A crime to outlive him

A crime to outlive him, part 8
By F.P.Barbieri

Part 8 - guilt

Harry Potter looked up and realized that the sky over Hogwarts had cleared. He wondered, for a second, when it had happened; had not seen it happen, and indeed he would not have noticed even now, were it not for the brightening sunlight picking more and more detail across his mother's beautiful face. That was the first thing he had noticed about her, even as the mist softened and be-grayed everything around: that she was astonishing, even lovelier than Ginny. Yet, apart from their red hair, no two lovely women could be more unlike. Lily Evans Potter was six inches shorter than Ginny Weasley, and did not have one freckle on her. Her skin was slightly darker, and her hair was auburn rather than the coppery, bright red of most Weasleys. In that easily tanned, almost Mediterranean complexion, her bright green eyes shone out, a wonderful, compelling surprise. Ginny's long, lean, strong, Quidditch-player limbs contrasted strangely with Lily's rounded arms and legs; only, both women had long and exquisite necks.

It was on taking in her neck that Harry was first struck by the family likeness with Petunia. He then found it easy to find other correspondences, which had not struck him until then; but everything that was, in Petunia, withered, angry and unwholesome, seemed to be the reverse in the body and behaviour of Lily Evans Potter. Long, lovely neck... long, scrawny, bony neck. Small, elegant hands; small, thick, square hands with sausage-like fingers. (My God, how Harry had got to know and hate those hands down the years!) Only a tone separated Lily's radiant auburn from Petunia's mousy brown (she dyed it blonde, but Harry knew what lay under), or Lily's pretty, straight nose from Petunia's long, quivering, poky schnozzle. Both women had high foreheads and small chins, but for some reason, Petunia's forehead looked withered, and her chin insufficient. How strange that such a small difference could make for beauty... his mother. His beautiful, beloved mother.

Talk had begun nervously, as in the previous meeting; but one day and one night had passed. Harry had slept long past normal waking time, and had been allowed to lie in till he felt recovered. He was not now crushed by the exhaustion of his own anger. And indeed, he was surprised at how quickly the conversation became easy, fluent, jovial.

Not that there were no problems.

"Honestly, Mother, I'd rather not talk about it."

"I don't understand you, Harry. It's not as though you had anything to be ashamed of..."

"I'm not ashamed of it!"

"Well, you know, you sound like you are. You sound just like someone trying to get out of having to describe a bad night out."

And Harry realized that he did. His part in the war really felt like a matter for shame. Irrationally, perhaps. He knew that it would become famous - even more famous than it already was; that people would hand the tale of his deeds down from father to son, and that children would listen to the story with shining eyes. But he hated it. To him, it had been mostly a matter of fear, violence, shame, misery, and despair. He had hated it at the time, and he hated to think of it now.

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There were some fearful shocks.

"Peter! How could Peter be the traitor?"

"He was, mother. He was the Secret Keeper, and you know that without him Voldemort - Tom - could never have found you."

"He was too... I remember it now... but how could... Peter!"

"He did a lot more, actually. A lot worse. I have to tell you this: he may have been your friend - or at least, you may have been his - but I am glad he is dead."

"Peter! He was so funny, so helpless... I used to defend him..."

"He had travelled a long way by the time Voldemort destroyed him. A long way. I don't think he was even ashamed of his behaviour any more."

There was a long silence; and his mother's question, when it came, sounded almost like a sob.

"How do things like that... how do they even happen?"

Harry had not really felt it before now; but at this point he was aware, startlingly and clearly aware, that the woman beside him was barely older than himself - and, in spite of her part in the first war, she did not have the long, bitter, agonizing experience that had marked him over years. He shook his head, trying to clear his thoughts.

"I guess they happen... when... when someone loses perspective. When they lose the sense of their importance - what it is, as compared to others. By the time he died, Wormtail - Peter - was living in a fantasy world where everyone owed him everything. He had built up a whole story in his own mind, of resentment and hatred - of others being resentful of him and hating, denying him his rights, doing him down. His refrain was: "Well, they asked for it!" Or: "They deserved it!" It was not just you and us... by the time he died, he hated the Dark Lord and his fellow Death Eaters pretty much as much as he hated us. He might have killed Bellatrix or old Snape, if he had not died first. He had begun to have the makings of someone really quite Dark in his own right."

"So dark... my God, such corruption. And we never knew."

"I think... I hope that, God willing, he was not so corrupt when he was your friend. I hope that then he was just scared, and weak, and selfish. That is my impression. The hatred came later... when he had to justify to himself what he had done. He had destroyed you, so he had to hate you. And he started to invent reasons."

Lily was weeping silently.

"I am thinking now... I shall never know... who worked the hand that killed him, or why. Looking back, I wonder whether he actually killed himself... whether he could not live in my presence, with all his lies lying useless and dead around him."

Lily nodded, her voice uncertain. "Well... I... I shall hope he did. Suicide is bad... but in his case, it might have been better than the alternative."

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"...well, the thing is, I only found out later that Dumbledore was at his wits' end. As he told me much later, the post was cursed. Tom had wanted it for himself, and as Dumbledore had flatly refused it, he made his displeasure known by placing a specific curse on it. Nobody was able to stay in it for more than one year."

"Seriously?"

"Seriously. At first, it was only a matter of people just leaving the job for various reasons."

"Oh, yes, come to think of it... We did remark on it at the time. No DADA teacher ever seemed to stay. Kettleburn had to be shifted to Care Of Magical Creatures, because the post had been vacated suddenly... Axebanger Brookstanton joined the Aurors... Anthony Serge caught a nasty bug and had to resign... Worthington... Tuttle suddenly started having nightmares... As you say, nobody ever seemed to last more than a year. In our final year, Dumbledore took the job himself, I guess that will have been why he never thought of taking it in your time."

"Oh yeah. I think someone mentioned Tuttle's nightmares... that was the first time that Dumbledore began to suspect an actual curse."

"He never told us."

"Dumbledore never told anyone anything unless he had to, Mother. I loved him dearly, but that is the truth. Everyone has faults, and that was one of his."

"I guess so... You knew him better than we ever did. So... how did you do in DADA yourself, when all the good teachers were long gone?"

"It was... interesting. I know that just before I joined, Quirrell, the Muggle Studies teacher, volunteered for the post. He had plenty of Defence theory, and, to prove his worth, he took a trip into the deadliest magical parts of Europe. He was too sure of himself... Dumbledore accepted because he was desperate, but he did not trust him from then on, and set Snape on him. Unfortunately, neither Dumbledore nor Snape realized how far Quirrell had gone - he had actually taken the remains of Voldemort in his own body, suffering atrociously all the while, just because he wanted to. Can you believe that? Of all the traitors I met, he was the worst. He died fighting me, destroyed by the opposition between his master and me." Lily listened intently, with a trace of horror on her face

"... Well, after Quirrell and Lockhart, Dumbledore was reduced to begging old friends with no teaching experience to fill in."

"Lockhart? Who was Lockhart?"

Lockhart was good for over an hour of laughter (Lily, incredulously: "...and this twit really wanted to start a Duelling Club?"), and the discussion took a less drama-ridden turn. And when she heard that her own son had coached himself and his classmates to a successful set of OWLs, in spite of all the efforts of a malevolent teacher, she smiled proudly at him.

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The sun now rode high in the sky, and still Harry and Lily paced the Hogwarts grounds, talking. Harry was not surprised to hear that Lily had had a few adventures of her own

"...by the time Horace Slughorn was back, Severus and I were sitting at our desk. Everything would have been all right, if only Severus had not had the bright idea of putting on... how can I describe it... this super-innocent, butter-won-t-melt-in-my-mouth expression that completely did not suit him. Of course old Slughorn took one look at him and took five points from Slytherin straight away. So Severus was pretty upset and asked him why. 'I don't know why,' answered Slughorn, 'but I bet you do.' I can remember the twinkle in his eyes still."

"Well," sniggered Harry, "if you think about it, five points is pretty cheap!"

"You're right," laughed back his mother, "and when Slughorn finally drank the Slimming Potion, I was able to argue that since Severus had already been punished, it would not be fair to take extra points from Slytherin."

"What, with the Slimming Potion at work?"

"It wasn't that bad... it only lasted twenty-four hours. The thing is though, he had to go with all his clothes held up by braces, because he had nothing to fit him and was not going to borrow anyone else's clothes."

Harry could not hold back his laughter. "And Snape still got away with that?"

"What matters," said Lily Evans, with an angelic smile, "is knowing how far you can go too far. Horace did not really want to take points from his house, he liked me, and Severus was his prize scholar of the year. Throw in a bit of cheek and a bit of a grin, and you are giving him the opportunity to do what he really wants to do."

Harry thought, but did not say: Well, I can see why you married my father. For some reason, he did not want to raise the matter of her marriage just yet.

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"Well, we did not do a whole lot of pranks ourselves, Mother... In our time, it was as if politics had got everywhere. It coloured and poisoned everything. It was all about who was for and against the Dark Lord... and it was deadly serious.

"I will say, though, that some of the things we did would have been terrific pranks, if we had intended them that way. Like the time in second year we Polyjuiced ourselves and sneaked into Slytherin..."

Lily nearly choked with laughter. "I can see your father doing just that! Did you at least leave Slytherin some sort of memorial of your visit?"

"Well, no, we couldn't... it was kind of a spy mission, and we had to be secret. Besides, Hermione was still very upright and fussy at the time. Not that she has ever quite unbent... I think she's meaning to become the next McGonagall."

(Lily snorted.)

"You met Hermione the other day, remember? She is one of my two best friends, and she is in love with my other BF, Ron Weasley."

"Weasley as of the carrot hair?"

"Yes, that's them."

"I remember them all right. In fact, that was the name I thought of as soon as I saw him. It's an old wizarding joke, Harry... the Weasleys and their red hair."

"I can well believe that! Did you ever know any of them at school?"

"Not really. There were a couple in Hufflepuff, but in a different year. And there was Molly Prewett, who was a senior in my first year, and she married a Weasley virtually as soon as she graduated. She had red hair, too."

"She still has."

"What? You mean?"

"She's Ron's mother and a dear, dear friend, Mother. She is a wonderful person."

Harry went on about Molly and her wonderful family for several minutes, until Lily carefully moved the conversation away. She did not know how she felt about Molly Prewett/Weasley. On the one hand, she ought to be glad that her boy had not lacked for a mother's love as she was... otherwise engaged. On the other, she could not help the jealousy that slid leglessly into her heart at the thought that another woman had had the pleasure of watching him grow up, the pride of seeing him turn into this young hero. She had been robbed of so much... And this also roused thoughts that she did not want to think, about Petunia. If Molly Prewett had been a mother to him... She was already sure, she had seen it in both their eyes, that neither her son nor her sister had told her the truth; but if their relationship had been less than harmonious, she for one did not want to know. The conversation drifted away from the Weasleys...

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Harry's question went through her head like an exploding missile. The snake! How could he ask about that? How could he be curious about something so horrible? Lily could not help it. For the first time since Petunia had come to her, her long years as Nagini had been called back to memory. She started howling, then throwing the most horrible insults she could, screaming like a mad woman.

Indeed, to tell the difference would have been hard. During her sixteen years as Nagini, her human mind had been deliberately destroyed. The shock alone of being constrained into the tiny, inadequate brain of an animal would alone be enough to drive any human being mad with pain; that is why it took so much work to make Animagi, and why werewolves, subject to animal transformation without that preparation, carried so much rage in their animalized hearts. The mere memory of the pain was enough for her to want to break her head open.

Yet that was not the worst. Voldemort had also made her his executioner; and hidden in the lowest and darkest depths of her memory, never allowed to see daylight - or she would go mad - there were the many memories of human beings, some of whom she had known, paralyzed while still conscious, devoured mostly in one mouthful, still alive and awake as she began to digest them. It was not just that this was a convenient way to do murder - leaving behind no bothersome corpse; Lord Voldemort also took delight in it. It was his most secret pleasure, hidden even from the likes of Bellatrix (for it would be dangerous if someone like her learned of it): casting his own mind into the snake as the animal warmth and pleasure of digestion was spreading through her being, and feel the last moments of a dying enemy as no sorcerer before him had ever felt them. And there was an extra prize for him: the warm, fleshy intimacy of murder and feeding was his way back into a life of flesh and blood he had denied himself long before. He had not realized this would be so; but he soon became almost addicted to the hypnotically slow, near-sleeping pulse and to the animal warmth of a feeding snake body. It was a pleasure he had discovered long before, through his affinity with crushing snakes. But when he had manufactured Nagini, he had manufactured the perfect snake, the perfect instrument of revenge - able to swallow a still-living adult homo sapiens in one gulp. And as raw material to make her, he had used one of his worst enemies. Compared to this, torture, rape, brainwashing, were nothing.

It would be years before Lily could bring herself to explain even the basics of what had been done to her; years before she was distant enough, safe enough, to face it. Now -as intolerable memories were suddenly and unexpectedly called to the surface in one moment of white heat - she could only scream. The machinery of her mind was out of control, swamped by burning pain and intolerable guilt.

Harry was horrified. He had approached the question carefully enough, suspecting that it might be painful. He had not perceived the danger signals - supposing there were any - until far too late. Indeed, it seems likely that neither he nor anyone could possibly have seen the danger. Most of the worst that had been done to Lily Potter was Lord Voldemort's own invention - his refinement on cruel earlier devices and spells. Who could possibly have warned him against probing into something whose extent nobody, except the dead Dark Lord himself, had even imagined? Harry just stood there, horrified and helpless...

...until he saw his mother, still howling, run at a tree and start bashing her head against its trunk. Then instinct took over and he ran and seized her struggling form before she could do herself further harm.

For a few seconds, it was a nightmare such as he had never experienced - a wild struggle with a screaming thing that would not stop and whose jerking and violent twisting he did not know how to handle. Then she seemed to slowly fell apart in his hands till he was holding her whole weight up, limp and quivering.

"Hold me, James... Harry... don't let me go. Don't let me forget you exist..."

"Mother..."

"It hurts so much, James... you cannot imagine. Memory... Memories of... I wanted to crack my skull, just to let them out of my head. For God's sake, don't leave me!"

And he did not. He held her limp weight till his arms and shoulders ached; but he did not even let her slide on to the grass till he felt her breath grow slow and regular and saw her eyes close, and he knew that she was asleep. And then he sat over her, keeping guard - ready to awaken her at any time if he saw any sign of nightmares such as he knew all too well.

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"Oh!" she said as her beautiful green eyes blinked open in the sunlight. "Oh! Have I been asleep?"

"So far as I know, you have," he answered with a hint of a smile. "No snore and minimal drool, however. You are a neat sleeper."

"Then... I must have been dreaming."

She did not look unhappy about it, but Harry did not dare ask. His view of dreams was conditioned by the nightmares he had so often experienced, courtesy of Lord Voldemort - the same person whose memories were enough to make his mother attempt suicide. Yet she was... smiling?

"I thought I was flying... riding pillion on your father's broomstick. Or perhaps it was yours. You are hard to tell apart, you know?

"It was a nice dream... comforting. I could see all of Hogwarts spread out under me in the sun, and the blue sky, and little white clouds. I didn't ask... are you a good flyer?"

Harry blushed. "Not too bad, they say."

"In that case... I would really like a ride."

"Are you sure?"

"It was such a good dream. And I want to do something pleasant, and fun, and relaxing."

"Makes sense. Just a second, then... Accio Firebolt!"

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It took a while, after all, before they were airborne. Lily had never seen anything like the Firebolt before, and could not get enough of it. It was not just twenty years ahead of anything she had ever seen: it was a top-of-the-line racing prototype, designed for world-class Quidditch, and, even for most kids of Harry's time, beyond dreaming of. Only the fabulous wealth of the House of Black, and his own recklessly generous nature, had allowed Sirius to purchase one in secret. Since then, one of Harry's worst fears had been that it should suffer the same fate as his previous broom - beaten to flinders in a freak accident. Even with his parents' fortune and Sirius' inheritance, he did not think he could contemplate the expense of buying another. But Lily was even more taken with it than he was - she caressed it from head to tail-twigs, took her wand out to analyze its spellwork design, and then insisted on watching Harry do some acrobatics with it before she joined him.

It was now high afternoon, bright and warm in unbroken sunshine. If the couple had paid any attention, they would have noticed that they were riding on an empty stomach, having had no food since breakfast; but the beauty of the day, the excitement of flight, the flowing pleasure of each other's company, kept their mood high and their blood racing. They skimmed the lake again and again, raising high spurts of water with their wands, dodging the twisting arms of the giant squid, and finally putting everything in a sudden wild upwards dash as all the creature's appendages seemed to have found them at once; then diving towards the forbidden forest - Lily gave a whoop of delight, like a child on a rollercoaster - reaching and dodging the trees, dashing past the arrogant centaur Bane and observing with amusement his angry and surprised expression; then slowing down and slowly rising, to take in the glorious Scottish landscape - mountain and lake and stream and firth, green and flower-covered summer grass, crowned by the great shape of Hogwarts like the crown of a king. Their mood was high, and Harry could feel Lily holding on to him tightly, her rib-cage heaving against his as she said things and laughed. He could feel her excitement as she could feel his, and they delighted in it. They rose into the mountain, saw a golden eagle, and raced it down the wind as it sought a rabbit; they missed the ground by inches - laughing all the while - and threw themselves through the main street of Hogmeade village, whose all-wizard population barely looked up at the strange fliers.

Flying had completely taken hold of them. On such days, when no fog or rain interferes, the endless fields of the sky, from which one can look down upon terrestrial things like a god, seem to place no obstacle or impediment or danger or impasse on a skilful wizard. Flying almost seems to be the image, the terrestrial realization, of the idea itself of liberty, and more than liberty - of release, of a seeming end to all bonds and ties, of the will being released, guiltless and unconstricted and free at last.

Time and time again, Harry did something crazy, and they both laughed. And laughing, they looked at each other. And suddenly, and neither of them could tell how it was, they were kissing.

Harry was the first to realize what he was doing; Lily followed him by a split-second; but before she was fully awake to it, his eyes had grown huge in horror, he had dived instinctively back from her...

...with a despairing scream, he was falling off his broom.

Lily barely managed to grip his left wrist with her right hand, nearly toppling off the thin enchanted strip of wood herself as she did so. Struggling desperately not to let him fall (eight or so hundred feet straight down, on stone), she tried to command the broom - and without James, she had never been much good at it. But by some miracle, the broom slowly began to obey. Just before the terrible weight of his son slid from her hand, she felt it pay out swiftly, but not recklessly, towards the ground.

They did not quite reach the ground safely; they slipped from the broomstick a few feet above it and tumbled down. They landed heavily, messily, and painfully, on top of each other, and struggled to break free of each other. Harry stood up, drew his wand, and called his fugitive broom back - but the corner of his eye caught clearly the figure of his mother, all but running away from him.