lomonaaeren (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
lomonaaeren) wrote2022-11-15 07:23 pm
lomonaaeren) wrote2022-11-15 07:23 pm
Entry tags:
[Songs of the Stormy Season]: Just Another Damn Thing About Being Harry Potter, gen, PG-13
Title: Just Another Damn Thing About Being Harry Potter
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Gen
Content Notes: Ignores the epilogue, angst, Harry is a Lestrange, Metamorphmagus Harry Potter, discussion of past character deaths, non-linear narrative
Rating: PG-13
Wordcount: 4100
Summary: It comes out after the war that Harry is the son of Bellatrix and Rodolphus Lestrange, adopted by the Potters as a baby after a battle in which his parents Apparated out and left him behind. It seems everybody has Opinions about who he is. Harry thinks he’ll continue deciding who he is for himself, thanks.
Author’s Notes: This is one of my “Songs of the Stormy Season” series, one-shots being posted between Halloween and the winter solstice. It’s based on a request from serpen_sortia for a fic where Harry finds out he’s not a Potter, and where he’s a Metamorphmagus if he’s related to the Blacks. Hope you enjoy.
Just Another Damn Thing About Being Harry Potter
“So what do you really look like?”
Harry stopped and glanced back at the Auror who had asked the question. He didn’t know her, but she sort of looked like Zacharias Smith, all cleft chin and blonde hair and supercilious arrogance. “Rude,” he said mildly.
She planted her hands on her hips. “I want to know what you really look like!”
“In the robes or out of them?”
She actually flushed and took a step away, and Kingsley’s extremely tired voice said from down the corridor, “Auror Potter, if you could come here, please.”
*
“Harry, can you please stop antagonizing the other Aurors?”
Harry lounged back in the chair across from the Head Auror and shrugged. Kingsley hadn’t lasted long as Minister after the war, just a year or so before Gawain Robards had finagled his way into the position. Harry had the sneaking suspicion that Kingsley hadn’t fought it too hard, probably preferring the Head Auror job anyway. “She was the one who asked me the question. Sir.”
Kingsley stared at him for a moment, then leaned back and nodded. “Still, I think if you could use your Metamorphmagus powers once in front of the others, then they might stop asking you those questions.”
“I changed my face into a werewolf’s just yesterday,” Harry objected.
Kingsley put a hand over his face.
“This is what I really look like, sir,” Harry said softly, and something in his tone, probably, made Kingsley look up. “This is who I am. It was an accident of birth that I was born to someone else. The Potters are the ones who adopted me and loved me so fiercely that I was able to use my mother’s love to defeat Voldemort more than once. I’m Harry Potter.”
Kingsley’s lips rose in a weary smile. “Just like you’ve been telling everyone since day one.”
“Yes, sir.”
*
Harry still didn’t know whose bright idea it had been to start poking around in old Lestrange safehouses. Probably someone who felt they could find money there that the Ministry could distribute to Muggleborns victimized by Umbridge and the like during the war, without spending any of their own Galleons.
They hadn’t found any gold that Harry knew about, but they had found the Lestrange family tapestry in one of those old properties. And it had shown a silver line extending down from Bellatrix Black and Rodolphus Lestrange, with the name in small silver stitching beside it: Royal Lestrange (Harry Potter).
Honestly, one of the most depressing things Harry knew about his birth parents was that they hadn’t been able to come up with any name other than Royal.
*
“You look like your p—I mean, the Potters because you’re a Metamorphmagus.”
Harry shrugged a little at the Healer they’d sent up from the Department of Mysteries. He supposed she was the only one who knew about Metamorphmagery that they could find on short notice, because otherwise they could have picked anyone. The secret was all over magical Britain by now. “I knew that. I thought you were here to analyze why I’ve looked like this since my early childhood with no shifting.”
The Unspeakable wore a hood in an eye-searing shade of white that completely concealed her face, but nonetheless, Harry had the impression that she’d blinked at him. “Ah, Mr. Potter…”
She trailed off again. Harry shook his head. “I’m legally keeping the name of Harry Potter. I’m entitled to it, anyway. That’s what my name is all on the legal documents and the adoption document we eventually found in my mother’s personal vault.”
“Lily Potter’s personal vault.”
“Yes, that’s what I said.”
The Unspeakable frowned at him, or Harry thought she did, and made some notations on a chart. “Can you change into your real form?”
“I already have.”
“Not in front of me.”
“I mean.” Harry gestured at his dark messy hair, glasses, Auror robes. “This is it.”
The Unspeakable looked at the wall as if it might give her the answers. Harry looked, too, but no one showed up.
“I mean,” the Unspeakable said, sounding like someone picking her way through a field of broken glass, “the form that you would have had as the son of the Lestranges.”
“How do I know what I looked like then? It’s not as though I have any photographs.”
“Mr. Potter.” The Unspeakable seemed to have forgotten about her potential issues with addressing him by that name. She was also attempting to loom at him, but it wasn’t working very well. “I have studied Metamorphmagery for decades. You will have a neutral form to which you return when your magic is very tired. I would like you to assume that form so I can check its magic against your magic in this form.”
“I’ve never assumed that form. And believe me, I’ve been really tired. Like the time after I got bitten by a basilisk.”
The Unspeakable gave the impression of blinking again. “What?”
*
“Harry, will you stop derailing the Healers by telling them the basilisk story?”
“Look, Hermione, it’s not my fault they’re easily distracted.”
*
Neville was avoiding him.
Harry hadn’t been entirely sure at first, because since Neville was the Herbology Professor at Hogwarts and less of a close friend than Ron and Hermione, Harry saw him less often. But after the second time that Neville canceled on a get-together they’d been going to do at the Leaky Cauldron during the summer, when he had no classes, Harry had had enough.
He Apparated to Longbottom Manor and focused on the gates, which were old and made of some silvery metal that Harry didn’t think was actual silver, but kind of looked like it. Harry nodded and “knocked.”
By which he meant releasing a huge pulse of magic at the gates and making them swing back and forth in their sockets, while an audible boom echoed up the path to the manor.
He only did it twice before a witch Apparated into place behind the gates, straightening her vulture hat agitatedly. “You’re not welcome here, Lestrange!” she snapped. “Get out of here before I call the Aurors!”
“I want to talk to Neville.”
“Well, he doesn’t want to speak to you. Murderer.”
“I didn’t know you held the defeat of Voldemort against me, Mrs. Longbottom.”
She faltered for a moment, reaching up to touch the vulture on the top of her hat as if it was a good luck charm. “I don’t—of course that wasn’t what I was referring to,” she said stiffly. “You know it was Frank and Alice.”
Harry leaned a shoulder on the gate. “And I was completely guilty of being a year old when they were tortured, of course, and raised by other people for the vast majority of that time.”
“You’re a Lestrange.”
Harry looked her directly in the eye. “I’ve refused that name. I refused the vault contents that the goblins wanted to give me—and really got them angry, by the way, they’d been looking to dump some of the contents and fees on other people. I’ve said over and over in public and in private that my real parents are the Potters. What do you want from me?”
The implacable look of loathing remained on her face. Harry stepped back with a shake of his head and used his magic to raise his voice so that it would echo to the Manor where he suspected Neville was hiding.
“I’ll respect Neville if he wants to tell me or write to me that he doesn’t want to see me again. I don’t respect him for hiding, like a coward, and refusing to talk to me.”
Harry turned away and Apparated.
*
Harry got an owl the next day.
I don’t want to see you right now, Harry. Maybe someday we can talk again? But it’s tough, you know, knowing that your real parents are the people who tortured my mum and dad to the point that I didn’t have them my whole life. If you think about it, you’ll probably understand.
Harry closed his eyes and held still for a long time. He had received the owl at home instead of work; he could do that without someone noticing and reprimanding him for it.
Then he wrote back.
All right, Neville. I’ll respect that. But I do have to correct you on one thing: my real parents were the Potters. If you’re going to hold someone’s genetic heritage they never knew about against them, then you aren’t the man I thought you were.
He sent it off.
There was no response.
*
Because Malfoy did nothing quietly, Harry knew he was coming long before he actually popped his head into Harry’s Auror office and smiled too widely at him. “Hello, Cousin.”
Harry leaned back in his chair and studied Malfoy for a moment. If he had been smirking as he’d said it, then Harry would have known that Malfoy was playing up to the press or the public and planning to use this new relationship with the Boy-Who-Lived for his own gain. That would have been stupid, but understandable. Harry would have sent him off with a laugh.
But instead, he was smiling at Harry with wide-open eyes and nodding a little, as though they shared a secret.
“I’m surprised you want to acknowledge it,” Harry drawled. Malfoy had avoided him as much as possible after the Death Eater trials, where Harry had testified that Draco had been coerced into it and Narcissa had saved his life. Harry thought it was partially a matter of shame, partially one of pride.
“You’re my cousin,” Malfoy said in a sort of shocked voice. “Our mothers were sisters.”
“She was not my mother in any way that mattered.”
Malfoy looked as if he wished there was a fainting couch nearby. “She gave birth to you. You’re a pureblood.”
“I found the letter in my mother’s vault that said how they got me,” Harry said. “Because the Lestranges came and attacked an Order of the Phoenix safehouse. For some reason, they brought their three-month-old baby with them. Do you think that’s remotely sane? Then they left me behind when they Apparated away. I don’t know why. Because they were following the call of their master, because they didn’t care, because they assumed they could always have another child later? Either way, they never even came looking for me. The Potters are my parents, Malfoy. I claim no relation with the Lestranges.”
Malfoy licked his lips. He looked lost and young. Harry rolled his eyes. Frankly, Malfoy hadn’t grown up, even during the war, and Harry didn’t know why. Perhaps he’d tried to put those experiences out of his mind entirely instead of learning from them.
And Harry could sort of understand that choice, but he also didn’t have patience for it when someone else was trying to dump the consequences of their decision on him.
“I—that’s only what the Potters said,” Malfoy whispered at last.
“Sure,” Harry agreed. “And what your mother said when I wrote to her.”
“She—did?”
Harry gave him a harsh smile. “She did. She confirmed the whole thing. From the way she told it, Bellatrix and Rodolphus thought about their Dark Lord first and foremost. Bellatrix was annoyed that recovery from the birth took her so long, because then she had to spend less time running around murdering and torturing people. They thought of me as some kind of prize to continue their legacy, their heir, not their son.
“Your mother actually suspected, when she started hearing about the Potters’ son, that it was me. And you know what she did about it? Not a bloody thing. She said that she had other things on her mind.”
Malfoy stared at him.
Harry stood up from behind the desk and stalked around it. Malfoy took a step back, unnerved. Harry smiled at him, and knew it wasn’t a reassuring smile. He was happier than ever that he had apparently changed his features young to look like the Potters’, according to what several Healers had told him now, because he felt loved when he was with them.
It was the same reason that Teddy Lupin so often looked like Harry and Andromeda.
“Your mother didn’t act like an aunt to me,” Harry whispered. “Even though she was one of the few people in the world who suspected. And the people you insist on calling my parents were free from Azkaban for more than two years during the war. They had to have suspected, too. Rodolphus, if Bellatrix was too mental to. Do you think they looked for me? No.”
Malfoy opened his mouth. Nothing came out.
“That’s how the Lestrange family treats its children.” Harry tilted his chin down. “That’s why I’m a Potter.”
“You have cousins, though,” Malfoy whispered.
“Yes, and I’m sorry as hell that Tonks died before I knew, so that I could have talked to her. And I have an aunt, too. But you’re not my cousin, and your mother’s not my aunt.”
“You can’t decide that.”
“Why not?”
“That’s—not the way it works.”
“Yes, it is. Especially since you said I’m a pureblood. Good enough to associate with, now? When you had a living cousin for years, and didn’t associate with her because she was a half-blood?”
Malfoy turned and walked away. He mostly looked confused.
Harry rolled his eyes and went to sit back down behind his desk. Even paperwork was better than trying to explain basic decency to purebloods.
*
“What I don’t understand is,” Ron said, the second night of their marathon drinking session after Harry found out, “why did the protections around the Dursleys’ house function the way that Dumbledore said they did? Why did you manage to burn Quirrell with your mother’s blood protection if it wasn’t blood protection?”
Harry leaned back against the wall of Ron’s bedroom in the Burrow and laughed until he hiccoughed. Ron shushed him nervously, glancing towards the door. Everyone else had given Harry lots of room since he’d come to visit Ron carrying six bottles of Firewhisky. They didn’t seem to know whether to feel sorry for him or not.
But now they were all asleep, and Harry was alone with his best friend, and he could lean forwards and say what he thought.
“Because Dumbledore really did speak the truth. The most powerful force in magic is love. My mother loved me, Ron, with all her heart. The protections on the Dursleys’ house functioned because of that, because they were an echo of the protection imbued in my skin. I could have lived anywhere and had that love defend me. Because Dumbledore got it wrong, too. It really had nothing to do with blood.”
Ron closed his eyes. “Damn.”
Harry nodded and took another swig.
*
“Hello, Harry.”
Andromeda opened the door of her cottage with wide, solemn eyes. Harry nodded to her, his throat clogged. He had to take several tries before he was able to clear it and speak.
“Thanks—for seeing me. I know it must be difficult.”
Immediately, Andromeda’s eyebrows snapped together. “What do you mean?”
Harry looked at the ground by his feet. It seemed that Teddy had been playing outside in the mud a short time before. There were small footprints and a blue duck toy there, the duck still slowly opening and closing its wings.
“The woman who gave birth to me killed your daughter,” Harry whispered. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry—”
He squeaked as Andromeda hauled him into the house and stood him there with her hands on his shoulders. She was shorter than he was but more formidable, and at the moment, Harry thought he would rather have dealt with a living Bellatrix than her.
“You listen to me,” Andromeda said, low and fierce. “Yes, I hated my sister. Yes, I had no idea that she’d had a child she’d brought to a battle with her and whom the Potters had adopted.
“But I suffered from lack of family for the last twenty years, outside my Ted and my Nymphadora. Teddy is a wonderful gift, but now the people I loved and lived for are gone. If you think I would reject my nephew who wants to spend time with me, no matter how he came to be—”
By then, she was crying, quiet tears that ran down her cheeks without interrupting her steady voice. Harry leaned forwards and hugged her. He was crying, too.
“Unca Harry!”
A small flying weight hit his legs. Harry leaned on Andromeda for a moment and reached own to touch Teddy’s head.
Teddy looked back up at him, beaming. At the moment, his hair was a dark mass of tight curls, like Andromeda’s (and like Bellatrix’s, in old newspaper photographs Harry had seen of her), and his eyes were a brilliant green.
Like Harry’s. Like his mum’s.
“Unca Harry!” Teddy repeated in satisfaction, and broke into a bright smile. “I got mud on my feet.”
He sounded as proud of that as if he had just been made an Auror. Harry picked up Teddy with his free arm, and leaned one moment more on Andromeda.
His aunt. His cousin. The family he had chosen.
*
“We just want to know your plans, Mr. Lestrange.”
Harry halted and turned around. He’d been followed throughout Diagon Alley by half a dozen reporters, all of them waving quills and cameras at him and calling for him to turn back into his “real form.” He’d just been trying to accomplish ordinary shopping, and he hadn’t responded to them so far, particularly because they kept calling him “Lestrange” instead of “Potter.”
Hermione tugged on his arm. “Harry,” she said in a furious undervoice.
“Come on, Hermione,” Harry said in a carrying one. “They just want to know my plans, right?” He smiled at the crowd.
“Yes, of course!” The lead woman, who looked like she was trying to imitate Rita Skeeter’s popularity by dressing like her, edged closer, bouncing on her toes. “Please, Mr. Lestrange? Just a word about what you’ll be doing with the money that’s now yours in Gringotts? Rumor says your fortune is quite extensive.”
Harry smiled.
“Harry.”
“Well, just for you, Matilda,” Harry said, lowering his voice a little, and the reporter preened at being recognized. “It’s world domination, of course.”
She stared at him with her jaw hanging open.
Hermione closed her eyes and took a deep breath.
“Yes, of course,” Harry said, nodding seriously. “I think there’s too much tradition of following Dark Lords in the family. I’m going to take over as a Dark Lord myself. And my first step will be cornering the market on the world supply of pumpkin juice.”
Quills scribbled furiously.
“When I have all the pumpkin juice in the world at my command, then I can put my own special potion in it.” Harry paused for dramatic effect. “It’s called Obey-Harry-Potter Potion.”
Matilda gasped.
“But you’re telling us about your plans!” yelled a tall male reporter in a grey robe. “How are they going to work now?”
“Shouldn’t it be Obey-Royal-Lestrange Potion?” called someone towards the back of the crowd.
“Just try to keep your kids from drinking pumpkin juice,” Harry told the reporter in the grey robe, “even when they know it’s potioned.”
That was the point when Hermione hit him with a Silencing Charm and dragged him away.
*
“Seriously, Auror Potter, do you know how many Howlers we have to field when you announce your intention for world domination in the middle of Diagon Alley?”
*
“Um. I know you don’t like to talk about this, mate.”
“It’s easier when I’m pissed on Firewhisky,” Harry said happily. It was night three of the marathon drinking session, and he wasn’t sure which way was up. He was sitting on something he was pretty sure was a chair, though. Probably.
“Uh. What about the prophecy?”
“Oh, for shame, Ron.” Harry rolled his head back on what he was pretty sure was his neck. “You didn’t read the newspaper articles about the tapestry they found?”
“I tried not to.”
Harry snorted a little and closed his eyes. “I was still born July thirty-first, mate. My mum and dad didn’t change that. I think—I wondered how they knew, but I think Sirius could easily have told them. Bellatrix bragged about the birth of an ‘heir’ to all and sundry. The Ministry gave me some of the letters they found.”
Harry had read them and then burned them. He smiled now, remembering it. Pretty fire.
There was a loud scrape that was probably Ron’s chair legs, not Ron himself. “But then he knew?”
“Sirius? Yeah. I don’t see how he couldn’t have. He would have known that my mum wasn’t pregnant.”
“But—then why did he never tell you?”
Harry wrenched his eyelids open. They wanted to drop closed. But he was pretty sure this was important, and he was pretty sure he had to say it.
Ron was looming anxiously over him.
“Don’t you see?” Harry whispered. “It’s the same reason that the prophecy applied even though I don’t think Bellatrix and Rodolphus defied Voldemort three times.” Even though he thought they could have, what with Bellatrix’s tendency to go off and do reckless attacks on her own like the one on the Longbottoms. “James and Lily Potter were my parents, in every way that mattered. I might as well have been born to them. Or reborn. It was Halloween when they had that battle and found me, you know? Exactly three months since I was born. Exactly a year before Voldemort came. And he was probably mad enough that he didn’t remember there was a chance I was born to Bellatrix, if he ever knew.”
Ron’s face cleared slowly. “And you think—”
“Halloween is associated with death, and rebirth as a soul.” Harry contemplated standing up and decided not to. “Or I was ‘born’ to them when they adopted me. It could have been all of those and none of those. At the same time.”
Ron looked like he was about to question that, but Harry continued in a dreamy voice. “And that’s why Sirius didn’t tell me. He was one of the few people who knew my mum and dad, and knew the Blacks, too. He knew which ones were my real parents. He knew which ones would give me a better life.”
And that was probably the part where Harry passed out.
*
Harry stood in front of his bedroom mirror the night they told him.
He stared at his reflection, and then for the first time, he reached out and tried to consciously control the power that had once allowed him to regrow his hair after Aunt Petunia had cut it so short.
His body trembled and flowed and warped. Harry sought for the point that he thought should be there, the “birth” form that he knew Tonks had talked about once. Had she talked about it? He thought so.
But for long moments, he simply saw swimming flesh in the mirror, nothing that made sense or could make sense.
And then it came to him.
He didn’t know what he’d looked like. Even Tonks must have grown up knowing her supposed “normal” form, looking into mirrors sometimes, and practicing with her Metamorphmagus magic before she’d got control of it. Teddy had dark hair most of the time, the way he’d come out of the womb, and he seemed to prefer it, although he changed the texture and length whenever he wanted. But at least he could look at baby photographs if he ever had any doubts what he looked like.
Harry could turn his eyes brown, if he wanted. He could grow his black hair as long and wild as Bellatrix’s had been, or like Sirius’s. He could turn his eyes grey like a Black’s.
But it would all be playacting, his best guess at a combination of Bellatrix and Rodolphus. He didn’t even know what Rodolphus’s face looked like, couldn’t visualize it. He was entirely subsumed in the shadow of his wife.
Harry let his real face surface, and smiled at the green eyes, the shaggy black hair, even the lightning bolt scar.
There was no “normal” face “beneath” his. He couldn’t go back to being Royal Lestrange because he had only been him for three months, twenty-five years ago.
It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are.
This was who he was.
The End.
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Gen
Content Notes: Ignores the epilogue, angst, Harry is a Lestrange, Metamorphmagus Harry Potter, discussion of past character deaths, non-linear narrative
Rating: PG-13
Wordcount: 4100
Summary: It comes out after the war that Harry is the son of Bellatrix and Rodolphus Lestrange, adopted by the Potters as a baby after a battle in which his parents Apparated out and left him behind. It seems everybody has Opinions about who he is. Harry thinks he’ll continue deciding who he is for himself, thanks.
Author’s Notes: This is one of my “Songs of the Stormy Season” series, one-shots being posted between Halloween and the winter solstice. It’s based on a request from serpen_sortia for a fic where Harry finds out he’s not a Potter, and where he’s a Metamorphmagus if he’s related to the Blacks. Hope you enjoy.
Just Another Damn Thing About Being Harry Potter
“So what do you really look like?”
Harry stopped and glanced back at the Auror who had asked the question. He didn’t know her, but she sort of looked like Zacharias Smith, all cleft chin and blonde hair and supercilious arrogance. “Rude,” he said mildly.
She planted her hands on her hips. “I want to know what you really look like!”
“In the robes or out of them?”
She actually flushed and took a step away, and Kingsley’s extremely tired voice said from down the corridor, “Auror Potter, if you could come here, please.”
*
“Harry, can you please stop antagonizing the other Aurors?”
Harry lounged back in the chair across from the Head Auror and shrugged. Kingsley hadn’t lasted long as Minister after the war, just a year or so before Gawain Robards had finagled his way into the position. Harry had the sneaking suspicion that Kingsley hadn’t fought it too hard, probably preferring the Head Auror job anyway. “She was the one who asked me the question. Sir.”
Kingsley stared at him for a moment, then leaned back and nodded. “Still, I think if you could use your Metamorphmagus powers once in front of the others, then they might stop asking you those questions.”
“I changed my face into a werewolf’s just yesterday,” Harry objected.
Kingsley put a hand over his face.
“This is what I really look like, sir,” Harry said softly, and something in his tone, probably, made Kingsley look up. “This is who I am. It was an accident of birth that I was born to someone else. The Potters are the ones who adopted me and loved me so fiercely that I was able to use my mother’s love to defeat Voldemort more than once. I’m Harry Potter.”
Kingsley’s lips rose in a weary smile. “Just like you’ve been telling everyone since day one.”
“Yes, sir.”
*
Harry still didn’t know whose bright idea it had been to start poking around in old Lestrange safehouses. Probably someone who felt they could find money there that the Ministry could distribute to Muggleborns victimized by Umbridge and the like during the war, without spending any of their own Galleons.
They hadn’t found any gold that Harry knew about, but they had found the Lestrange family tapestry in one of those old properties. And it had shown a silver line extending down from Bellatrix Black and Rodolphus Lestrange, with the name in small silver stitching beside it: Royal Lestrange (Harry Potter).
Honestly, one of the most depressing things Harry knew about his birth parents was that they hadn’t been able to come up with any name other than Royal.
*
“You look like your p—I mean, the Potters because you’re a Metamorphmagus.”
Harry shrugged a little at the Healer they’d sent up from the Department of Mysteries. He supposed she was the only one who knew about Metamorphmagery that they could find on short notice, because otherwise they could have picked anyone. The secret was all over magical Britain by now. “I knew that. I thought you were here to analyze why I’ve looked like this since my early childhood with no shifting.”
The Unspeakable wore a hood in an eye-searing shade of white that completely concealed her face, but nonetheless, Harry had the impression that she’d blinked at him. “Ah, Mr. Potter…”
She trailed off again. Harry shook his head. “I’m legally keeping the name of Harry Potter. I’m entitled to it, anyway. That’s what my name is all on the legal documents and the adoption document we eventually found in my mother’s personal vault.”
“Lily Potter’s personal vault.”
“Yes, that’s what I said.”
The Unspeakable frowned at him, or Harry thought she did, and made some notations on a chart. “Can you change into your real form?”
“I already have.”
“Not in front of me.”
“I mean.” Harry gestured at his dark messy hair, glasses, Auror robes. “This is it.”
The Unspeakable looked at the wall as if it might give her the answers. Harry looked, too, but no one showed up.
“I mean,” the Unspeakable said, sounding like someone picking her way through a field of broken glass, “the form that you would have had as the son of the Lestranges.”
“How do I know what I looked like then? It’s not as though I have any photographs.”
“Mr. Potter.” The Unspeakable seemed to have forgotten about her potential issues with addressing him by that name. She was also attempting to loom at him, but it wasn’t working very well. “I have studied Metamorphmagery for decades. You will have a neutral form to which you return when your magic is very tired. I would like you to assume that form so I can check its magic against your magic in this form.”
“I’ve never assumed that form. And believe me, I’ve been really tired. Like the time after I got bitten by a basilisk.”
The Unspeakable gave the impression of blinking again. “What?”
*
“Harry, will you stop derailing the Healers by telling them the basilisk story?”
“Look, Hermione, it’s not my fault they’re easily distracted.”
*
Neville was avoiding him.
Harry hadn’t been entirely sure at first, because since Neville was the Herbology Professor at Hogwarts and less of a close friend than Ron and Hermione, Harry saw him less often. But after the second time that Neville canceled on a get-together they’d been going to do at the Leaky Cauldron during the summer, when he had no classes, Harry had had enough.
He Apparated to Longbottom Manor and focused on the gates, which were old and made of some silvery metal that Harry didn’t think was actual silver, but kind of looked like it. Harry nodded and “knocked.”
By which he meant releasing a huge pulse of magic at the gates and making them swing back and forth in their sockets, while an audible boom echoed up the path to the manor.
He only did it twice before a witch Apparated into place behind the gates, straightening her vulture hat agitatedly. “You’re not welcome here, Lestrange!” she snapped. “Get out of here before I call the Aurors!”
“I want to talk to Neville.”
“Well, he doesn’t want to speak to you. Murderer.”
“I didn’t know you held the defeat of Voldemort against me, Mrs. Longbottom.”
She faltered for a moment, reaching up to touch the vulture on the top of her hat as if it was a good luck charm. “I don’t—of course that wasn’t what I was referring to,” she said stiffly. “You know it was Frank and Alice.”
Harry leaned a shoulder on the gate. “And I was completely guilty of being a year old when they were tortured, of course, and raised by other people for the vast majority of that time.”
“You’re a Lestrange.”
Harry looked her directly in the eye. “I’ve refused that name. I refused the vault contents that the goblins wanted to give me—and really got them angry, by the way, they’d been looking to dump some of the contents and fees on other people. I’ve said over and over in public and in private that my real parents are the Potters. What do you want from me?”
The implacable look of loathing remained on her face. Harry stepped back with a shake of his head and used his magic to raise his voice so that it would echo to the Manor where he suspected Neville was hiding.
“I’ll respect Neville if he wants to tell me or write to me that he doesn’t want to see me again. I don’t respect him for hiding, like a coward, and refusing to talk to me.”
Harry turned away and Apparated.
*
Harry got an owl the next day.
I don’t want to see you right now, Harry. Maybe someday we can talk again? But it’s tough, you know, knowing that your real parents are the people who tortured my mum and dad to the point that I didn’t have them my whole life. If you think about it, you’ll probably understand.
Harry closed his eyes and held still for a long time. He had received the owl at home instead of work; he could do that without someone noticing and reprimanding him for it.
Then he wrote back.
All right, Neville. I’ll respect that. But I do have to correct you on one thing: my real parents were the Potters. If you’re going to hold someone’s genetic heritage they never knew about against them, then you aren’t the man I thought you were.
He sent it off.
There was no response.
*
Because Malfoy did nothing quietly, Harry knew he was coming long before he actually popped his head into Harry’s Auror office and smiled too widely at him. “Hello, Cousin.”
Harry leaned back in his chair and studied Malfoy for a moment. If he had been smirking as he’d said it, then Harry would have known that Malfoy was playing up to the press or the public and planning to use this new relationship with the Boy-Who-Lived for his own gain. That would have been stupid, but understandable. Harry would have sent him off with a laugh.
But instead, he was smiling at Harry with wide-open eyes and nodding a little, as though they shared a secret.
“I’m surprised you want to acknowledge it,” Harry drawled. Malfoy had avoided him as much as possible after the Death Eater trials, where Harry had testified that Draco had been coerced into it and Narcissa had saved his life. Harry thought it was partially a matter of shame, partially one of pride.
“You’re my cousin,” Malfoy said in a sort of shocked voice. “Our mothers were sisters.”
“She was not my mother in any way that mattered.”
Malfoy looked as if he wished there was a fainting couch nearby. “She gave birth to you. You’re a pureblood.”
“I found the letter in my mother’s vault that said how they got me,” Harry said. “Because the Lestranges came and attacked an Order of the Phoenix safehouse. For some reason, they brought their three-month-old baby with them. Do you think that’s remotely sane? Then they left me behind when they Apparated away. I don’t know why. Because they were following the call of their master, because they didn’t care, because they assumed they could always have another child later? Either way, they never even came looking for me. The Potters are my parents, Malfoy. I claim no relation with the Lestranges.”
Malfoy licked his lips. He looked lost and young. Harry rolled his eyes. Frankly, Malfoy hadn’t grown up, even during the war, and Harry didn’t know why. Perhaps he’d tried to put those experiences out of his mind entirely instead of learning from them.
And Harry could sort of understand that choice, but he also didn’t have patience for it when someone else was trying to dump the consequences of their decision on him.
“I—that’s only what the Potters said,” Malfoy whispered at last.
“Sure,” Harry agreed. “And what your mother said when I wrote to her.”
“She—did?”
Harry gave him a harsh smile. “She did. She confirmed the whole thing. From the way she told it, Bellatrix and Rodolphus thought about their Dark Lord first and foremost. Bellatrix was annoyed that recovery from the birth took her so long, because then she had to spend less time running around murdering and torturing people. They thought of me as some kind of prize to continue their legacy, their heir, not their son.
“Your mother actually suspected, when she started hearing about the Potters’ son, that it was me. And you know what she did about it? Not a bloody thing. She said that she had other things on her mind.”
Malfoy stared at him.
Harry stood up from behind the desk and stalked around it. Malfoy took a step back, unnerved. Harry smiled at him, and knew it wasn’t a reassuring smile. He was happier than ever that he had apparently changed his features young to look like the Potters’, according to what several Healers had told him now, because he felt loved when he was with them.
It was the same reason that Teddy Lupin so often looked like Harry and Andromeda.
“Your mother didn’t act like an aunt to me,” Harry whispered. “Even though she was one of the few people in the world who suspected. And the people you insist on calling my parents were free from Azkaban for more than two years during the war. They had to have suspected, too. Rodolphus, if Bellatrix was too mental to. Do you think they looked for me? No.”
Malfoy opened his mouth. Nothing came out.
“That’s how the Lestrange family treats its children.” Harry tilted his chin down. “That’s why I’m a Potter.”
“You have cousins, though,” Malfoy whispered.
“Yes, and I’m sorry as hell that Tonks died before I knew, so that I could have talked to her. And I have an aunt, too. But you’re not my cousin, and your mother’s not my aunt.”
“You can’t decide that.”
“Why not?”
“That’s—not the way it works.”
“Yes, it is. Especially since you said I’m a pureblood. Good enough to associate with, now? When you had a living cousin for years, and didn’t associate with her because she was a half-blood?”
Malfoy turned and walked away. He mostly looked confused.
Harry rolled his eyes and went to sit back down behind his desk. Even paperwork was better than trying to explain basic decency to purebloods.
*
“What I don’t understand is,” Ron said, the second night of their marathon drinking session after Harry found out, “why did the protections around the Dursleys’ house function the way that Dumbledore said they did? Why did you manage to burn Quirrell with your mother’s blood protection if it wasn’t blood protection?”
Harry leaned back against the wall of Ron’s bedroom in the Burrow and laughed until he hiccoughed. Ron shushed him nervously, glancing towards the door. Everyone else had given Harry lots of room since he’d come to visit Ron carrying six bottles of Firewhisky. They didn’t seem to know whether to feel sorry for him or not.
But now they were all asleep, and Harry was alone with his best friend, and he could lean forwards and say what he thought.
“Because Dumbledore really did speak the truth. The most powerful force in magic is love. My mother loved me, Ron, with all her heart. The protections on the Dursleys’ house functioned because of that, because they were an echo of the protection imbued in my skin. I could have lived anywhere and had that love defend me. Because Dumbledore got it wrong, too. It really had nothing to do with blood.”
Ron closed his eyes. “Damn.”
Harry nodded and took another swig.
*
“Hello, Harry.”
Andromeda opened the door of her cottage with wide, solemn eyes. Harry nodded to her, his throat clogged. He had to take several tries before he was able to clear it and speak.
“Thanks—for seeing me. I know it must be difficult.”
Immediately, Andromeda’s eyebrows snapped together. “What do you mean?”
Harry looked at the ground by his feet. It seemed that Teddy had been playing outside in the mud a short time before. There were small footprints and a blue duck toy there, the duck still slowly opening and closing its wings.
“The woman who gave birth to me killed your daughter,” Harry whispered. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry—”
He squeaked as Andromeda hauled him into the house and stood him there with her hands on his shoulders. She was shorter than he was but more formidable, and at the moment, Harry thought he would rather have dealt with a living Bellatrix than her.
“You listen to me,” Andromeda said, low and fierce. “Yes, I hated my sister. Yes, I had no idea that she’d had a child she’d brought to a battle with her and whom the Potters had adopted.
“But I suffered from lack of family for the last twenty years, outside my Ted and my Nymphadora. Teddy is a wonderful gift, but now the people I loved and lived for are gone. If you think I would reject my nephew who wants to spend time with me, no matter how he came to be—”
By then, she was crying, quiet tears that ran down her cheeks without interrupting her steady voice. Harry leaned forwards and hugged her. He was crying, too.
“Unca Harry!”
A small flying weight hit his legs. Harry leaned on Andromeda for a moment and reached own to touch Teddy’s head.
Teddy looked back up at him, beaming. At the moment, his hair was a dark mass of tight curls, like Andromeda’s (and like Bellatrix’s, in old newspaper photographs Harry had seen of her), and his eyes were a brilliant green.
Like Harry’s. Like his mum’s.
“Unca Harry!” Teddy repeated in satisfaction, and broke into a bright smile. “I got mud on my feet.”
He sounded as proud of that as if he had just been made an Auror. Harry picked up Teddy with his free arm, and leaned one moment more on Andromeda.
His aunt. His cousin. The family he had chosen.
*
“We just want to know your plans, Mr. Lestrange.”
Harry halted and turned around. He’d been followed throughout Diagon Alley by half a dozen reporters, all of them waving quills and cameras at him and calling for him to turn back into his “real form.” He’d just been trying to accomplish ordinary shopping, and he hadn’t responded to them so far, particularly because they kept calling him “Lestrange” instead of “Potter.”
Hermione tugged on his arm. “Harry,” she said in a furious undervoice.
“Come on, Hermione,” Harry said in a carrying one. “They just want to know my plans, right?” He smiled at the crowd.
“Yes, of course!” The lead woman, who looked like she was trying to imitate Rita Skeeter’s popularity by dressing like her, edged closer, bouncing on her toes. “Please, Mr. Lestrange? Just a word about what you’ll be doing with the money that’s now yours in Gringotts? Rumor says your fortune is quite extensive.”
Harry smiled.
“Harry.”
“Well, just for you, Matilda,” Harry said, lowering his voice a little, and the reporter preened at being recognized. “It’s world domination, of course.”
She stared at him with her jaw hanging open.
Hermione closed her eyes and took a deep breath.
“Yes, of course,” Harry said, nodding seriously. “I think there’s too much tradition of following Dark Lords in the family. I’m going to take over as a Dark Lord myself. And my first step will be cornering the market on the world supply of pumpkin juice.”
Quills scribbled furiously.
“When I have all the pumpkin juice in the world at my command, then I can put my own special potion in it.” Harry paused for dramatic effect. “It’s called Obey-Harry-Potter Potion.”
Matilda gasped.
“But you’re telling us about your plans!” yelled a tall male reporter in a grey robe. “How are they going to work now?”
“Shouldn’t it be Obey-Royal-Lestrange Potion?” called someone towards the back of the crowd.
“Just try to keep your kids from drinking pumpkin juice,” Harry told the reporter in the grey robe, “even when they know it’s potioned.”
That was the point when Hermione hit him with a Silencing Charm and dragged him away.
*
“Seriously, Auror Potter, do you know how many Howlers we have to field when you announce your intention for world domination in the middle of Diagon Alley?”
*
“Um. I know you don’t like to talk about this, mate.”
“It’s easier when I’m pissed on Firewhisky,” Harry said happily. It was night three of the marathon drinking session, and he wasn’t sure which way was up. He was sitting on something he was pretty sure was a chair, though. Probably.
“Uh. What about the prophecy?”
“Oh, for shame, Ron.” Harry rolled his head back on what he was pretty sure was his neck. “You didn’t read the newspaper articles about the tapestry they found?”
“I tried not to.”
Harry snorted a little and closed his eyes. “I was still born July thirty-first, mate. My mum and dad didn’t change that. I think—I wondered how they knew, but I think Sirius could easily have told them. Bellatrix bragged about the birth of an ‘heir’ to all and sundry. The Ministry gave me some of the letters they found.”
Harry had read them and then burned them. He smiled now, remembering it. Pretty fire.
There was a loud scrape that was probably Ron’s chair legs, not Ron himself. “But then he knew?”
“Sirius? Yeah. I don’t see how he couldn’t have. He would have known that my mum wasn’t pregnant.”
“But—then why did he never tell you?”
Harry wrenched his eyelids open. They wanted to drop closed. But he was pretty sure this was important, and he was pretty sure he had to say it.
Ron was looming anxiously over him.
“Don’t you see?” Harry whispered. “It’s the same reason that the prophecy applied even though I don’t think Bellatrix and Rodolphus defied Voldemort three times.” Even though he thought they could have, what with Bellatrix’s tendency to go off and do reckless attacks on her own like the one on the Longbottoms. “James and Lily Potter were my parents, in every way that mattered. I might as well have been born to them. Or reborn. It was Halloween when they had that battle and found me, you know? Exactly three months since I was born. Exactly a year before Voldemort came. And he was probably mad enough that he didn’t remember there was a chance I was born to Bellatrix, if he ever knew.”
Ron’s face cleared slowly. “And you think—”
“Halloween is associated with death, and rebirth as a soul.” Harry contemplated standing up and decided not to. “Or I was ‘born’ to them when they adopted me. It could have been all of those and none of those. At the same time.”
Ron looked like he was about to question that, but Harry continued in a dreamy voice. “And that’s why Sirius didn’t tell me. He was one of the few people who knew my mum and dad, and knew the Blacks, too. He knew which ones were my real parents. He knew which ones would give me a better life.”
And that was probably the part where Harry passed out.
*
Harry stood in front of his bedroom mirror the night they told him.
He stared at his reflection, and then for the first time, he reached out and tried to consciously control the power that had once allowed him to regrow his hair after Aunt Petunia had cut it so short.
His body trembled and flowed and warped. Harry sought for the point that he thought should be there, the “birth” form that he knew Tonks had talked about once. Had she talked about it? He thought so.
But for long moments, he simply saw swimming flesh in the mirror, nothing that made sense or could make sense.
And then it came to him.
He didn’t know what he’d looked like. Even Tonks must have grown up knowing her supposed “normal” form, looking into mirrors sometimes, and practicing with her Metamorphmagus magic before she’d got control of it. Teddy had dark hair most of the time, the way he’d come out of the womb, and he seemed to prefer it, although he changed the texture and length whenever he wanted. But at least he could look at baby photographs if he ever had any doubts what he looked like.
Harry could turn his eyes brown, if he wanted. He could grow his black hair as long and wild as Bellatrix’s had been, or like Sirius’s. He could turn his eyes grey like a Black’s.
But it would all be playacting, his best guess at a combination of Bellatrix and Rodolphus. He didn’t even know what Rodolphus’s face looked like, couldn’t visualize it. He was entirely subsumed in the shadow of his wife.
Harry let his real face surface, and smiled at the green eyes, the shaggy black hair, even the lightning bolt scar.
There was no “normal” face “beneath” his. He couldn’t go back to being Royal Lestrange because he had only been him for three months, twenty-five years ago.
It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are.
This was who he was.
The End.