[From Samhain to the Solstice]: Truth is Wilder, gen, 4/7

[lomonaaeren]

An owl has come for Harry. He’s never got an owl before.

The large, imposing black bird sits on the headboard of his bed and extends a talon. Harry’s magic growls and transforms into a larger owl, leaning forwards from Harry’s shoulder with wings spread and hooting menacingly. The owl on the headboard looks cross-eyed at it.

“I don’t think you’re scaring it,” Harry says absently, and takes the message hesitantly. He’s heard that some owl messages have charms on them that can track who’s touched or opened them. But the bird doesn’t seem inclined to go away even with Harry’s magic puffing up until its head touches the ceiling, so he settles down to read it, ignoring the hooting in the background.

Dear Harry Potter,

You may not have heard of me, but my time is Albus Dumbledore, the Headmaster of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. This is the school you would have gone to if you had been a wizard instead of a Squib.

At least, we all thought you were a Squib.

Recently, your twin brother, David Potter, was involved in a confrontation with the spirit of Voldemort, the Dark Lord he defeated—

“Whose stupid idea was that?” Harry asks aloud. Then he looks up in annoyance as the owls start chasing each other around the room. “Hey.”

His magic drops to the floor, transforms into a snake, and snaps its neck up to eat the messenger owl. The bird barely avoids it and lands next to Harry, huddling into him for comfort.

“Stop it, please,” Harry tells his magic.

His magic curls up on the other side of him, eyes still fixed on the owl. One tendril of darkness starts trying to sneak around Harry’s back towards the bird.

“I see you doing that, you know.”

His magic sulks.

Harry shakes his head and goes back to reading the letter, angling his body a little to protect the owl from the influence of his bad, nasty magic.

--and in the process of trying to comfort him, our gamekeeper, Rubeus Hagrid, told David that he had to live, or he would never meet his twin brother and his wild magic. You can imagine our surprise when we heard this, as we had believed you had no magic. On questioning Hagrid, he admitted that he had in fact been teaching you to sympathize and work with your magic, although he was shame-faced at having betrayed a secret you had asked him to keep.

Harry rolls his eyes. “Yeah, that sounds like Hagrid,” he mutters as he swats the tendril that is now trying to crawl over his head to reach the owl on his other side. The owl crouches down and mantles, feathers so puffed that it looks about twice its size.

“That’s not going to impress my magic,” Harry tells the owl, and goes back to reading.

We therefore would like to meet you and evaluate you for acceptance back into the wizarding world and specifically attendance at Hogwarts. You would be a year behind your brother, due to having to master the first-year curriculum, but we would hope that you would catch up in some months. Your parents, James and Lily Potter, have offered to tutor you privately this summer as well.

Yours sincerely,
Headmaster Albus Dumbledore.

Harry blinks and turns the letter over, looking for some other indication of another message. But no, apparently this is the whole letter in all its craziness.

“Can you believe this shit?” he asks, turning to his magic, and then scowls. “Put the owl back.”

His magic tries to turn into a picture of innocence, but given that it’s currently a snake with a bulging stomach, that’s difficult.

Harry narrows his eyes and speaks in Gobbledegook. “Ashnaran poliskipoi.”

Maybe in sheer surprise that he knows the words “Put the owl on the bed,” his magic regurgitates the owl. The bird lands on the bed, dazed, and flaps its wings back and forth for a second. Then it turns and flies out the open doorway of Harry’s room, escaping.

Harry watches it go, and shrugs. He wasn’t planning to write back, anyway. He would kind of like to meet his brother, just because being twins is supposed to be special even to goblins and werewolves, and he thinks that David would have been too young when he was a baby to have any part in deciding to exile Harry to the Muggle world.

Then again, maybe David has absorbed the prejudices against Squibs, and wouldn’t be worth meeting after all.

In the meantime, Harry has something more important to do.

“You can’t just eat random owls and people’s pets. How would I take you anywhere?”

His magic turns into an owl.

“I can’t use you as a messenger, don’t be silly.”

His magic hoots.

“No, because you can’t go that far from my body, remember? You wouldn’t be able to reach all the way up to Scotland and back. And I don’t know if the Potters live any closer.”

A thin tendril stretches out of his magic and towards the window, growing thinner and thinner, further and further, as it extends. Harry blinks and looks back at the main “body” of his magic, which contrives to look smug.

“You think you could really do that?”

“I know I can.”

Harry smiles a little. It’s still rare for his magic to speak to him in English instead of Gobbledegook. “Well, we can try it. But don’t blame me if something goes wrong.”

*

“I don’t know why he hasn’t responded to Albus’s owl.”

“We should have owled him ourselves, Lils. That’s what I said.”

David stands silently in the shadows that fall across the entryway to the sitting room, and watches his mother pace back and forth. Dad is sitting on the couch near the hearth, a glass on his knee. David knows it’s Firewhisky and not the first one, either.

“You did not say that. You were happy to let Albus handle it.”

“Well, yeah, because how can we tell him that we—that we just threw him away and we didn’t even bother to go look and see if he ever developed magic? Even though we knew he had it before that night…”

Dad bends over, nearly spilling his glass. Mum flicks her wand to catch the Firewhisky in a swarm of hovering bubbles, and then comes over to put her arms around Dad. Her voice is so low David has a hard time making it out.

“Hush now, my dear. We didn’t know this would happen. We made the best decision we could.”

“You went to Petunia’s, Lily. You know—”

“I know.” David has to search his mind for a moment before he recalls the name of his Aunt Petunia, whom he’s heard about but never met. Kind of like Harry. He got told that it would expose his Muggle relatives to too many fame-seeking wizards if they ever went to visit them, and maybe also people who would want to harm Harry for being a Squib or the Boy-Who-Lived’s brother.

Watching his parents now, David wonders if that was ever true.

“We didn’t know,” Mum goes on. “We made a mistake, just like we made a mistake encouraging David to confront Voldemort this year. We’ll never make that mistake again, and we’ll never make one with Harry again, either.”

“Are we going to teach him this summer?”

David finds himself easing a little nearer to the sitting room. He doesn’t know how he feels about the idea of Harry coming here. On the one hand, in a way it would be nothing new. Ron and Neville are over almost every week, and Hermione came to visit before she went on holiday to France with her parents.

On the other hand, it’s different with a brother. And a twin. David’s friends can go home to their parents, but what would it be like to share Mum and Dad with someone?

David feels uneasy about it, and excited. That’s a nice change from scared out of his mind, or bewildered, the way he was when Hagrid made a stammering, tear-filled apology for blurting out the secret Harry expected him to keep when he was trying to encourage David to wake up.

“If he ever accepts the bloody invitation.”

“We can’t blame him for wanting to stay away, Lily…”

“We made a mistake, and all we can try to do is make up for it.’

His parents move closer together, and David reckons they’re going to kiss and hug. He slips away from the side of the sitting room and up to his bedroom, where he sits and looks out towards the owlery.

Harry probably doesn’t want to respond to a letter from people who threw him away, but what would happen if David wrote him a letter?

*

“If stretching your magic exhausts you this much, then I will not permit you to do it.”

Harry looks at Miss Miranda as kindly as he can, while his magic curls up around his feet in a huge black puddle that has edges of horns and wings and feathers right now, but no form. “Miss Miranda, how can you stop me?”

Miss Miranda considers him for long moments, then leans back and shakes his head. “I can’t. But I don’t want you to suffer the possible consequences of magically exhausting yourself just to reply to a bloody letter, either.”

“What do you think would happen?”

Miss Miranda’s answer gets interrupted when a snowy owl flutters through the door. Harry lowers a hand to his magic to calm its response, while Miss Miranda holds out her arm, probably assuming the owl is for her.

But Harry knows the owl is for him. He doesn’t know how he knew that, but he’s utterly not surprised when the owl settles on the bed beside him and holds out a leg. At least this letter doesn’t have the Hogwarts seal on it like the last one, which means it probably isn’t from Dumbledore.

“You’re a pretty thing,” Harry tells the owl, and ignores the trembling of the black pool around his legs. He sets the letter down on the bed and spends a moment petting the owl, both to warn his magic off harming this bird and to let Miss Miranda act in case any harmful magic takes effect.

Nothing happens. The owl hops off his arm with a happy hoot and lands on the headboard. Harry picks up the letter.

When he opens it, it starts Dear Harry, which is weird, because whoever wrote this doesn’t really know him, even if they’re writing because Hagrid accidentally told them about him. He lets his eyes skim to the end of the letter.

Sincerely,
Your brother David.

Harry’s breath catches.

“Harry?” Miss Miranda leans forwards as if she thinks the letter is about to bite his fingers.

“It’s all right,” Harry says hollowly, eyes still fixed on that signature. “It’s form my brother.” He feels a mixture of happiness and anger and impatience with his own happiness. David could have written to him at any time, right? Squibs can still get owls.

Maybe he thought it wouldn’t be a good idea if Harry was still living with Aunt Petunia? But that would require David to know what Aunt Petunia was like, and then he should be upset at the thought of anyone living with her—

Harry’s magic perks up, ready to destroy something.

“No,” Harry tells it forcefully, and ignores its sulking as he goes back to read the letter.

Dear Harry,

I don’t know if you would want to hear from me, with—everything. But Hagrid said that you weren’t a Squib. I thought you would be happier living outside of the magical world if you were non-magical, but if you have magic, then you should be in it.

I don’t know if you’d want to live with Mum and Dad and go to Hogwarts. From what Hagrid said, your magic is pretty different from the stuff we get taught there. But I would be happy to help you if you did.

I’ve never really had a brother. Mum and Dad told me over and over that it would be best for us to never meet, that you would be jealous of my magic and Squibs are happier in the Muggle world. But I don’t think you’re jealous. What’s there to be jealous about? I don’t have more powerful magic than other people, and being the Boy-Who-Lived just means that a lot of people hate me for defeating Voldemort and others think that it’s for the best that they force me to confront him again.

Sorry. You probably don’t want to hear about that. But I won’t scratch it out, just in case you want to think about it.

So, if you want to come live with us, then I’d do my best to help you. Or I’d do my best to tell Mum and Dad and the Headmaster to leave you alone, if that’s what you want. I would like to meet you, if that’s okay. Or we can just write letters. What do you think?

Sincerely,
Your brother David.

Harry strokes the letter with a fingertip, and thinks about it. He thinks David probably does have some of the same prejudices that a lot of wizards and witches do about Squibs, even if he thinks he doesn’t.

But he also sounds like a desperate, scared kid. The sort of kid Harry was in his cupboard years ago, before he figured out that he really had magic and just thought he was a Squib that weird things happened around, the worst of both worlds.

“Well?”

Harry glances up with a small smile. Miss Miranda is leaning forwards from her chair as if she’s going to get up and seize the letter out of his hands, even though Harry knows she would never do that.

“He sounds scared,” Harry says. “But he’d like to meet me, or write letters to me if I don’t want that. And if I wanted to live with the Potters, he said, he would help me get caught up on the magic and the schoolwork.”

“But you don’t want to.”

“No, I don’t.”

Only when Miss Miranda relaxes back in the chair does Harry realize how tense she was. He stares at her in wonder. “You thought I would want to go live with the people who abandoned me? And you were upset about it?”

“I thought you would be miserable if you decided to go,” Miss Miranda says quietly, clasping her hands. “But I also thought I could not stop you. As you said.”

“I wouldn’t do something that stupid. It might be nice to have a relationship with my brother, but I don’t know how much he’s being influenced by the Potters.” Harry looks thoughtfully at the letter that David wrote. It sounds honest and open.

Then again, so did the Dursleys when they were telling people how terrible and ungrateful Harry was.

“I’ll write back to him,” Harry says, looking up at the snowy owl, who bobs her head in what sems like approval of his decision. “And see what happens.”

*

David is a little annoyed that Hedwig comes and finds him in the middle of dinner. If she found him later, when he was alone and able to give Harry’s letter the attention it deserves, he thinks that would have been better.

But it’s done, she’s swooping down to the dinner table with a little croon and a bob of her head, and Mum is leaning forwards with an interested smile. “I didn’t realize you were writing to anyone, David. Is Hermione back from her holiday in France?”

“I thought she wasn’t, but she could be,” David says. Because he can hear lies when people speak them, he tries not to lie himself. He glances at the letter, with Hedwig doing a little dance on the arm of his chair, and then nods. “Yeah, I reckon she has to be, if Hedwig went to her and delivered the letter so quickly,” he says, which isn’t technically a lie. He tucks the envelope away.

Even if it feels like it’s burning a hole in his pocket, he can’t act too anxious about a letter from a friend who already writes him novels.

Mum nods and looks at Uncle Sirius, who’s sitting next to Dad. Both of them have glasses of Firewhisky in front of them. David picks up his own pumpkin juice and wonders if he’s hiding his scorn.

It’s not something he’s used to feeling around Dad and Uncle Sirius. He looks up to them. They’re smart and good with magic and funny in a way that David isn’t.

But they act like they need Firewhisky to cope with something they also seemed to suspect was true for a lot of years, that Harry has magic. Or else why did they keep asking the Ministry to go test Harry, and anxiously asking about the results? They have to know that there was a chance he could have developed magic.

David doesn’t always understand his parents, but lately, he feels like he especially doesn’t understand them.

“I don’t understand,” Uncle Sirius says, as if reading David’s thoughts. He picks up his glass of Firewhisky and tilts it back and forth so that the amber liquid glows in the firelight. “Why doesn’t he want to come to Hogwarts?”

“Maybe he still feels abandoned.”

“But we reached out to him! We apologized for abandoning him as a Squib!”

“Well,” Mum says, folding her hands in the way that she does when she talks about the former Death Eaters she has to work with in the Department of Mysteries, “technically Albus was the one who reached out.”

Uncle Sirius is drunk enough that David can see him having to think about that. Then he puts down his glass and leans forwards. “Wait,” he says. “I don’t understand. You let Albus write to him? Why?”

“Albus is the Headmaster of the school Harry would attend if—”

“But you’re his parents!”

David looks down and picks at his salad. He has to do that to conceal his snort.

“We didn’t think he would want to hear from us. He probably blames us for abandoning him—”

No shit, David thinks, and is secretly a little delighted at himself. He doesn’t often think like that.

“But Albus made the offer for him to live with you during the summer and have you teach him some of the Hogwarts stuff he missed?”

“Well. Yes.”

“What the fuck, Lily?”

Mum hushes Uncle Sirius, her eyes flickering to David. David decides not to tell them he hears worse every time he goes over to the Burrow and one of Fred and George’s experiments blows up.

“We made a mistake,” Mum says.

“No shit!”

“Sirius, I will insist that you leave if you can’t be calm about this.”

Uncle Sirius is probably the right level of upset, David thinks. But he thinks that he might be able to leave the table and read Harry’s letter if he can pretend that he’s more upset and confused by the language than he is. He puts down his fork. “Can I go to my room, Mum?”

Mum agrees quickly, and Dad just stares into his Firewhisky glass and doesn’t say anything. David checks over his shoulder as he gets ready to climb the stairs. Mum is talking quietly and rapidly to Uncle Sirius, their heads bowed so close together that David can’t hear anything from his position.

David snorts and takes the steps two at a time.

Yeah, they made a mistake. And they don’t want to face up to it. I think they think it’s such a terrible mistake that there’s nothing they can do to move on from it or anything like that.

David shakes his head as he opens his bedroom door. If Harry didn’t want anything to do with his family, David wouldn’t really blame him. But Mum and Dad could at least try apologizing and see what happened.

Alone at last, David sprawls on his bed and opens the letter.

David,

I’m not going to call you my brother yet. It’s too strange, writing to someone I should have known all my life, and don’t know at all.

David nods. That’s better than he expected, honestly. He thought maybe he would get a letter full of curse words like Uncle Sirius’s back.

Or a Howler.

I got a letter from Albus Dumbledore offering to let me attend Hogwarts, although with the first-years instead of the second-years like you. Or offering to let me stay at the Potters’ house while the people who should have been my parents pretended they didn’t throw me away. I’m not interested in taking either offer.

David winces. Yeah, he can understand that.

But I might be interested in talking to you, although I don’t really care about learning what you’ve learned at Hogwarts. Tell me more about yourself. What is it like being the Boy-Who-Lived? What do you feel about Squibs? What do you feel about goblins and werewolves?

David blinks at the unexpected questions. Well, no, he supposes the second one might be expected. Harry wants to know if David hates him for supposedly being a Squib and is going to refuse to apologize the way Mum and Dad did.

But the others are kind of strange.

David’s eyes keep going back to that first one, though. What is it like being the Boy-Who-Lived?

Lots of people have asked him that before, including Ron and Neville when they were younger, but it’s not—they meant, did he enjoy the fame, and what was it like to have shopkeepers close up the shops so they could serve him, and what was it like being recognized everywhere he went.

David thinks—he hopes—that Harry doesn’t mean that. Harry seems pretty blunt and straightforward, and he grew up in the Muggle world and didn’t know about David’s fame until a year or so ago. He might just want to know what’s it really like. What does David think and feel because he’s the Boy-Who-Lived?

David takes a deep breath. He’ll repay honesty with honesty, and tell Harry what it’s really like.

Even if that means Harry will never want to come home.

He looks back at the letter and realizes there are a few lines down near the bottom of the parchment that he didn’t read the first time.

Let’s write a few letters to each other and see what it’s like. Then maybe we can discuss meeting up.

Harry.

David half-smiles. He can definitely live with that.

*

Finally, Harry thinks he’s ready.

He’s spent evening after evening practicing with his magic in stretching further and further out, leaving just a tendril of itself connected to Harry, after their lessons in spells and history and Potions and Gobbledegook for the day. His magic is more confident than Harry is, but he thinks things will be fine.

For now, he lies on his bed with his hands folded on his chest and lets his magic extend outwards from him, spinning the thread thinner and thinner, finer and finer. On and on it goes, until it reaches out of Diagon Alley and past countryside that blurs and rushes past like Harry is seeing it from the train he took to London.

Or the Hogwarts Express, which he’ll never ride.

They speed on and on together, and Harry’s magic aims instinctively at a large collection of wards and power to the north. Harry is betting that’s Hogwarts, and his magic bets with him, and yes, there it is, a magnificent castle beyond a dark forest that Harry’s magic yearns to explore.

Later, Harry tells his magic sternly. He’s already feeling hollow this far from his body, and something like a headache beats in his ears. He could have sent an owl, he can admit that. Miss Miranda would have let him use one of the sanctuary’s birds, if he ever requested one. He’s just never had anyone to write to.

But coming this far, and like this, proves a few points. It lets Harry answer Dumbledore directly, so that Dumbledore doesn’t decide someone else is influencing Harry and not letting him come to Hogwarts.

And it lets Dumbledore see what Harry is, what his magic is.

They don’t have any trouble getting through the wards. Wards are either meant to guard against spells, against solid objects like Banished furniture or raindrops, against certain kinds of people—like magical creatures or humans with hostile intentions—or all three. The wards against Hogwarts are all three, but Harry and his magic don’t fit any of those categories.

Panting, riding the very thinnest thread he can, Harry soars through the wards and towards the most magical place in the castle.

Which turns out to be a buried underground chamber with no people in it.

Wait, no, that isn’t right. Harry and his magic backtrack and fling themselves upwards, aiming at the second most magical place.

This time, Harry is sure that he’s right. He’s in an office filled with books and a phoenix, which glances towards him and squawks softly. The tall man with the white beard behind the desk glances up, and his eyes widen, his hand probably going to his wand.

“What—Fawkes, what is this?” the man asks, glancing at the phoenix.

The phoenix looks at Harry, head tilting back and forth and a low croon coming out of his beak. Harry smiles grimly and asks his magic to do something they haven’t practiced previously, given that Harry didn’t even know they would get this far.

At least Dumbledore’s eyes widen in a satisfactory way when Harry’s magic rears up in front of him and manifests Harry’s face out of its blackness.

“Harry?” he whispers.

“Yeah,” Harry says. “I wanted to tell you that I’m no Squib, but I’m also not a wizard, and I have no interest in attending a school run by wizards or getting help from the parents who abandoned me.”

“It was not quite like that,” Dumbledore begins.

Harry snorts and lets his face dissolve and his magic reel across all the long distance back into his body. He’s feeling the strain as he gasps and his heart labors. Miss Miranda will probably have things to say to him tomorrow. So will Starfire if he has to miss her class.

But his magic gets up and runs around the room, adopting the form of a long-legged cheetah. It literally bounces off the wall and lands on Harry’s chest, luckily lighter than a real-life cheetah would be. Harry gets a furry feline cheek rubbed against his and a rumbling purr that echoes through his body.

“We did it.”

“Yeah, we did,” Harry says, and reaches up to rub his fingers gently behind his magic’s round furry ears.

His magic lies down beside him and puts one paw across Harry’s chest. “Rest. I will keep watch.”

Harry closes his eyes and lets himself fall into sleep. He hears a brief flutter of owl wings and thinks drowsily that it might be David writing back. He also thinks that he should probably stay awake and prevent his magic from eating the owl.

But nothing doing. It’s too late. Harry’s head nods, and he sinks into slumber. The owl will have to take care of itself.