Chapter 35: The Boy Who Was Doomed
Harry hurried to follow Lily up the stairs and into his room. James and Sirius were downstairs, one sulking and the other alternately laughing at him or trying to cheer him up; Remus was off snogging Hermione somewhere in the castle; Peter was still on his date with Marlene, so there was no one to help him, no one to distract her, no one to dull the anger or hexes that the girl was going to throw his way.
The second the door closed she turned on him and he knew he was doomed.
"What the hell were you thinking?" she demanded, her voice harder than he had ever heard it. "I can understand something this stupid from them, but from you?"
Harry said nothing. He couldn't reasonably explain that he was only trying to get his parents to start dating, now could he?
"Answer me, dammit!"
"I w—"
"Look at me," she ordered. "After what you just let him do to me, you'd better look me in the eye when you try to explain yourself."
Fearful of what he might see, he obeyed, turning his hazel eyes to look at her face. She was livid, flushed red from anger and embarrassment, her whole body was shaking and giving off an electricity that could only be barely-restrained magic. The second their eyes met, her wand came out. "Fix your eyes before I hex you. You look too much like him as it is."
Again he obeyed immediately, performing the spell that ended the transfiguration of his eyes. It must have worked because the crackle of wild magic he felt coming off her fell away abruptly, though the girl still shook with anger. "I'm sorry. I thought that maybe if you got to spend time with him you'd find you kind of liked him."
"Where did you come up with such a stupid plan?"
"James," Harry said, still holding her eye though he was desperate to look away.
"I'll kill him."
"Don't!" he cried, jumping forward to grab her arm, knowing that she was angry enough to mean her threat.
Her jaw flexed so hard she had to be in danger of breaking her teeth. "I nearly kissed him thinking he was you."
His stomach rebelled in a way it had not since September, and Harry ran from the room, fleeing to the washroom. He stood gripping the cold porcelain of the sink, wishing the mental images away as he fought off his nausea. He had seen people killed, murdered before his very eyes, but the thought of having him mum's tongue in his mouth made him wish he could scrub raw his mouth and eyes and brain. This really had been a bad plan. He was reluctant to leave the washroom, afraid looking at Lily would make that horrifying picture return to his head, but he had to try to soften the girl's anger enough that she would not continue to hate James.
'I hate time travel,' he sighed to himself as he pushed away from the basin. In trying to bring his teen-aged parents together, he might have driven them farther apart, perhaps to the point of preventing his own birth.
"Lily?" Harry asked in a tiny whisper, peering around the door cautiously in case she was ready to hex him.
The girl was still there. The few minutes it had taken him to calm his nerves and stomach had been enough to quell her fury a bit. She was no longer shaking and her skin was no longer such a deep, angry red. She still looked displeased, however, her brow creased deeply as she turned and considered him silently, studying him as he had often seen her study books; when her hard eyes fell on his proper green ones, she stepped closer and looked at him, saying nothing. Somehow he knew she was not looking into his eyes but at them.
"I'm not James," he promised, assuming she had been trying to sort out which boy had come back to the room.
The girl made no reply, though her eyes made one last sweep of his face and form before she brushed past him quickly and left him to stand alone.
"Bad idea," Harry muttered. "So not worth the psychological damage."
oOo
Lily stopped sitting beside Harry in class and in the Great Hall, stopped walking with him, stopped speaking to him entirely. What little interaction she ever had with the Marauders was cut off completely; she refused to acknowledge James even when he was doing something blatantly against school rules.
In the week before the train departed for London, the Chaser tried everything he could think of to draw her attention. It started innocently enough, with the boy sending his owl to her with apologies and chocolates and flowers, none of which were accepted. He tried talking to her directly then indirectly when that did not work, but all of his emissaries were summarily dismissed. Finally, he resorted to pranks, knowing that she was a Prefect and that she would have to look at him and talk to him again if only to tell him off. If his only options were being ignored or being shouted at, he would much rather she shout at him.
That didn't work either.
Lily walked past him as he stood in plain view of anyone with eyes, writing curse words on the walls of the corridor. She said nothing, although the Ravenclaw Prefect noticed and reported him. He got a detention for it. He got another from Professor Sprout for throwing a clod of mud at Lily's Herbology partner; Lily did not even spare him a dirty look. Flitwick gave him another detention after the desperate boy had charmed her chair to walk across the room toward him with her stuck to it; he had hoped that if she was unable to move, he might apologise to her, but he didn't get the chance as Lily marched from class the second Flitwick released her from James' sticking charm. His pranks only grew larger and more elaborate with each failed attempt and detention.
By Friday afternoon, as the rest of the students were packing to leave for the holiday, James had more detentions to serve than there were hours in the day. He had set a new school record, receiving more hours of punishment in a single week than any previous student in the past thousand years, enough to fill every Friday evening and Saturday morning for the next two months. Yet for all his effort, Lily still refused to look at him.
"What am I going to do?" the despondent boy moaned, sinking into his chair in the Great Hall.
"I suppose being patient is out of the question," Remus replied; he, too, was in the proverbial dog house for having helped deceive Lily. Hermione had not spoken to him all week, but, unlike James, he was confident enough in the girl's feelings to know that she would forgive him his part in the fiasco soon enough.
"Patience is highly overrated," Sirius said.
"Not to mention boring," added Peter.
Harry just sat silently beside them, dejected and wondering at what point he would start to fade from existence. Or perhaps he would simply vanish as if everyone in the world blinked as one and in that split second he would be gone. His mum did not seem like the sort to give up a grudge easily and he could not foresee her getting over her hatred of James any time soon, if at all. No, Harry was doomed to fade or vanish, leaving no trace that he had ever been. He wondered what would happen to Hermione. He was the reason she was in the seventies. If his meddling had prevented his ever being born, would Hermione have ever come to the past?
"Thinking up a plan?" Sirius asked, nudging his ribs gently.
"Not really," he replied absently. "Just wondering."
"What about?"
"If someone travelled through time and while there prevented the person who had sent them back from being born, would that someone still have travelled back in time at all?" he muttered, frown on his face and eyes unfocused on a distant point that even he couldn't see.
"You have too many thoughts, Harry James Granger," Sirius replied with a sad shake of his head. "You're meant to be putting that devious brain to good use helping Prongs."
"No use. Doomed," James sighed and dropped his head to the table with a hard 'thud'.
"Doomed," Harry agreed.
Their mourning was so heavy that Harry was actually quite happy to see them off. He was hoping that with two uninterrupted weeks to scour the Restricted Section and practice every potential spell, they might find the one they needed to return home before he started to fade. This was all assuming that Hermione was still willing to speak to him. She had been as painfully silent as Lily during the past week, offering him only a cold shoulder and icy glare.
"Well, if she won't help me, and I'm doomed to non-existence," Harry reasoned while alone in the common room, "then I might as well change some other things, right? I could at least try to save Sirius."
"Don't be an idiot, Harry," Hermione chided in the harsh tone she usually reserved for Ron.
"Hermione!" he cried and leapt up to hug the girl. "Help me! I'm doomed!"
"You've been spending too much time with those prats," she shook her head. "You aren't doomed."
"I am! She won't even look at him. She'll never date him or marry him. I'll never be born. I'm doomed!"
The girl sighed and looked at him with the tried patience of an indulgent parent. "She's embarrassed. You two played a horrible trick on her. That's not the sort of thing anyone can get over quickly, Harry. If your dad had even half the brains everyone thinks he does, he'd see that and lay off for a while."
Harry dropped onto the couch and glowered. "It wasn't a trick. We just thought that she might see how much she likes him if she spent some time with him. And now I'm doomed. Let's hurry up and go home before I muck anything else up."
"Might be a bit late for that," she replied quietly and looked away before Harry could read her expression.
The boy was already losing sleep fearing that he had prevented his own birth. Hermione's comment only added to his ulcer-inducing stress, and he started running through all the things he could remember saying or doing since arriving in 1976 that might have altered their past. He had joined the Quidditch team, which meant someone else had not; was that it? Or was it that he had helped that first year to History of Magic in September? Maybe that kid was meant to do something while lost in the corridors, meet the girl he would one day marry and have kids with, or possibly meet his partner in magic that he would work with to develop some break-through cure for lycanthropy.
Or was it all the time he spent with the Marauders that had changed the future? James should have started to mature by now, at least according to what Lupin had told him. Was he preventing that from happening? Was the new blood he provided the devious quartet enough to prevent his young father from turning more responsible? Surely, a boy who would pull such horrendous pranks to get the attention of the girl he liked would never be promoted to Head Boy.
Or perhaps it was Sirius. He knew so little about his Godfather, there was no knowing what he was meant to be doing at this point in his life, but with all the time he spent glued to Harry's side there was surely something else he ought to have done by now, some girl or boy whose heart ought to have been broken by him.
He paused and frowned. From what everyone had told him in this time and from the way Lupin mentioned it back in June, Sirius was something of a serial monogamist, dating someone new every few weeks until he got bored and moved on, but Harry had not seen him go on any dates at all. His Friday and Saturday nights were always spent with his head in Harry's lap as they read or talked Quidditch. His Godfather made no obvious advances toward anyone outside the sly wink at passing girls just to get them to giggle or drop their books, but nothing to give him the reputation of heartbreaker that everyone seemed to have attached to him. For heaven's sake, the boy spent more time flirting with Harry than he did anyone else.
His frown fell along with his jaw, his eyes growing huge as he thought of all the winks, smirks and batted lashes, all the arms Sirius had draped over his shoulder and passages of his eyes over Harry's body.
"Finally figured it out?" Hermione asked politely, though her laughter was barely contained.
"Sirius…"
"Fancies you," she finished the sentence for him. "Yes, he does. Has for quite some time. Everyone's noticed but you. He's not exactly been subtle about it."
The boy shook his head. "No, he's just being friendly. They've no idea of personal space, him and Tonks," he insisted, grasping for some alternative explanation, however flimsy it might be. "Sirius would hug me for five minutes at a time back at Grimmauld Place and, Tonks, she would stick her hands up my jumper all the time. That's just what they do."
"Really?" Hermione smirked so blatantly that it felt like slap in the face. "Have you seen them do that to anyone else? Tonks never put her hands up Ron or Lupin's shirts. Sirius doesn't keep his head on anyone else's leg by the fire or spend nearly as much time with any of his other friends, and he's known them far longer than he's known you."
"No."
"Yes," she said. "He fancies you."
Harry wasn't sure what to do. Hermione was dating Lupin. She had told Tildy and Lily where they were really from. Memory charms would fix all their interferences after they left, he was sure; any feelings Sirius might have for him would be erased along with his memories of Harry James Granger. Still, he didn't know what to do, what to think, how to respond. His Godfather fancied him.
"I'm doomed."