Ever the Same

Chapter Two: The One-Eyed Witch

A/N- Just as a reminder, we're diverging from canon quite a bit given that this is an AU where the second wizarding war didn't happen. 

It was on August 31st, 1991, that James Potter sat his son, Harry, down and began to tell him of the special secrets that he would be passing down from the marauders themselves. 

Padfoot had all but begged to include he and Moony in the conversation, but James felt that he needed the moment with his son. At the announcement, Sirius transformed into the shaggy black dog and waited, petulantly, in the orchard behind Potter Manor with Remus.

"You're leaving for Hogwarts tomorrow," James began, sitting in the chair across from Harry.

"And I know I'll be in Gryffindor," Harry added, smirking at his father and causing James to almost feel as though he was looking in a mirror. 

"I don't doubt it at all, Buck," James laughed. "I have something I'd like to give you."

Harry knew of the cloak of invisibility, seeing it on the rare occasion that he caught his dad sneaking back into the manor or using it with Uncle Padfoot and Moony. But when James handed it over to him, allowing the soft fabric to graze the tips of Harry's fingers, Harry couldn't help but to gape at his dad.

"My dad gave it to me before my first year," James smiled wistfully. "It's been passed down through the Potter line for generations. It's your turn to take care of it now, and I trust that you won't give Minnie too much trouble with it."

"You're....giving it to me?"

"As long as you promise to be responsible with it, yes."

It took everything in James not to simultaneously laugh and sob at the words coming from his mouth. Somehow, in the last couple years, he had become just like his father. He could almost hear Fleamont speaking the same exact words to him all those years ago, probably in the same room.

He watched as Harry's green eyes widened in wonder at the thing in his hand, holding it as if it was a newborn kitten.

"Dad...Thank you."

Harry threw himself into James's arms and hugged him tightly. James returned the hug just as tight, and wondered to himself what Harry would have been like in the other world. The world that Regulus had rewritten, saving he and Lily's lives and rewriting the fabric of reality altogether. 

He couldn't help but wonder if Harry would have ever gotten the cloak. James could only guess that someone would have passed their legacies onto Harry, even if James himself hadn't been around to do so.

It was another tender moment that James felt his heart restrict in his chest over, thinking about what could have happened, and didn't.

It was that moment that played over and over in James's head as he traversed the passageway between the basement of Honeyduke's Sweet Shop and the statue of the one-eyed witch. 

He had been invited to the castle, and yet nostalgia had won over and he found himself casting a notice-me-not across himself and slinking down the tunnel. 

Hogwarts held the best times of James Potter's life, and even just being in the dark passage was bringing up memories of the times that he, Sirius, Remus, and Peter had been up to no good. 

But the war had taken things from all of them, and James found that every time he looked at the quidditch pitch, he couldn't help but think of Fleamont. The final battle.