Nose to the Wind // tomarry

Chapter 7: You Just Might Get it All

The rest of that school year passed fairly uneventfully. Harry did finally get to start making potions, with Lily or Remus' supervision, a little before Chris' fourth birthday. On Will's orders, Harry made a potion that would turn the drinker's hair neon orange for the day, and Will slipped it to Chris, who got Sirius to drink it on account of it being his birthday and him being allowed to order people around. Sirius thought it was fantastic, but Lily did say no more potions to change hair colour. (Remus, on the other hand, was completely willing to help Harry make potions to change the colour of skin, eyes, fingernails, tongues, or whatever else they could find, and they spent the next couple of weekends pranking various members of the household. Lily gave up forbidding colour changing potions once she discovered Remus was in on it.)

By July, Lily had mostly stopped looking disapproving when she caught Will and Chris speaking Atlantean, and a couple late-night excursions had let Harry discover that his parents were trying to create their own dictionary of Atlantean, basing it on context clues when one of his brothers had to use English words for a concept that didn't exist in Atlantean, or it was pretty obvious what they were talking about.

"It's impressive work," Death offered when Harry asked it how their work was coming along, having been unable to actually get a look at the dictionary they'd been building. "They're wrong on a couple counts, and their spelling is atrocious, but they're not doing too badly, given they don't know anything about the language's origins."

Harry nodded to himself and rubbed his fingers along the edge of his robes, staring off into the darkness of the Realm of Death. "I see no reason to try stopping them," he decided. "As careless as Will and Chris are with it, any more, I doubt anything I do will stop Mum and Dad from forming some sort of record eventually."

"A most wise assumption, Master," Death agreed.

Harry glanced up at it. "Rather." He sighed and looked down at the stretch of robe he'd been worrying. "I expect I should be proud of their accomplishments, given how little they know about the language, but I think I'm more resigned than anything. Irritated, a bit."

"No one likes sharing their secrets, Master," Death offered, one skeletal hand squeezing his shoulder.

Harry snorted. "Quite true," he agreed, leaning in to Death's touch. "I suppose there are some things even I can't expect to keep from the people I live with."

Death rattled a quiet laugh. "Master, I believe it is because you are who you are that you have such difficulty hiding such things."

Harry scowled and side-eyed his servant. "And what is that supposed to mean?"

"Simply, Master, that you do not wish to hide yourself from those you most love."

Harry slumped, unable to disagree with that assessment. Because he didn't like lying to his family, for all he believed he needed to, to keep them safe. To keep them his.

"You're the one," a voice called, and Harry jerked his head up to find a heavy-set man with a well-tended beard standing in front of him. A rosary hung around his neck, half hidden in the folds of his dark robes, and he held a thick tome in one hand, pages turned at odd angles within it. "The one who is looking for the rarest of tales. Those treasures of the written word which have been hidden away from humanity."

Harry blinked and nodded. "That's me, yeah. Do you know of one?"

The man held out the tome, his whole bearing one of a man giving away the greatest of treasures. "The work of two lifetimes," he explained as Harry accepted it. "I have waited forever to find someone who will treat it as lovingly as it deserves, and now I have, I may pass on to the next life, may I never again recall this empty between." And he turned and walked away, fading as he went, on to his next life.