His Twenty-Eighth life

6. The Person He Becomes

"And we have no more hope than ever of retrieving Harry."

Albus closed his eyes and winced. He hated hearing anyone's voice sound so dead and hopeless, but especially Lily's. He remembered the first time he had seen her, walking into the Great Hall at Hogwarts at eleven years old, looking as if all the fire of her life burned in her green eyes. The dark-haired, skinny boy at her side had given Albus less hope, but even him he had tried to save.

And now, this.

"No," he said, opening his eyes and forcing himself to face the disaster that his carelessness had caused. If I had only insisted that Peter burn all those scraps of paper... "I'm sorry, Lily. We know that Harry's alive, but not where he is. To make such a device, I would have to have some of his blood."

"And I didn't get it while I had the chance." Lily sat with her hands dangling in her lap, her eyes fastened on the western window. The sun was descending on the sixth of August, exactly a week past Harry's second birthday. "I'm a failure."

"You are not, Lily." Albus pressed her shoulder. She shivered, for a moment, and then pulled away and stood up to pace around the drawing room. Albus watched her, his chest aching. "You still have a fine son you can be very proud of. Jonathan needs you. And you cannot let your understandable grief over Harry tear you apart."

"I thought last year that the worst thing was not to know." Lily stopped moving, but still gave more attention to the sunset than to Albus. "That nothing could be worse, because how in the world could it? And now I know that he's alive, I realize the worst thing is not being able to bring him home with us." She bowed her head, then paused.

Albus waited. He had sensed on his last two visits that she wanted to discuss something with him when she hesitated, but she had always extended the hesitation and pulled herself back from the brink at the last moment when James or Sirius came in. Since they were both from home with Jonathan this time, Albus hoped she could tell him.

He did entertain the notion that this was about Remus. He hoped so. Lily and James had distanced themselves from Remus because they thought he might succumb to Tom's reaching out to the werewolves, and then Remus had vanished on the Continent. Albus thought he might be able to find him if he searched.

Out of what he considered a misplaced sense of guilt, neither Lily nor James had asked about Remus since the attack on Halloween.

"I—how can Jonathan do what he's meant to do when he didn't destroy Voldemort the first time around?" Lily whispered abruptly. "I—it's ridiculous, but I don't know what to tell him. It would be one thing to tell him he was under the doom of a prophecy. I was always glad that he was too young to understand. But now—what do we tell him? Is the prophecy going to come true or not?"

Albus privately believed that it would, but his belief was not a substitute for the truth. He sighed and crunched one of the lemon drops he had brought along. Lily and especially James used to like them. "I don't know."

"So how do we get him ready? Or do we even have to get him ready?" Lily collapsed back on the couch and looked at Albus with a numb expression in her eyes that filled Albus with that helpless ache again. "Maybe he'll never fight Voldemort at all?"

"I think it is likely that Tom will come against him again someday."

"But then why take Harry?" Lily's words were tumbling fast enough now that Albus became suddenly convinced that this was the real question she had wanted to ask him, not whether Jonathan would face Tom or not. "And Harry—I showed you my Pensieve memory of how he was behaving, Albus. That night. The way he was talking. How do you explain that?"