James Potter and the Crimson Thread

by G. Norman Lippert

  The room was suddenly thick with stunned silence. James blinked against green after-images of the duel, each spell momentarily burned onto his retinas. The only sound now was the huff of Ralph’s hard breath as he stood against the door, pushed up onto his toes, his head tilted back from Odin-Vann’s pointing wand.

  “I daresay, to the both of you,” Debellows exhaled, shaking his head slowly, “you might do well to learn less spellwork… and more when to quit.”

  James felt very alone that night at dinner. He sat across from Rose but didn’t say much. She didn’t need him to. Having made up with Scorpius again, she was in much better spirits and talked to the blonde boy incessantly about her classes, the upcoming Hogsmeade weekend, the many books that she was reading, and general school gossip (including, of course, Albus’ ongoing relationship with Chance Jackson, which had not been remotely diminished by the intervening holidays). For his own part, Scorpius merely ate and nodded in a bored manner, letting Rose’s words wash over him like waves on a beach. The sight of it made James angry, fueling his already sour mood. He was embarrassed for his cousin, since anyone could see that Scorpius was just a manipulative little berk toying with her emotions like a kneazle with a mouse. She knew better to put up with him, and yet somehow continued to put up with him anyway. He opened his mouth to say something, and then thought better of it, knowing it was no use.

  “Something stuck in your craw, Potter?” Scorpius interrupted Rose’s monologue, raising a sly eyebrow.

  James shook his head. “Have another roll,” he said, throwing the one on his own plate at Scorpius’ chest. The blond boy caught it, not taking his eyes from James.

  Standing and grabbing his knapsack, James escaped before Scorpius could offer another word. If he didn’t get away, James would likely be drawn into a row. About what, he didn’t even know. He was simply in that sort of mood. And Scorpius was just the sort of person to sense a person’s short fuse, and deliberately light it.

  He went up to the common room, avoiding eye contact with everyone along the way. This tactic failed him as he entered the portrait hole and encountered Cameron Creevey in the common room.

  “Hey James,” the boy called, hopping up from a table near the window. “My mates and I have to write essays about a famous wizard for Wizlit and I was hoping to do mine on your dad! Can I interview you for it?”

  James was shaking his head even before Cameron finished speaking. “Sorry, Cam. I’ve got too much homework myself. I’m just going to camp out in the corner and bury myself in it.” He unslung his knapsack and gestured with it toward an empty table across the room.

  “Oh,” Cameron deflated, and then perked up again. “I can come sit with you! I won’t interview you or anything. I’ll just ask you questions as they come up. You’ll hardly know I’m there!”

  “Cam, honestly,” James sighed, letting his knapsack dangle against his leg. “You already know more about my dad than I ever will.”

  “Nah,” Cameron grinned and blushed crimson, as if he’d been given the highest compliment imaginable. “Let me just grab my things!

  I’ll come and join you right now.”

  James closed his eyes helplessly and reached to rub them with his free hand. Cameron dashed away. Papers rattled and books slammed shut as he hastily gathered his things.

  “You know what, Cam?” James said, dropping his hand from his eyes. “I just remembered. I need… my…” He gestured weakly toward the boys’ dormitory stairs. “Things. From my trunk, upstairs. I’ll just…” He was too annoyed and tired to attempt a more imaginative excuse.

  Cameron frowned at him from the nearby table, his things half-stuffed into his bag. “Oh. Well, why don’t I go set up over at our table, and I’ll just wait for you. Sound good?”

  James nodded dismally. Turning on his heel, he stumped to the dormitory door and climbed up the spiral stairs into darkness.

  A box was under his bed, just visible behind his trunk. With a start, he remembered: it was his Christmas gift from home, delivered by Kreacher before the holidays. James had never opened it.

  Eager for a happy distraction, he heaved out the colourfully wrapped box, stripped away the ribbons and paper, and tugged off the lid, flinging it aside.

  A note sat atop a mass of neatly folded black cloth. James picked it up and read his mother’s neat handwriting:

  Happy Christmas, James!

  I’m certain these new dress robes will come in handy over your holiday with the Vandergriffs. Those old ones are too horrid even to serve as hand-me-downs for Albus. Do us all a favour and donate them to Mr. Filch to use as rags.

  Much love!

  Mum

  Bleakly amused, he read the note again, and then allowed it to fall from his fingers to the floor. Without looking at the new dress robes, he pushed the box aside and flopped onto his bed, unsure if he felt more like laughing or crying.

  Some small part of his mind (probably the part that belonged to his mother) scolded him for blowing off Cameron, whose only crime was thinking much too highly of James than he surely deserved.

  Another part of his mind (this one likely belonging to his father) halfheartedly reminded him that he did indeed have a stack of homework to do. And yet he couldn’t bring himself to address either voice. Instead, he thought only of Ralph battling Professor Odin-Vann, and the increasing flash and sizzle of their furious duel. Ralph truly disliked the young professor. But why? Was there something more to it than distrust?

  Further, what could explain Odin-Vann’s suddenly expert dueling abilities? Surely James hadn’t imagined the professor’s earlier impotence. He recalled very well their first Charms class, when Odin-Vann had seemed unable to so much as magic his own chalkboard clean while everyone was staring at him.

  Dolohov, he thought to himself, lying crooked on his bed, one leg kicked off and sprawled to the floor. Ralph Dolohov. Get used to it…

  He didn’t know when he fell asleep. It fell over him like a black cloak, dropping him into dreamless oblivion with no transition whatsoever. He didn’t dream.

  He traveled.

  “James,” a young woman said, her voice bemused and surprised in equal measure, though muted with solemnity.

  James opened his eyes. He stood in a small space that was simultaneously enclosed yet open to the outdoors. Breeze lifted his hair and tugged at his untucked shirt. His feet stood on old wooden planks, rough with peeling white paint. From all around came the unmistakable shush and gurgle of waves. James had been here before, in another dream.

  Only this wasn’t a dream, anymore than it had been the last time he had visited this place. It was the gazebo on Petra’s grandparents’ farm, overlooking the secluded woodland lake in which Izzy Morganstern, Petra’s stepsister, had almost drowned at Petra’s own hand.

  Izzy was there now. She lay sleeping on one of the two benches built into the gazebo’s hexagonal railing. Across from her, pale in the last shreds of sunset, sat Petra. A heavy book was open on her lap, but she was looking up at him, a weary, affectionate smile on her face.

  “Is this really you?” James asked, his voice unconsciously hushed beneath the gentle lap of the waves.

  Petra shrugged. “As real as I get these days.”

  “So I’m not dreaming,” he confirmed, looking around at the ruddy shimmering water, the distant wood filled with purple dusk and chirring crickets. “But I am, er…” he glanced back at Petra again, frowning, “asleep?”

  Petra shrugged again. “Actually, I don’t think so.” She patted the bench next to her, inviting him to join her, and then moved an object that was sitting there in her shadow, covering it with her hand. “I think you come to me sometimes when you sleep, but for real. This is no vision, not for either of us. I think that somewhere in Gryffindor tower there’s an empty bed with your name on it.”

  James moved to Petra and settled down next to her, but slowly, uncertain that any sudden movement might not break the moment like a soap bubble.

 
“Actually,” he admitted, settling his hip and shoulder next to hers, feeling her warmth, “my bed still says ‘whiny Potter git’ on the headboard. A gift from Scorpius his first year.”

  Petra nodded and smiled. He turned aside to her. She looked out over the waves. The burnished gloaming reflected in her eyes, making them look as deep and vivid as the lake itself. Quietly, he asked her, “Is this place really here? Or are you making it?”

  Petra considered the question. “I think it’s real. But it’s not in the world that we know, or at least not in the time that we know. I think this is a memory made real again. This is my grandfather’s farm back before grandma died. Before I was a little girl here. Back before the gazebo had broken away from the dock and sunk to the bottom of the lake for all those years.” Her eyes unfocussed as she went deeper into the thought. “This is the gazebo back before your grandparents died at the hand of Voldemort. Before any of the ugliness happened. Back when the world was simple, with beauty still to be found in it. When there was still the possibility of love and light and hope. I come here with Izzy every night. But I don’t make it happen. I just know where to find it again, to reach it back in those long-forgotten days of the past.

  Maybe it’s because of those secret hours I spent asleep in the World Between the Worlds, where there’s no such thing as time. Maybe it happens just because I want it so much.”

  James listened to her words, but barely heard them. Part of this was because what she said sounded so bereft, so prosaically hopeless.

  Another part was because his mind was still reeling with the suddenness of his appearance in her presence, unprepared and inexplicable. But mostly he barely heard her because all of his attention was focused only on looking at her, soaking up the warmth and solidity of her presence, memorizing the smoothness of her cheek, the solemn vibrance of her eyes, the lustre of her dark hair as the wind teased it, trailing silky brown ribbons over her shoulders.

  He wanted to put his arm around her but didn’t dare. He wanted to breath deeply the simple intoxication of her scent—floral soap and sun-warmed skin—but knew he could never get enough. So he simply stared at her instead, musing pointlessly on a fate that would bring them together like this, if only one more time, only for them to be taken apart again forever.

  “I’ve been studying,” Petra said, glancing down at the book on her lap. James followed her gaze. The book was huge and old, with pages as heavy as lambskin, covered in dense penmanship, most of which seemed to crawl and writhe before his eyes. Somehow, James knew what it was, even though he’d never seen such a thing before.

  “It’s one of the Volumes of the Unknowable Enigmas,” he said, as if the information was coming into his mind from Petra herself, through the invisible ribbon that connected them. “The one you collected when you broke into the Armory of Forbidden Books and Artifacts.”

  Petra nodded. “But it’s of little use. I took it mostly to learn about Horcruxes, but I also thought I could use it to learn how to break through to alternate dimensions without having to go through the Vault of Destinies and the Loom.” She shook her head and closed the book on her lap with a thump. “But it’s no use. There are theories, but none of them have ever been tried or proven. They’re just ideas, and not very practical ones, at that. No one can break through. Not without the Loom. Not without the right key to the right dimension.”

  James sighed, deep and hard. This was the last thing he wanted to talk about with Petra. But he knew there was nothing else to talk about. This was all that was left.

  “When will it happen?”

  Petra shook her head blandly. “It’s not up to me. And I’m glad it’s not. I want it to be over as soon as possible. But I’m also afraid to go. I’m afraid to lose Izzy. Afraid to become another version of myself that I barely know. Morgan was broken by her choices. She didn’t have any hope left. She had nothing to lose, but nothing to live for. I don’t want to become her in the world that she came from. But I don’t have any choice.”

  James shook his head as he listened. “But why, Petra? You don’t have to do it. What do you gain by it?”

  Petra turned to him finally and looked into his eyes, as if reading what she saw there. “I don’t gain anything by it. But everyone else does. I’m not going to that dimension to become Morgan. I already am her. You know that. When Morgan died in this world, she became a part of it. She stopped being the Crimson Thread. Now, she’s Petra, and I’m Morgan, the Thread plucked from another dimension. It’s how the balance of destinies works: corpses don’t count. This is no longer my world. It rejects my being here. Its destiny breaks down more and more the longer I stay. I can’t let myself be responsible for that. I have to go to the world that knows me, no matter how much I may hate it.

  It’s the only way to save this world, and the people that I love in it.”

  “Like Izzy,” James nodded sadly, looking across at the sleeping girl.

  Petra sighed and said quietly, “Not just Izzy.”

  James turned back to her, unwilling to accept her version of the truth. “But, what if you’re wrong?”

  Petra’s eyes hardened slightly. “I’m not wrong. I feel it. I know it. I’m certain.”

  And yet, suddenly, James wondered: was she really certain?

  There was a stubbornness in her words that hinted that she was trying to convince herself as much as she was him.

  “There must be another way,” James insisted, slumping next to her, turning his own gaze away, letting it rest again on Izzy’s sleeping form. Her breathing was slow and deep, her back turned to James, her blond hair bronzed with the dying sun.

  “There’s no other way,” Petra said flatly. “I can’t stay here. I can’t be imprisoned here. And most of all, I can’t die here. That would be the worst thing of all. If that happened…” She shook her head, her eyes going glassy. She cradled the object that had been sitting on the bench next to her, placed it on the book on her lap and covered it with both hands.

  “You mean,” James said, hating the thought, “that if both versions of you died in this world… there would be no hope of ever setting it right?”

  Petra nodded. And then shook her head. “It would be disastrous. Not just for our world, which would have two Petras in it, but the other, which would have none. How can we know what that would cause? Maybe a chain-reaction of collapsing destinies across the whole universe of realities?” Her face hardened at the thought. “That’s why I can’t allow anyone to stop me. No matter what. I can’t be imprisoned here. I can’t die here.”

  “That’s why you made the Horcrux,” James said, swallowing hard and looking down at the object under Petra’s hands.

  She looked down as well, and then uncovered it. The dagger glinted darkly. Its jeweled handle was possibly the ugliest and most garish thing James had ever seen. Petra was ashamed of the Horcrux dagger, and yet she did not flinch from it. James saw that, to her, it was a necessary tool, guarantee that her mission would succeed, no matter what it cost her.

  “I’m Morgan now,” she said, speaking as if to the dagger itself.

  “I’ve nothing to lose. And nothing to live for.”

  James couldn’t approach that thought. His heart, even more than his brain, rejected it. He shook his head curtly, exasperated and heartsick.

  “Maybe Odin-Vann will fail. Maybe he won’t be able to prepare the Loom in the Vault of Destinies. Maybe he won’t even be able to get in. Or maybe the magic just won’t work. What then?”

  “It won’t fail, James,” Petra said, a note of pity in her voice as she looked at him again. “And I’ve got more than Don helping me.”

  This surprised James. He snapped his gaze back to her. “What do you mean? Who’s helping you besides Odin-Vann?” He realized, with a note of stupid frustration, that he was jealous.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Petra said, not meeting his eyes.

  “It matters to me, it does,” James pressed. “I think I should at least be allowed to know who’s
helping rid the world of the girl that I—”

  He stopped himself, just barely, from saying the last word— the girl that I love. Petra stood up, however, and turned her back on him, the fat book in her left hand, the dagger Horcrux in her right.

  Quietly, she said, “I need somebody, James, and as much as you’d want it to be you, it can’t be. For reasons that I can’t tell you, it just can’t be. And to be perfectly blunt, I don’t think I owe you any reasons.” She looked back at him over her shoulder, half challenging him, half begging him to leave it be.

  He stood as well. “Who is it?”

  She returned her gaze to the lake, not answering. The sun was still hovering just beneath the fringe of the trees, and James understood: it’s wasn’t a sun setting, it was a sun forever frozen. This was an orphan hour, replaying itself endlessly, fossilized in time except for the lap of the waves and the hush of the breeze.

  “Who is it?” he asked again, daring to raise his voice.

  “It’s Albus,” Petra answered, turning her head but not looking at him. “All right?”

  “Albus?” James exclaimed, certain that he couldn’t have heard her properly. Petra didn’t move, merely waited. He had heard her correctly after all. A flash of memories swept into his thoughts: Albus on first night, sitting in the Room of Requirement, strangely quiet on the topic of Petra until someone questioned whether it really had been her that had broken into the Armory of Forbidden Books and Artifacts . It was her, he had said with strange confidence. He had known. Had Petra met with him even back then? Had she brought Albus into her confidence months before she had even informed James himself?

  Worse, would she ever have told James her plan if he hadn’t been able to visit her via the ribbon they shared, just as he was now?

  “You can’t be serious? Albus?” he exclaimed again. Next to him, Izzy stirred and murmured in her sleep.

  “It’s not all that shocking, if you think about it,” Petra stated, raising her chin, still not turning back to him. “Albus and I became friends during the summer that Izzy and I stayed with your family.