37 ~ When the Past caught up with You

Trust rarely breaks all at once, but piece by piece

     The world stood still. My hands trembled, my eyes fixed on the envelope. My name was written on the letter and as sender it read You-know-who. Of course I knew who it was and it frightened me.      Although everything inside me told me not to open the letter, to go straight to Dumbledore with it, not to deal with what was written, I carefully opened the envelope with trembling fingers.      I broke the simple wax seal and unfolded the parchment. My fingers were ice-cold and a pressing feeling lived in my stomach - fear. I was not afraid of the piece of parchment itself and not of the words either, but of their meaning, the journey into the past. But I could not look away. I had to know what was written in the letter:

Phil,

     I will be honest; I do not quite know where to begin.          A few months ago I learned that you are at Hogwarts, and of all places in the house of lions. How I found out is not important, but I am proud of you, even if I know that you are only there because something must have happened. Cathrine, your mother, never wanted you to go to Hogwarts, for the reasons we both know. She never had the foresight to see what you truly are, always insisting that you were a danger to others.

     But Phil, you are something special. You always were to me, and you still are. I regret that I left you back then, and only recently did I learn of Cathrine's death.     I assume you were never told the real reason for my disappearance, though at sixteen you are old enough to imagine much. Your mother never understood that you are extraordinary, and when we argued, she threatened me with the Ministry, as though they had any right to judge what they cannot comprehend.

     I must be honest with you; I would have preferred to take you with me, whatever the price. No father should have to leave his own child behind, yet I did what had to be done. With me, you would never have been safe.      I cannot tell you much about where I am staying or under what conditions I live, because I do not know how much you hate me now, though I suspect you do.

     I know that the Ministry has taken up my trail again. My suspicion is that your stay at Hogwarts has something to do with it, especially that old Dumbledore. I am not angry with you, Phil, but before you allow the world to turn against me, your own father, I want to explain myself.

     You are who you are, Phil.      You are like me, whether you accept it or not.

     I still have much to explain to you about your nature, though I do not know whether you will allow me to do so. What happened to you after I left, I do not know. But you mean more to me than you realise; you are my flesh and blood, and the thought of anything happening to you is something I could not bear.

     I hope this letter reaches you without too great a shock. I left signs for you, such as the deposit into your bank vault. And when I bought the owl, I saw you, Phil. It was not intentional; I did not lie in wait for you.     You have grown. Almost eight years have passed since we last saw each other, yet I recognised you immediately. I believe that in that moment you knew it was me in Diagon Alley, and that you told others about it.      I do not hold that against you, because you must have been afraid, and fear makes people act against their own blood.

     Recently investigators have been moving through Diagon and Knockturn Alley. Let them try their luck; I remain one step ahead of them, as I always have. I do not know what you will do now that my letter has reached you, but the owl will not return to me. He is a gift for you.      You always liked animals; perhaps you still do.

     In any case, I have much to explain to you, and next time I will contact you in a different way. Then I will give you the choice whether you want anything to do with me, or whether your hatred is greater after all.          You are still my daughter, and I will always love you.      I want you to remember that, even if you choose to see me as a monster.

Your father

     I stared at the letters, feeling empty. My breathing had calmed and suspicion had turned into reality. Like a statue I stood there, breathing in and out calmly. It was strange, because my father sounded in his letter like a normal person and not like a wizard wanted by the Ministry.     He had explained in the letter that he was being searched for, but how he described himself in the last sentence as not being a monster, well, that was a lie.

He is a lie.

     In the next moment I closed the letter and walked to the brown owl.          "Now you are here," I said quietly, holding my hand out to it. It yellow eyes examined my fingers, then it briefly pressed its head against them. "He always had a talent for influencing the lives of others. Pulling someone into his affairs," I continued and thought of my father.     It was a strange thought to know that he was alive and had contacted me. My earlier fear had vanished, because if I was honest, I had never been afraid of him; I had been afraid of his mind.      If all this had happened in the first months at Hogwarts, I would have burned the letter and waited for his next attempt at contact, would have searched for him. Now I knew what he was. That was why I turned away from the owl and left the dormitory.     I was no longer the naive Phil who would run to her father. Unfortunately my hatred, however, was closely tied to curiosity. As it said in the letter: My father had much to tell me.     I wanted to know, but I also had to insist on my reason. I would tell Dumbledore about this, but if I heard from him again next time, I would keep it to myself. Keep it to myself until I had my answers. He had passed this curse onto his own daughter, had seen her as a dark magical experiment, and I wanted to know why.

Remus' POV:

     My eyes followed Phil as she stormed out of the courtyard. None of us said a word.           We were speechless.     I was not speaking only for myself when I claimed that we had not expected such a reaction. Especially Padfoot, whose idea the conversation had been and who had led it. Most of Phil's words had also hit him like a hailstorm.     I was surprised. None of us seemed to have judged the shy Phil like that. Phil's reaction had, however, made it clear that she had been aware the entire time of the possible danger coming from Lestrange.

Yes, we are the arseholes in this moment.

     I felt bad that I had judged Phil as naive, we all had. However, after the way she had spoken about her childhood and with the thought of Ethan J. Aquila as her father, Phil could absolutely not be naive. She could be fearful, reserved, but all this time I had overlooked that her eyes never stood still.      Yes, she was emotionally unstable and perhaps did not always make the right decisions, but she had constantly been aware of that. Even back then she had known that her pack was roaming in the forest, yet we had still found her. However, she had not run into danger out of naivety.      We had all misjudged her. That was why I felt like shit in this moment.          "Woah...," Wormtail managed brilliantly, but his sound pulled us out of the world of our thoughts.     "You didn't know, did you, Moony?" Padfoot asked. His gaze still went to the place where Phil had left the courtyard, then his eyes found mine.     "No," I answered truthfully, because Phil had never told me anything about her life. I was also certain that she had not wanted to tell it to anyone like that in an argument. Something we had forced her into?          I did not know. In any case, she was angry.

Rightly so.

     "I feel stupid," Prongs admitted and it seemed to be the main emotion among us. No one was angry at Phil for shouting at us, because we had provoked it over the past while.     "Me too, even though I still stand by my words. Lestrange is a nasty snake, you only have to look at her family, even her brothers Rabastan and Rudolphus," Padfoot began, "but Phil is right after all."          "Wait," Prongs said, "you're admitting that someone else is right?"     Sirius shrugged his shoulders and I knew that the wound with his own family was still fresh.           He had not spoken much about it.     "As I said, for me Lestrange is still bad company, but I cannot use my knowledge about the Lestranges as an argument; Phil is right about that. Lestrange is not good company, even if she helped her, but I am a Black as well. Apparently I have too many prejudices. Phil is right that I do not understand all Gryffindors and Slytherins, and she is most right that it is her life. We should stay out of it."     I did not know how to react to his words, because the usually so quarrelsome Sirius was sitting in the grass. He seemed to have given up.     "But we can't just leave it like that, can we?" James asked. Sirius only shrugged his shoulders.     "What else are we supposed to tell her other than that we don't want her to talk to Lestrange? We are simply interfering in her life," Padfoot sighed and he also seemed to feel bad. He also did not seem to hold it against Phil that she had shouted at him like that. As I said:           We had intruded into her life.     "We shouldn't have treated her as if she were a naive girl," I spoke aloud what burdened me, because they had been my words that had left an injured expression on Phil's face.     "We could apologise?" Peter suggested the obvious, but Phil was very angry, which was why I believed it would not help.          "She wouldn't believe it and her words were clear," Prongs replied.     "Why apologise then?" Padfoot asked, but Wormtail said quietly: "Because Moony likes Phil."

Words that caused a sting in my heart.Words that hurt me the most because they sprang from the truth.

     I ran a hand through my face and hair, breathing in slowly. Wormtail was right, because I liked Phil. I liked studying with her in the library or talking to her when I found her in a corridor. In Fifth Year something like a friendship had developed and now I was sure that she was disappointed in me. I had told her that she could always turn to me, yet I had become a person who interfered in her life without being asked. Who had judged her.     "Ah, fuck, Moony," Sirius was struck by the realisation, James too. He muttered something and they all looked at me. I must have made a miserable sight, but for a long time it had not mattered to me when my friends could recognise my emotions.     "We are stupid," Prongs sighed and I felt the same. I felt like a complete idiot, at the same time like an arse who wanted to control everything.          "It is what it is," I said dryly, "She hates me, all of us, to be precise."     My words met no resistance; we all thought the same.

     After we had remained in the courtyard for a while longer, we finally made our way to the common room. To all our misfortune, we ran into Phil when the portrait of the Fat Lady swung aside. Her ocean-blue eyes shone with not only anger but also another emotion.      It resembled fear and unease at the same time, but after the argument I obviously could not speak to her about it. She also threw all of us a look that made that clear, and as a result she walked past us.      The letter she held in her right hand received no attention from me in that moment, because I felt bad. I felt even worse that deep down I hoped that Lestrange was indeed plotting something, that our warnings had not been mere prejudice.

Elizabeth's POV:

     "What are you planning with that mad Aquila?" Severus asked beside me as we moved away from the courtyard. I glanced sideways and he looked at me sceptically. Yes, among us Slytherins Phil had been given the name mad Aquila, since her father had also been off his rocker.     "What would I be planning with her?" I asked calmly, meeting my friend's gaze.      I knew what Severus was thinking, because all these years I had preferred being alone. Now in Sixth Year I had suddenly come up with the idea of seeking the company of another person, an Aquila who was in Gryffindor. That was what he thought. Many thought the same as he did.      Just because I was a Lestrange, they thought I had something planned with her.

Ridiculous, yes.

     As a Lestrange I knew that the Dark Wizards were rising and that a certain Ethan J. Aquila had never been averse to the Death Eater side. That was enough for most people to see a deceitful intention in my conversations with Phil, and I let them think that way.     Of course I could not go around all of Hogwarts telling everyone that I had simply found Phil nice during partner work in Potions. She had also been the first person in my life who had seen me without my surname from the very beginning, because not even Severus had done that.

Phil does not seem to care about surnames.

     "I find her interesting," I half lied, because I did not even dare to tell Severus that I found Phil's presence pleasant.          I was certain that she did not know it, but the girl radiated a neutral energy. One that I had never experienced in my entire life. Many could mistake it for naivety, but after just one month I could say that Phil was absolutely not naive. She constantly kept her surroundings in view, and you could immediately tell that she had not had a normal upbringing. Even so, she did not treat me like a Lestrange.     Yes, perhaps it sounded cheesy, even in my thoughts it embarrassed me, but apart from Severus I had no one. My parents were the sun in human form - they burned you down to the bone, without mercy, and were admired by others. However, the sun was only beautiful when you were not exposed to it too closely and for too long.     So yes, apart from Severus I had no one. I knew that Phil was often by herself as well. Whether a friendship would grow from it, however, I could not know at that moment. For the time being it was enough for me that I could occasionally speak normally with another human being. A bonus was that it bothered many people. I would not be myself if I did not enjoy driving others mad with my actions.     "You've always been odd, Lizzy."          "I told you not to call me that!" I snapped back. Severus only laughed.     "Understood, Lizzy," he repeated the nickname with exact emphasis, the one he had given me in First Year.          Not that I did not like nicknames, but I preferred the short form, Liz.      However, Severus did it out of habit and also because he sometimes, often, was an annoying arse. For that reason he received a shove the next moment, but it did not bother him. He remained cheerful and we continued our way to the lake.