multiversallogs | he walks among his peers unread;

At the appointed time and place, Sebastian, Sol and their respective dogs are waiting at an airy table on the patio of the Slug and Lettuce. The not-too-promising name hides a quaint, garden-themed café known for its vegetarian options and that the owner is a sentient tree with dryads for staff.

"On the bright side, it's unlikely this could go any worse than the last time I tried it."

“My man the optimist,” Sol says, dryly, nudging aside Conan's attempts to perform a six-legged clamber up his knee. The smaller dog is like a 4WD mini; you don't quite see the point of the damned thing, but it's cool to have. (According to Liesl, anyway.) “Drink your tea.”

Lily has long given up on any pretense of disguise (what's the point, when you can introduce yourself as Daisy Williams until you're blue in the face but everyone says oh hello Mrs. Potter anyway) and pauses outside of the patio at the cafe. She looks around, then spots two men sitting together. One of them is dark-haired, in his twenties, and has glasses and a dog. No one else matches all those criteria, so she takes a breath and crosses over to them, smiling.

"Hi, Sebastian?"

Sebastian has previously informed Velcro that if he dares to sprout an extra set of legs, then he'd be forced to wear silly dog booties at all times. So far, the threat appears to be effective.

"Hullo," he says with a smile before standing up and offering to pull out Lily's chair for her. "I'm, I'm Sebastian and this is Sol."

Edited (Adverbs are the dickens.) 2012-03-24 21:55 (UTC)

“It's a pleasure,” Sol says, briefly and inescapably comparing this Lily Potter to the one he'd met once in Bete Noire - but he hardly knew her, and it's a pointless exercise, just a strange habit. He offers her a hand to shake, rising, “Solomon Koenig.”

Conan would also like to make Lily's better acquaintance, and seems less than thrilled that Sol isn't letting go of his leash. Fun ruiner.

"Mr. Koenig," she replies with a smile, shaking his hand as well. As she goes to sit, she coos at Conan and Velcro, greeting them warmly. She doesn't make moves to pet them, though; not until she has the okay from their respective maters. "It's lovely to meet you both properly."

"Likewise. You should also know that I trust Sol a great deal and he knows about our world and the way it works," he says plainly, doing a respectable job of keeping his emotions in check. Lily will have to wait until another time to meet Velcro; today, he's very much a working dog and staying up against Sebastian's legs.

"When you arrived, we spoke briefly about how there are variations on the same world, people from different times or that have come about from making different choices than one might've expected from them. Have, have you seen this now for yourself?"

Captain Trustworthy has a variety of colourful opinions about what he knows about the infrastructure of wizarding Britain, but he just tips his hand in agreement as Sebastian mentions his understanding of it - he's here as support crew, is all - and gives Lily and Conan both the nod to let the latter investigate the former with a friendly nose and all eight eyes.

If Lily is taken aback by Conan's ... unorthodox appearance, she doesn't show it, instead reaching down to scratch his head as she speaks to Sebastian.

"I've come across it here and there, yeah. I won't pretend like I understand it yet, but." She smiles, shakes her head, a few ginger strands escaping from her ponytail. "I've had to learn about loads of new things since I got here, and I'm always learning more."

"What I've asked you here for is that I'd like to tell you how the war plays out in respect to you, your family, and your friends," he speaks calmly, but there's an aborted gesture where it's clear he'd like to run his hand up through his hair but retrains himself. "If you accept this offer, I won't keep anything from you, but you need to understand that time and causality are so slippery that depending on when you come from, you might be able to change your future or you might not."

"It's a hard, ugly road for all those you know, but they do win, Voldemort dies alone, and your son lives. Do you want to know more than that?"

Lily's smile flickers. She knows she can't change her future, that things are set in stone for her. If she had any doubt of that before, receiving James' wedding ring (worn on a chain around her neck, tucked discreetly beneath her shirt) wiped them all away.

"Yes," she says after a moment, with a decisive nod. "I would. I've heard some things, but I'd like the whole picture."

"Shortly after you arrived here, Voldemort's own Killing Curse rebounds and many people falsely believed that it destroyed him, but a few people knew the truth of the matter -- that previously, he had performed a series of rituals that split his soul into fragments that could be embedded into objects or living creatures. Until each of those pieces was found and utterly destroyed, he couldn't truly die." He looks uncomfortable now, but presses onwards with the ugly truth. "What's most important about this is not that there was a lull of ten years before the second war, but that there were people who knew he wasn't dead. At least a handful of witches and wizards with power made the choice to keep this secret."

"I can't speak what went on in their minds and I daily waver on whether or not I can justly blame them for the suffering that followed. As you know, Wizarding Britain was being torn apart and any chance of peace might've been worth it, but in the end, it only covered the wound and let it rot and eat away at all of us."

He stops to take a drink of his tea and skritch Velcro's ears before continuing, "In the aftermath, a few Death Eaters were found guilty and sent to prison, but others, especially the connected, were set free. It wasn't just that killers escaped punishment, but when a tragedy happened a scapegoat was needed, so poor Sirius, without proof or use of veritaserum was locked away in Azkaban for life because it was expedient. He suffered and went mad because The Ministry and The Order needed to wrap up the war without loose ends."

Edited (ffff, wall o' text.) 2012-03-29 01:57 (UTC)

Lily is silent, her hand still moving over Conan's head, though it becomes questionable if she's still scratching him for his pleasure - or her own comfort. The snippets she's gotten from Tonks and Hermione have been nothing like this, and it makes her feel ill. But she wants to know - and she knows that Harry lives.

Somehow, Harry lives. Knowing that, knowing that her son is okay, somehow -

"How did the spell rebound?" she asks, focusing on that first. "What tragedy? Why was Sirius blamed?"

"That's all interconnected. Sirius was charged with being a traitor and that for reasons no one could explain, he broke the Fidelius Charm keeping you and James safe. Are you from that far along the timeline?" He doesn't say outright ask if she's dead in her homeworld, but he suspects that must be the case.

Lily glances at Sol, then takes in a deep breath before she nods. "Yes, but - Sirius wasn't the keeper of the Fidelius Charm. I guess people still ... thought he was?"

"As a martyr, he never said otherwise. Maybe he blamed himself or was told to keep quiet, but the fact remains that he wasn't exonerated until after his death, more than a decade after the fact." Sebastian believes that the truth is a mix of the two: Sirius blamed himself and was gently encouraged to accept the blame because it put a neat cap on the war.

"And, you asked how the spell rebounded. It..., a witch's last act, especially when it's borne out of powerful emotion, it can do almost anything."

Lily takes a moment, her hand slowing, then stilling, on Conan's head as she considers the weight of Sebastian's words. A witch's last act, especially when it's borne out of powerful emotion ...

The memory of that night forces its way back to the forefront of her mind, much like Voldemort had that night: Not Harry, please, take me instead!

And then the flash of green light ...

She stares at Sebastian. "You don't mean - you can't mean - I -?"

"The night Voldemort came, both you and James fell at Godric's Hollow. Your son lived and Dumbledore chose to place him with the Dursleys to be raised as a muggle." Sebastian looks down at his hands, gathering his thoughts before pressing onwards. "Do you need a moment?"

"Yes, please."

She ducks her head and presses a hand to her mouth, feeling her tears burning at her eyes despite her best efforts to hold them back. Despite herself, a little choked sob wells up, but she swallows it back with effort and blinks the tears away determinedly.

Her last act was to protect her son, and he lived. It's overwhelming, this knowledge, this happiness.

Once she's pulled herself together, she looks at Sebastian again. "Why was he sent to live with Tuney? She - why not someone in the wizarding world?"

Sol, quiet but still present - this is theirs, this moment, but he's not sure Sebastian could have it on his own, not yet - rests his hand against the back of Sebastian's arm, steadying, well aware of the acute difference between Lily's emotional response to that news and what it had ultimately meant for her son. For Sebastian.

“Take your time,” he says, quietly.

Sebastian looks over to Sol and nods in agreement before taking a couple of slow, steady breaths. Yet again, he's managed to make Lily cry and he's reminded of the way James berated him for his cruelty. Just as it was in Bete Noire, he never intended to harm her for the sake of causing her suffering, but if she choose to know the truth, it's not his place to keep it from her.

"Dumbledore felt that the best way to protect him was to put him in with blood relatives." There's no way to know for sure, but Sebastian has wondered if the protection afforded to him by his mother's death would've been supported better by living with people who truly considered him a part of their family.

"But - " Lily swallows, hands fisting in her lap as she tries to keep control of her emotions. Nothing will ever change the deep-seated feeling of gratitude that she has that her son lived, and that Tuney and Vernon presumably took him in. She doesn't care for them, but she's certain they put a roof over his head and clothes on his back, which is something. But how good of care could they have taken of him? People who hated magic, hated everything it stood for? " - but they hated magic. Did they still take good care of him?"

He won't lie, but for now, he'll redirect the question to something a little less ugly, "Dumbledore put someone in the neighbourhood to keep an eye on things."

"And when the time came, collected him so he could go to Hogwarts, where he was schooled, fought in the second war, and survived." Sebastian would rather push on past his early childhood, which was a period of uninterrupted unpleasantness, and draw Lily's attention to her son's continued existence. He may not always have been happy, but alive and suffering still allows for the hope of liberation.

"Lily, there's one last, great and painful piece of news. Do you want it today or shall I wait?"

She looks up at him once she's sure she has her emotions under control, takes a deep breath through her nose, and smiles. It's weak, but it reaches her eyes, and she means it.

"Well - I suppose since we're ripping off the plaster, we may as well all the way, oughtn't we?"

"There was a lot of political fallout from the end of the second war and I'd lost the ability to do magic, which made it both miserable and rather dangerous for me to remain in London. I chose the name Sebastian and built up a new identity as a muggle, but before that, -- what I mean is, the reason I know so much about Harry's life, is that it was my own." It's not a smooth revelation and he doesn't know if she'll accept it, but he couldn't go about his life in the city without having told her.

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