GoF AU

Authoress' Note: To all my faithful readers, I give you the next chapter. It's a very nice chapter, in my opinion, but then again, I'm biased. ;]

Remember, if you want to be put on an update list for new chappies, give your e-mail in the review.

And now, let the chappy begin.

~*~

Harry slowly let out a breathy sigh, sitting back against the head of his bed, careful of his new tails, wings, and ears.

“Is Master Harry-sama ready for the Orb yet?” Hoshi--chan questioned softly after a few moments of silence while Harry collected his thoughts, delicately and carefully holding the small sphere out to her Master, head cocked minutely to one side.

“As ready as Master Harry--sama ever will be, Hoshi--chan,” Harry sighed heavily again, resolutely accepting the Orb that was held out toward him.

“The word to activate the Orb is ‘Kitsune--Yamaneko’, Master Harry--sama,” Hoshi--chan informed her Master in her naturally quiet voice.

“I know, Hoshi--chan,” Harry replied, not quite sure how he somehow knew how to pronounce the words, after only seeing them for the first time in the letter, and never hearing them before Hoshi--chan had just spoken them a moment ago.

“Kitsune--Yamaneko,” Harry spoke reverently, holding the Orb out at face level with the fingertips of his left hand. He only had a split second after he said the words before it exploded with a smoky purple light and stayed where it was, floating, even as he brought his hand back down to his side as the smoky light cleared, revealing a person sitting in a chair in a strange way; crouched, bare-footed, knees pulled up to their chest with their arms around their knees, hands sitting delicately on them.

“Good evening, Harry--chan,” spoke the soft, mellifluous voice of one of the people he thought that he would never see again, alive anyway: his mother, Lily Potter, auburn hair just as coppery red as in all the photographs he had of her, emerald eyes just like the ones in his head; the ones he had had earlier tonight, at least. “Or ‘good morning’, as would be the proper greeting, considering that you should be watching these projections at a little bit after midnight.”

A quick look at the clock on his bedside table proved that she was actually correct. Surprisingly, it was only about half an hour past midnight; apparently that that nap he had had wasn’t as long as he had thought it had been, even if it had felt like it had been as long as he thought it had been.

“Firstly, what I want to say that this is strange, even for me, considering that I’m talking to you, for you, when you’re fourteen years old, while at the exact same time you are here with me, sitting in front of my chair as a one--and--a--quarter--year--old toddler as I’m speaking to the fourteen--year--old you ---- yes, I’m talking to you, my oh--so--very--adorable little young son,” Lily Potter addressed the unintelligible coos of reply from the toddler version of him, setting one foot on the unseen floor under the chair to steady herself as she reached onto said floor to grab the younger version of her son and set him gently between her legs, still sitting around him in that same strange position. “Say ‘hello’ to your older self, Harry--chan,” his mother cooed to the toddler version of her fourteen--year--old son, running her fingers through his hair gently.

“’Ewwo, ‘Awwy--chyan,’” the toddler version of himself greeted his older counterpart eagerly, smiling a gum--filled smile and enthusiastically waving, both of his hands turning into blurs with the speed of his energetic waving.

“Secondly, I have to say that this has been pre--recorded, as you can see, but I considered all of your possible reactions and recorded those too, so it’s not going to be just me talking, more sort of ranting, and then hoping that you can fill in the gaps yourself, if there are any, which is more than a little impersonal if you ask me, even if I am your biological mother; if you ask questions, this Orb is magicked to hear them and to get the proper projection and to play it.

“And thirdly, this is the statement that is going to start it all, the most important thing I have to say in the current list of important things that I have to say, is that we, as in our family, as in you, your father and I, are not human… well, we aren’t entirely human, anyway. I believe that requires a little explanation? Or a bit more than a little? Or a lot more…” she scratched the back of her head sheepishly, wearing an expression that matched her actions.

Harry, the fourteen--year--old--Harry, could only stare at her blankly, yet pointedly, mouth slightly agape and nodding slowly in agreement, before he realised the first thing he was doing and closed his mouth with a soft ‘click‘, still staring, nodding, and giving her the pointed look.

“But first…” she trailed off, waving her hand over her form, and the fourteen--year--old--Harry gasped. His mother’s entire body, well, what he could see of it anyway, had changed. Her hair looked just like his did now, only it was brilliant shades of purple and blue with dark purple and blue streaks, along with her eyes, except they didn’t have the streaks, and which looked like purplish--bluish fire with purple and blue smoke swirling in and around it. Her skin was his same pale shade, her eyelashes his length and curl, her nose just like his, and her lips looked exactly like his; Harry’s eyes, eyebrows, ears and jaw apparently came from his father. Her wings looked like some type of bird, like a raven or something along those lines, maybe a crow, in the same colours as her eyes. And she only had a single pair of animal ears, and one tail, both feline--like; apparently she was the lynx half that made him up, his father being the fox half.

“You are actually rare in and of yourself, although your father and I are just about as rare as well; I think there are about a dozen or so others of you, and a dozen or so others of your father and I respectively, at the time I‘m recording this at least; some of the others may have decided to have more kitten--cubs between the time I‘m recording this and the time you are watching this, so you may not be as rare as we are, or we may still be equally rare; I‘m not entirely sure about that. But, I digressed a little bit. What you are, Harry--chan, is a Kitsune--Yamaneko, which, in English, is a fox--lynx--hybrid. I am the Yamaneko half of you, as you can see,” she flicked her ears and her tail up in his direction at the same time. “Both the Kitsune and the Yamaneko come from Shikoku, the smallest of the four main islands of Japan. Even though Shikoku is the smallest of the four main islands, it actually possesses the largest population of Weres of the entire country of Japan, which in and of itself is about half of the population of Weres on this planet. And when I say Weres, what I am talking about are werewolves, werecats, werefoxes, et cetera, and all the rest of all that jazz. The Kitsune and the Yamaneko are Weres, in case you couldn’t tell. Like Weres, the Kitsune and the Yamaneko transform into our animal forms at the time of Mother Moon, or the full moon. The animal forms of your father and I are different, obviously; his is a rather large, greenish silver fox, and mine is a slightly smaller purplish blue lynx. Your animal form is ours combined, which is basically a merging of the colours, with two pairs of ears and two tails, one each from each of our forms. Any questions so far, my slightly, by a few years, older than the one that I currently hold in my arms, yet still completely and utterly my son, kitten-cub?”

“Just one, Mum. You keep saying ‘your father’ whenever you talk about James. Why don’t you just say ‘James’, instead, considering that’s what his name is?”

The projection flickered. Harry in the present could tell some time had past, even though another projection seamlessly took the place of the one that preceded it, because there was a rather large slice of strawberry--shortcake with whipped cream and chocolate sauce, not to mention several plump strawberries on top, sat next to her on the arm of the chair, a rather long fork sticking straight up out of one of the strawberries. A mashed-up mixture of what sat atop her cake along with some cake itself sat in a medium--sized bowl, obviously intended for the one--and--a--quarter--year--old--Harry, if the brownish pinkish mess around his mouth and on the bib he was wearing was anything to go by. [1] She took one last bite of her cake, gave one last bite to the toddler, and waited until she had swallowed before she spoke. “I was wondering when you were going to catch on to that, or if you even were going to catch on to it. It may look to you like not much time has passed on this side, and you’re right about that. It’s only been about ten, maybe fifteen minutes, since the Kitsune--Yamaneko projection, which is probably the projection that you just watched, but we had to take a cake break. You and I are such absolute strawberry--shortcake whores, Harry--chan. Aren’t we, my adorable little cake--loving man?” She questioned the younger version of Harry, spooning some more mashed--up cake into her son’s mouth with a gentle finesse only someone that had had practice with babies and toddlers could possibly possess. “Your father, on the other hand, is more of a chocolate cake kind of bloke. Alright, I should probably explain why I keep saying ‘your father’ and not ‘James’, like you most likely think I should be saying. The truth is, Hunny, that James isn’t your biological father. He’s not even your adopted father, at least willingly anyway; you were stolen from your father and I and given to James and some bint who I’m pretty sure was originally a blonde or maybe possibly a redhead, but I’m not sure because she was masquerading as me most of the time I saw her, so I never got to see her original hair colour, or even if she dyed her hair when she was in her own body. But, I’ve gotten too far ahead of myself; that’s another story for another projection, which will probably be the next projection, by the way, if you don’t have any questions to this one; or maybe if you do, depending on what the question that you ask is. Anyways, your father is actually a very handsome man by the name of Tomas Marvolo Riddle, who you know as the evil Lord Voldemort; the evil Dark Lord; the evil You--Know--Who; the evil He--Who--Must--Not--Be--Named; all of those last ones, the ones that he or I or some other person he trusts are really crappy pseudonyms, by the way. I actually have two tee--shirts that I wear when I’m around him and his Inner--Circle of his followers, about those crappy pseudonyms for him; one says, “I don’t know why he must not be named, and I really don’t give a fuck about the why.”; the other one says, “No, I don’t know who, so shut the fuck up about that right now.” Anyways, I sort of digressed again. The truth is that all of that is lies, him being evil and all that stuff; but, again, that is another story for another projection, which, with the way I have got things going, will once again be the projection that’s coming up next. Anyways, he’s not really evil; I mean, if he was, how could I have fallen completely and utterly head over heels in love with him? He’s handsome, caring, loving, sweet, an absolutely amazing listener, empathetic, sympathetic, understanding, powerful, has an amazing sense of humour, and several other adjectives and phrases along those lines, which, not only can I not think of some more, you probably wouldn’t want to hear half of them if I could.

“Anyways,” she began after a pause, during which Harry tried to cool his flushed cheeks, heated after he realised what his mother was insinuating to, and not wishing he had figured it out, and she gave herself a whole bite of cake, and the younger version of her son another spoon of mashed-up cake. “When your father and I first got together, it was during the Halloween Costume Dance for the Fourth Years through the Seventh Years. He had just transferred from a different school, and had gotten Sorted into Slytherin at the Beginning--of--Year Feast; I was a Ravenclaw. I had the most original costume that I could possibly think of; I let a few of my lynx features show through: whiskers; how my eyes looked; how my canines looked; claws; tail; ears; ---- ” she counted each of the features off on her fingers, then stopped and waved her hand dismissively, as if the specifics weren’t important, “ ---- stuff like that; you know what I’m talking about. And then, I dressed up as one of those sexy but completely oblivious to their sexiness, but they actually really know that they’re sexy and ‘innocently‘ exploit it, Japanese school--girls ---- uniform, make--up, hair, everything. I had kept this costume a complete and utter secret to everybody, even my best friends and the other girls that shared my dormitory room with me. So, imagine my complete and utterly shocked surprise when the one and only new transfer student, the one and only Mister Tomas Marvolo Riddle, shows up, wearing the exact counter--part of my costume, down to the way the hair, face, and body shape of his and mine perfectly complimented each other. Well, as you can imagine, I was pissed; and so was he. We both wanted to know exactly how someone could figure out the costume we had both kept completely and utterly secret from everyone we knew, for at least two months, since we had gotten out summer Hogwarts letters, could be known by someone else, especially when we had only seen each other in classes, in the halls, and at meals, we were barely acquaintances! We both literally pulled the other outside in our anger to give the other one a piece of our mind. It wasn’t until we were outside, away from all the noise, and the smells, and the other people, that we both noticed a strange, enticing scent, one neither of us could get enough of.; now we knew that neither of our fourteenth birthdays had come to pass yet ---- mine was about a week and a half away, and I later learned that he was borne about four days before I was borne ---- and the only reason that we only knew that we were each other’s Mate was because our birthdays were so close ---- less than two weeks away close ---- and because we were so close together, distance--wise. We didn’t really want to jump each other’s bones right at that moment in the courtyard, partially because it would have been so easy for someone to walk outside and see us, and because there were already a couple of couples out there at the time, though they were in the far corners away from us, and we were in the centre, near the fountain; anyways, we decided to get to know each other first, before we did anything really physical. So, over the next two weeks or so, we got to know each other, and then we ---- “ the rest of her sentence was smushed and garbled by the bite of strawberry--shortcake she gave herself, somehow impossibly staying on the fork from the sheer massive size of it, right after she gave the toddler version of her son a bite of his mashed--up cake. She politely waited until she was finished with the bite, somehow taking only about two minutes to finish it and, somehow else still, managing to end up not choking on the gargantuan piece of sweet.

“What I meant to say was after that week, we consummated our bond, which I’m sure you don’t want to hear all the raunchy details of, so I won’t go any farther into that little kernel of story than that. We met each other in secret, before and after we consummated our bond, and nobody knew about our relationship outside of being schoolmates and classmates; we’d each separately go to the very back of the school library, the part even the librarian is wary to go to sometimes, and has such a thick layer of dust that the dust bunnies actually come out to play, and so that you can‘t hear your footsteps; or we’d each separately go to some rarely visited little restaurant set back from the street in Hogsmeade. It was all perfectly fine, right up until a little while before everyone else got back from Christmas break in our Seventh Year, a few days at most. We were in our favourite little hidden room, one we knew nobody else knew about, and I’ll tell you about it when I say all the stuff I forgot to say in all the other projections, which will be a projection in and of itself. Anyways, he went to the lavatory, and he only should have been gone for a few minutes, several at most, because the lavatory was only just at the end of the hall and around the corner a little ways. But when the time got to be fifteen minutes after he had left, I started to get more than a little worried for him, and when the time hit half an hour after he had left, I was frankly completely frightened for him; I was just about halfway to the door to hurry off and search for him, to see what was wrong, what had kept him for so long, when he burst in the door. I asked him what had happened, why he had taken so long, and I told him that I was worried sick; more of shouted, really. He gathered me into his arms, sat down, brought me in his lap, and said, “My lovely lover Lillice, [2] my purple--haired water goddess, I truly have no idea what happened; one moment I was walking to the lavatory, the next moment I’m waking up in the hallway near the library, with no memory of what happened to me, or how much time had past. I looked at the nearest time orb, [3] saw that it had been almost half an hour since I left, and hurried back here. But I already scanned myself, and I can’t sense anything wrong with me. Everything’s fine,” and then he snogged me, pouring reassuring emotions into it. And then we had reassurance sex, mostly for me, and I think a little bit for him, because he and I both knew that there had to be some reason for him apparently passing out for no apparent reason, and then waking up in a location that he hadn’t been anywhere near.

“But there was this tiny little glimmer in his eye, this little bit of a flicker of some unidentifiable emotion, right when he walked back in the room, and I swore that I saw it, for the quickest, shortest, smallest, tiniest moment, and then it was gone so fast that I wasn’t completely sure that I had seen it at first, and since he hadn’t said anything about it, or sensed anything different about himself, I didn’t say anything about it either, and I didn’t think about it; but after that, there was always this tiny little niggling feeling, right at the back of my mind, and I could never remember why.

~*~END~*~CHAPTER~*~

*rubs hands together eagerly* Now we’re getting into the story! I’m really sorry if this got long--winded, but I just kept typing and typing, and the words kept flowing and flowing; please tell me if you think it got long--winded, and when and where, and I‘ll see if I can do something about it.

[1] [A/N: The bib says: ‘Food goes here’ with an arrow pointing up to his mouth, ‘not here’ with arrows pointing in every other direction.]

[2] [A/N: I’m not too much of a fan of her first name being “Lily”. Read my other fics. It’s anything *BUT* “Lily” or “Lilian” or “Lillian”.]

[3] [A/N: It‘s a magickal school. Don‘t you think they‘d have magical forms of clocks? Well, I do.]