A New Definition of Family
Chapter 2: Instincts
Disclaimer: Well, I don’t own any of JK Rowling’s characters. Big surprise, I know. Any characters you see here that you don’t find in her books, well, they are my babies.
Author note: Here’s where I give big ups to Lorett. She is an absolute GEM of a friend, and we're talking Hope Diamond proportions here! She is my beta for this story and if it wasn't for her, and her persuasive ways, this story would still only exist in my little ol' head.
The two red-heads waved and laughed, then blew kisses at Harry. The cycle began again and he watched it through three times, feeling a number of emotions wash over him in rapid succession, like gusts of wind whipping at his robes. The little voice returned. Muggle photographs can be altered. Can wizard ones? He tried to dismiss the thought, but it tickled the back of his mind like an annoying itch. You don’t know this woman at all. No one has ever said anything to you about your mum’s best friend before. Why would she just show up now? He couldn’t banish the tickle.
“Would you mind opening the boot for me?” He startled Arinna out of her thoughts.
“All right.”
Harry opened his trunk and took out a tiny picture album that reverted to full size once he pulled it from the trunk. He ran a hand over it lovingly before opening it. Hagrid had given it to him at the end of his first year at Hogwarts; it contained pictures of his parents. Harry flipped through the photos from their wedding hoping to find the faces of other guests, but Hagrid had been rather single minded in his quest to give Harry pictures of his parents, and pictures that did not have Lily and James as the main focal point had not made it into the album. He found the picture of James and Lily laughing with Sirius Black. There had to be…
A movement caught his eye, a movement at the left hand edge of a photo of the happy couple dancing. He waited…there! A young Remus Lupin twirled a girl in a deep red dress (Gryffindor red his mind told him) but just as he turned her so her face would be visible, they slipped out of the frame. Patiently Harry waited and was rewarded when the dancers entered the frame again. Her smiling face was to the camera; her red hair piled on her head in an elegant coif, with tendrils hanging down to frame her face and emphasize her big green eyes. She laughed as Lupin wrapped his arms around her and dipped her. When they came up, they disappeared from the frame again. Huh! Didn’t know the Professor had it in him, mused Harry.
Arinna was leaning against the car trying not to look at the pictures but it was no use. Her eyes were drawn to them like to a gruesome accident scene; she was almost nauseated by what she saw, but could not look away. Harry tapped the left edge of the picture, drawing her attention. She watched as she and Remus came into view, and again as he clowned around and dipped her. A small smile appeared on her face. “The silly ass,” she said softly. Harry looked up at her and saw sad nostalgia in her eyes. “May I look at this?” she asked. He stepped aside and held the one side as she grasped the other and the next few minutes were spent in silence as they turned pages.
Arinna finally broke the quiet. “After almost thirteen years, the pain should be less, don’t you think?” Harry saw the tears that threatened to spill.
“I’m guessing it’s not,” he whispered in half-question, half-statement.
She sighed and wiped her eyes. “In my experience, no. No, it is not.”
Harry felt a pang of guilt for subjecting her to the painful memories the photos must have evoked. “I’m sorry,” he started, “for bringing out the album, but I needed to know…” his voice trailed off. How could he tell her that he hadn’t trusted her even after she gave him the picture of her and Lily?
She looked sharply at him, but her voice was kind. “Know what?”
“If the picture you gave me was a fake.” He hung his head in shame. “I shouldn’t have questioned…”
“HARRY!” Now her voice was sharp. She took the album out of his hands and turned him to face her. She placed a hand on his shoulder and the other hand under his chin and forced him to look at her. Two pairs of green eyes met and held. “Promise me you will NEVER stop listening to that gut instinct, that inner voice, or whatever it is that tells you something is not as it seems!” Harry blinked in surprise. “That IS what was going on, isn’t it?” she pursued. He nodded.
She sighed and turned to lean against the car again, crossing her arms over her chest. “In retrospect, I probably was not the best person for the job. Swooping in, unheard of, out of nowhere and expecting that…”
SCREECH!
An owl’s cry caused both to jump. “Hedwig!” Harry gasped. He ran to the back door and opened it and felt the heat that had accumulated inside. He pulled her cage out and felt a packet of owl treats thrust into his hand.
“Poor thing. I forgot it gets so hot in parked cars. Here, let me…” Arinna spun her wand around the bird and a cool breeze began to ruffle her feathers. Next she conjured some water in a dish. Hedwig hooted her approval. “Pretty girl! Do you feel better now?” Hedwig looked her right in the eye and mantled her feathers haughtily. “Hmmm. I don’t think I’m forgiven,” Arinna laughed softly.
“Ah, she’ll get over it,” Harry assured her, as he fed his owl the treats. “After all, she spent 3 weeks cooped up in my stuffy room at least as hot as this.”
“May I borrow her, Harry? I need to send a note to Dumbledore and the Weasleys letting them know that I finally managed to wrestle you away from that, that, those people.” Harry nodded, and she grabbed a note pad and a ball point pen from her briefcase. Harry tried to surreptitiously remove the note he had tied to Hedwig’s leg earlier in his room but Arinna noticed. “What’s that note about?”
Harry blushed and stammered. “To tell the Weasleys I was being kidnapped.” he finally got out. There was a moment of dead silence, before she began to chuckle. Sharp-witted? More like razor-edged!
“Harry Potter, you have the makings of a good Auror in you! No, don’t apologize again! What did I just say about trusting your instincts?” Her face broke into a genuine smile, like the one from the picture. She was stunning.
“That I’d better not ignore them?”
Her eyes were warm and lit up by her smile. “I say, Harry, if I am ever in a desperate situation, surrounded by danger on all sides, then I want you and your razor wits at my back!” She turned to tie her message onto Hedwig. Harry went all warm at her praise.
Two heads lifted in unison to watch the snowy owl fly away. A loud rumble emitted from Harry’s midsection. “Tell you what,” Arinna grinned, it’s been a long time, but I do remember that teenaged boys are bottomless pits. “I’m feeling a bit peckish, let’s go grab a bite to eat. I have a lot of explaining to do, and I must have sustenance to do it!”
Harry grinned back. “An excellent suggestion, Miss Dunlevy!” he bowed mock-gallantly.
As he settled into the front seat, she placed a hand lightly on his knee and caught his eye. “Harry, my friends call me ‘Rinna.’ I’d like for you to do the same.”
As she pulled the car out into traffic, Arinna mentally made a herculean effort to pull her scattered wits together. The whole scheme had sounded good some ten days ago, but it wasn’t playing out quite as she had planned. Seeing that photo album…seeing them…seeing him… Pull it together, Rinna! You need to concentrate; you’ve only been driving for a year.
Driving in the city made her nervous. In all honesty, driving anywhere made her nervous. But failure was not an option for Arinna Dunlevy, and having decided three years ago to experience the unknown (to her, anyway) Muggle world, she embraced it with as much enthusiasm as she could muster. Well that sounds much prettier than the truth, said a tiny voice in her mind. Ruthlessly, she clamped down on the seditious thought, but not before it added: more like FLED the wizarding world to the decidedly unmagical one rather than face… Rinna pinched herself behind the knee. SHUT UP! she bellowed silently to herself. Really, Rinna, you’ve got to stop listening to yourself. She snorted. The irony that THAT was exactly contrary to what she told Harry HE should do was not lost on her.
The sound of her snort pulled Harry out of his own reverie. “Sorry? Did you say something?”
“No, but…this would be a good time to name your poison.”
“What?!” exclaimed a startled Harry.
Rinna mentally whapped herself upside the head. Bloody brilliant. Just rile up all his suspicions again. Keep this up and you will never be allowed on another rescue mission! She squashed down any further thoughts (including the one that stated she really needed a shot of fire whiskey about now).
“I meant, what do you want to eat? You choose. Anything you want.”
“Oh. Whatever I want?” She nodded. Harry broke into a grin. “Pizza!”
Harry took a bite from the slice of pizza, sucking in air to cool the food as the hot cheese threatened to take a layer of skin from the roof of his mouth.
“I’m not one for sweet drinks,” Rinna was saying, “but these fizzy ones aren’t so bad.”
“Soda.” Harry corrected her, as he drank said beverage in an attempt to salvage his mouth. Deciding it was prudent to let the food cool, he studied Rinna with curiosity.
“Rinna, how old are you?”
She almost choked and replied, “Harry! Don’t you know it is bad manners to ask a lady how old she is?”
Harry felt relaxed and happy for the first time in a long time and some impertinence was breaking through. “I’m sure I am NOT sitting with a LADY considering the language I heard you use not long ago!” He said in a supercilious tone while grinning cheekily.
“What?!”
“I quote: ‘effing bastard.’ Really, Miss Dunlevy, such language is NOT befitting a …” He was interrupted by Rinna’s shriek of laughter.
“That has got to be the best imitation of Minerva McGonagall I have ever heard!” she gasped out, laughing so hard she was teary.
“Well, she is the Head of my House,” he replied, with no attempt at wiping the impudence from his face whatsoever. When the laughter died down, he continued, “You just don’t look old enough, you know, to be friends with my mum.”
“I was two years younger than her, actually.”
Harry frowned a little. “How did that happen, then? Becoming friends when you are so far apart in age?”
Rinna paused. Certainly to an almost fourteen-year-old, two years was a big gap. But it hadn’t seemed so to her and Lily. “Well, two things happened to bring that about, really.” Rinna was surprised at how little pain she felt. She hadn’t spoken of Lily to anyone in so long. She had thought it would be rather agonizing for her to do so. “The first was; I entered Hogwart’s a year earlier than most children do.”
Harry looked surprised, so she explained, “My magical gifts manifested quite early. There was a need for me to develop discipline sooner rather than later.”
“Oh. And the second?”
“Well, I was so precocious in some areas, that at the beginning of my third year, I was put in Fourth Year Potions. The same class that Lily, your father, Siri…uh, all the Marauders were in.”
“Wow!” Harry was impressed. He thought about Hermione using the Time-Turner last year. She certainly would be considered precocious. His heart gave a little pang at the possibility of losing her if she was advanced to the next Year. “But wasn’t that hard on you, to leave your friends and go to a group of strangers?”
“Actually, I didn’t really have friends. I was very insecure my first two years, and shy. Then, I started to realize I was academically at the top of my year and by the beginning of my Third Year, I was much more confident. And something happened to me…”
“What happened?” Harry was intrigued.
“I developed a backbone, an attitude and opinions! It really was a bad combination, actually, quite volatile. No one in the Potions class wanted an ickle Third Year telling them in minute detail exactly where they were doing wrong in the brewing. But I couldn’t help myself. I was tired of being the quiet one. I was a little social nightmare, and became quite put upon by my classmates.” She cringed at the memory.
Harry nodded. He certainly could not see anyone in HIS class tolerating such insolence from a youngster. He felt sorry for the young Rinna. “And…” he prompted.
She looked into Harry’s eyes. So much like Lily’s. Ouch. The pain finally manifested. And yet, it wasn’t so bad when she could say it to Lily’s eyes. “Your mother was a very compassionate person. She felt sorry for me and took me under her wing and saved me from the social hell I was unwittingly creating for myself. She stood up for me and, most importantly, she loved me for who I was.” It felt like picking at a scab; you had better stop now, before you pull away the protective covering and become a bloody mess.
Harry wanted to talk with her forever. He really craved any information, any description of his parents. He wondered about himself; was he like them? Was his temper more like his mum’s or his dad’s? Which side did his sense of humor come from? But most of all, although he did not consciously realize it, he wanted some kind of confirmation that they would have been proud of him. Arinna Dunlevy had stepped into his life today, and provided some small bit of the enlightenment he desired. He wanted more.
“And you were friends ever since?”
Not trusting herself to speak at that moment, Rinna merely nodded her head.
“So you knew my dad, and Sirius and Professor Lupin, too, right?”
Uh oh, said the protective part of her mind, don’t go there. If you open too many wounds, you could bleed to death. The picture from Harry’s album of Sirius laughing was seared into her mind.
"Well," she hesitated, unwilling to open a line of discussion that she simply wasn't prepared for at the moment, "Of course I knew them...The, uh, the Marauders were quite, well, let’s just say infamous at school. I don't think there was a student there who wasn't subjected to their high jinks at one time or another." Harry's eyes lit up, but were quickly sobered at her next words. "And we will talk about them, Harry," she glanced around a bit nervously, "but later. This isn't the time or the place to do it."
Harry's lips pursed and quirked to the side. He sighed a little exaggeratedly and very grumpily. "Okay..."
Rinna nodded, one bullet dodged...
Harry's eyes lit right back up; uh oh… she could almost see the questions queuing up in his sharp mind, waiting to be flung at her...and she could feel her spirit running at a dead sprint behind its brick wall, not wanting to answer them.
"OH! But you can talk about my mum, right?" Harry went on undeterred, "Was she smart?"
Was the boy part terrier? Rinna felt like a fox in the hunt, cornered. “Definitely. She got high marks in all her classes. Ancient Runes, Arithmancy and Transfiguration were her best subjects...”
“Did she like Quidditch?”
“Harry…”
“Did she play on the house team? Was she a good flyer like my dad?”
“HARRY!” Once again, the tone in her voice made him stop. “Harry,” a bit less sharply, “Lily was like a sister to me.” Her voice dropped very low. “When she…when she…died, it was like a part of me had been amputated.” She dropped her head in her hands and ran her fingers through her hair. She looked up into Harry’s eyes. “I’m sorry, Harry, I thought I could do this. I thought I’d be able to tell you what you wanted to know. But I haven’t really spoken of her since…since that night. It is more painful than I expected, even after all these years.”
“But you are the first person I’ve met who was my mum’s friend, not my dad’s…” his voice had a slight edge to it…a touch of desperation mixed with annoyance. He ran a hand through tousled, raven hair and Rinna watched fascinated, Just like James…Just like him.
Rinna cringed and looked away. She didn’t want to see the look in his eyes…At the moment she just wasn’t ready yet. Harry would have to wait until she could battle these feelings and get them under better control.
“I understand that. I do.” Her voice became steady, and firm. That’s it, Rinna. Regain control of the situation, my girl. “You want to know about your mum. And I want to tell you about her, really I do. But you are going to have to give me some time.”
Her assessment of his face brought one word to mind: sulky. Well, that’s certainly better than desperate and annoyed… “Besides, we really should discuss our plans for the rest of the day. And I dare say you would be interested to know what Dumbledore and company have in store for you the rest of the holiday, hmm?”
Harry brightened with sudden hope. Ron had mentioned having Harry stay at the Burrow, and…
“The Weasleys said something about tickets to the Quidditch World Cup,” she dangled the morsel of information in front of him.
“YES!” Harry pumped his arm in the air.
Rinna smiled to herself at his quixotic change in mood. “AND you’ll be staying at the Burrow for the rest of the summer.” Harry did a few dance moves in his seat. “AND,” she continued, “I thought that before we went there tonight for dinner, we could go to the cinema as a treat.”
Harry had never been to the cinema as the Dursleys had never seen a need to take him. He’d watched movies on the telly, but wondered what it would be like in a big theater. As this was an opportunity not to be missed, he pushed away the disgruntled thoughts at having been thwarted in his quest for information about his mother, for now. He smiled at Rinna. “That would be cool!”
In the darkness of the movie theater, she tried to collect her thoughts. When she had woken up that morning on 23 July, Arinna Dunlevy had thought she had a pretty good idea of how the day would play out. And now, looking back, she realized that not a single quaffle had gone through the hoop. Her strategy had been sound, so what had happened? Something had obviously upset her game.
It had started with that album. She hadn’t been prepared to see everyone she loved looking so carefree and beautiful and alive. That’s what had started the mortar crumbling. And then Harry’s questions, and his eyes…hungry for any tidbit about his mother…Don’t need to use Veritaserum on me, oh no. Just put Harry Potter in front of me and I’ll spill my guts till I pass out from the pain. Well, that had begun the breaking of the bricks.
And then more questions, tearing at that place in her heart that she thought was dead, that she had tried to kill…Her fingernails dug into her palms as her hands became fists in anger. She had spent almost thirteen years carefully constructing the fortress around her heart, an impenetrable wall made from bricks of determination and denial and cemented by discipline and torment…and for what? To have the wall start to crumble so quickly, so innocently, so effortlessly…because of a stripling wizard, a mere slip of a boy?
Well, she needed to regroup, pull herself together, rebuild. She sighed. New game plan: think about how to give Harry the information he wants, no, needs, without causing further damage to yourself.
She couldn’t put it off for long; Rinna KNEW that sooner or later he would need to be told. Her eyes slid closed at the thought. Harry needed to know about Lily, about James, about his godfather, and about Rinna’s promise to Harry that she had been unable to keep.
Rinna wondered, and not for the first time that hot summer day, just what exactly she’d gotten herself into…
A/N: Thanks for reading! I sure would like to hear from you; did you like the story so far? Do you have any suggestions, or comments? Gripes or grievances? NOW is your chance to let me know! Go to that review button and leave me a line or two… or how ever many you want (far be it for ME to try to limit your creativity!) because I REALLY want to hear from my readers. I very much appreciate the time you spent reading my little story so far… (grinning like a silly girl).