Unofficial Portkey Archive

Harry and Pappy-Chapter 2

Harry grabbed all his letters from Hermione. Every single letter she'd ever written him was in a little pouch he'd found in his bag. He wanted to know what Pappy thought. He needed to understand Hermione. Maybe not understand just Hermione, maybe he just wanted to understand love.

When Harry arrived at Pappy's that morning the door was uncharacteristically closed. The sign hadn't been turned to "OPEN" and the lights were out. Harry was horror stricken that something may have happened to Pappy.

He set the pouch on the ground at his feet and looked for the key Pappy had given him. He couldn't remember if he'd brought it. Finally, he found it and opened the door.

The building was different in the dark. It was dank and musty. He never noticed it before. Maybe that was the reason Pappy opened the doors so early in the morning. He walked slowly to the end of the first row of antique; he didn't see Pappy on the floor. That was a relief. Then he looked down the second row. Now he was getting really nervous because he hadn't heard anything at all. Not a peep.

Finally, Harry got the nerve to call out to him. He was afraid of getting silence more than anything. "Pappy." Harry called and waited. Now he could feel his stomach churning as if it were a cauldron with one of Snape's anally retentive potions for seasickness or something. "Pappy, it's Harry." Harry finally found the lights at the back of the shop and turned them on. He looked toward the opposite corner of the shop and heard a noise. It sounded like someone crying. It couldn't be Pappy. There must be someone else here. What if they'd found Pappy dead?

Harry dropped the pouch and ran to the door at the far end of the shop. And threw the door open. He saw Pappy sitting in an old wingback chair holding a picture of a young woman of thirty or so. He was crying.

"Hi, Pappy. What's wrong? Why didn't you answer? I was scared out of my wits. I was afraid someone had come in and found you…" Harry paused as he looked at Pappy's red eyes and sullen face.

"…dead. I'm okay, Harry. There are certain days when you miss the ones you love more than others," he explained.

"Who is that pretty woman, Pappy? She looks like the same age as the pictures of my mother." Harry said without realizing it.

"Where are your parents, Harry?" Pappy asked innocently.

"They died in a car crash when I was a year old." Harry lied, but was careful enough to use the common story spread in these parts. "I live with my Aunt-my mum's sister-and her family.

"Really, do you remember your parents? I am sorry, you probably were too young to remember too much." Pappy said apologetically. "Forgive an old man who's forgot his manners."

"Thanks, Pappy. I never like talking about it because I end up feeling like you look and feel now," said Harry in flatly serious tone. He was trying his best to avoid telling Pappy too much.

"Fair enough, Lord knows that there are things I wish I could forget," Pappy said with wistful sigh.

"Tell me about your family, Pappy. If you don't mind, I'd like to hear about her. She was really beautiful, wasn't she?" Harry asked sympathetically.

"Francine Margaret Moore. It's funny, her maiden last name was the same as mine." He laughed. "She was someone who could make a prince out of a toad so to speak. I mean I'm no prince, but I was a toad."

"Come on Pappy, you have to be joking." Harry smiled.

"I'm joking, but it's not that far from the truth. I met her when we were in grade school. We grew up together. Do you still know the kids you grew up with?" asked Pappy.

Harry chuckled inside. "Yes, I still am friends with the most important ones."

"Well, that's how Francine and I were until we were about twelve."

"What?" Harry said with a confused look.

"That's when I started getting beat up almost everyday by the boys that were bigger than me. Almost everyone was bigger than me. I was so small it was embarrassing. It was ironic, because my dad was the biggest man in town…huge. They called me a freak midget and used to say that he couldn't be my dad." Harry could see the hurt in Pappy's face.

"Francine was always defending me. I used to get picked on for letting girls fight my battles. Well, to make a long story short, Francine made me realize my strength was that I was smart and could read people like a book. I mean strange things. I could tell them things about themselves they didn't want anyone to know. Francine often was embarrassed because I'd ask her about private thoughts." Pappy explained.

"I wish I could do that," Harry said absent-mindedly thinking of Hermione.

"No, I don't think you would, Harry. It caused Francine to get very angry with me. I became a mean person. She stopped spending so much time with me. I tried to get back at everyone by revealing their secrets. When I was sixteen, I finally got my growth spurt and grew taller than most. By then I had become the town bully. That's when Francine spent even less time with me and got a boyfriend because she was embarrassed about my behavior. The new boyfriend stopped the talk about her too." Pappy looked sad about that.

"Everyone was afraid of me. The saddest, most painful and luckiest day of my life also turned out to be the turning point." He looked at Harry intently. "I picked on the wrong boy. It started because he was Francine's boyfriend. We started pushing each other around and then I blamed him for his parents' death. He nearly killed me Harry. He was so angry that he nearly took out my left eye, broke my jaw, and nearly strangled me." He ran off and no one ever saw him again.

Harry looked at Pappy frightened and in disbelief. "You couldn't have said anything that bad."

"Harry, we don't know what others blame themselves for deep down. This boy thought he was the reason his dad had left when he was really small and why his mother had been an alcoholic who treated him badly." Pappy said.

"So he was pretty much a nutter to begin with," Harry said.

"Maybe, maybe not. His dad had left home one night after a fight with his mother looking for the father of one of the kids who'd beaten his son up. You see they were Irish and often being Irish was enough to get you beaten up back then. Well, in a fight near one of the local pubs, his father was shot dead. His mum found out and went off the deep end. And during one of her drinking sprees she died of alcohol poisoning."

"It wasn't his fault…his mother's and father's death." Harry said.

"Exactly. I had falsely accused someone who didn't deserve it and he snapped. Francine didn't know why he left her then. At seventeen I was in sad shape with my jaw wired shut, scars all over and a voice box that was almost crushed. She helped nurse me back to health because she'd never stopped caring for me. She'd always been my best friend, but had hated the way I treated people."

"Did you ever tell her what happened?" Harry asked.

"Yes. And that was the day she saved my life." The tears came rolling out again and the sobs became almost uncontrollable. He continued after a couple of minutes.

"As I told her, I begged for forgiveness for being such a mean and ornery person. I told her it was my fault he left because up until then no one knew who did it. She explained that she knew that one day something would be put in my life to repay my evil ways. She hugged me that day like she'd never hugged me before."

Pappy was happy again for a moment. "We got married a year later when we were 18 and graduated. Within two years we owned our house and another up the street."

"Did you live here in town, Pappy?" Harry asked.

"No. We lived in a little place called Godric's Hollow. I moved here a year or so after she died. They were saying crazy things about how she died and I didn't want to hear them. I want to remember my wonderful wife as she was, not as they accused her," he replied.

"We owned a single family home just down the block from ours and this nice young couple with a baby boy of 6 or 7 months lived there as our tenants. There names were Lily and James Potter, I think. I could be wrong. They were really secretive. Their friends were extra cautious when they visited. Francine and I laughed because it looked like that American TV show Mission: Impossible." We were really the only friends in the neighborhood they had.

"Pappy, how did she die?" Harry was very hesitant asking the question. He almost burst into interrogator mode but thought better of it. He walked toward the far end of the room as he listened so Pappy wouldn't see the tears on his face.

"Well, she and I were cleaning stuff around the place one evening when this tall, really unpleasant man came by. There was a lot of yelling about something and then the whole house just exploded. I was the most surprised person, because as the argument started, I went deaf. Yes, deaf. I couldn't hear them nor the explosion that followed. It blew me 25 meters away. When I landed, I could hear again. I ran back to find Francine, but she was burned so badly…" Pappy cried openly again. "I waited until the docs took care of her. Some other group whisked in and took the tenants somewhere. "

Harry was stupefied. He'd just heard a first hand account of his parents' death. He wanted to ask more, but there was no question he could ask with out raising more suspicion. Pappy had been through enough. "There was this other fella though."

"I do remember this bloke…hells bells…he could have been 8 feet tall if he was 6. He come walking into the house shortly after the blast and grabbed the baby and the baby's basket and road off on a motorcycle. I thought I was hallucinating too; he raced down the road and took off into the evening sky."

Harry thought that this might be a breakthrough, but he had no idea. He'd have to get to Dumbledore as soon as he got to school. Harry decided to get off the subject.

"I have a question about love, Pappy. Do you remember our deal about telling yo why Hermione was so important to me? And, you wanted to know if I was in love with her." Harry knew he did.

"Of course, I haven't lost all my marbles. As I recall, I had to badger you into saying `yes' to the deal." The old man recalled.

"Pappy, first tell me how you knew you loved your wife Francine," he begged.

"That's an interesting twist. I ask you if you are in love and you want to know about me. Well, first, tell me a little about your girl, Harry. I have forty-eight years of stories about Francine and some will be more appropriate than others, if I know a little about you two kids," said Pappy with a far off gaze as if he were trying to remember when he was a teenager. Harry couldn't remember where he'd put his pouch of letters. He saw them laying on the floor outside the door and way down the row of merchandise racks.

"I will. I have some letters from her you can read as I talk." Harry ran down the aisle, returning with his precious letters.

"I might read them later, Harry. I'm interested in how you feel. Not her." Pappy said matter-of-factly.

"Well, she's kind of not my girl…yet. We've been friends since we were ten and she may be the smartest student at my school or any school for that matter. She drives me crazy with all the facts and stuff she knows. And, sometimes she makes me feel stupid." He paused for a brief second to look out the window.

"So, let me get this straight, you like a girl who makes you feel stupid?" asked a bewildered Pappy.

"Yeah, it's complicated. She is always kind, puts my safety and well-being ahead of everything, and will do anything to help her friends in a crisis. That's one of the greatest things about her. She cares about everybody as long as they don't treat her badly." He paused and pictured her perfectly for the first time in quite a while as he remembered her smiling at him.

"Okay, now it sounds a little more like love than pure masochistic behavior." Pappy chuckled.

"Maso…what?" Harry asked rhetorically and then continued. "Anyway, she has these beautiful brown eyes, extraordinarily perfect lips, a perfect smile and a voice that when she's not showing off, sounds like a beautiful song in my heart. I think about kissing her every time she gets close to me and I don't want to be with anyone else but her if she's in the room. She can be feisty, dainty, eloquent, harsh, tender and tough at the drop of a hat. But most of all when she smiles at me, my heart melts." He sighed as though he had just run a marathon.

"What else, Harry, there has to be more?" Pappy prodded.

"I want to sit with her and look at the stars. I want to walk in the forest with her and look at the beauty without being…," he caught his own musing just before he said `chased by a werewolf or Dementors.'

"Without what?" Pappy asked.

Harry didn't have to lie to get out of this. "…without fear of scaring her away because my feelings for her are so strong. I have seen many pretty girls at school and here in Little Whinging, but no one…no matter how nice or sexy…makes me feel so alive." Harry finally stopped.

Pappy sat with a bemused look on his face and didn't speak for nearly ten minutes. If his eyes weren't open and his hands hadn't moved, Harry would have thought Pappy were dead. Finally he spoke, "You know the disease you have could be fatal. And, I think it has something to do with that scar, but I don't know what it is."

Harry was nervous. This was the first time he felt uncomfortable around Pappy. "What makes you say that? What has my scar to do with anything?"

"Relax, Harry. I mean you probably get picked on about your scar the same way I got picked on for being short. It separates you from your classmates, doesn't it? Your scar is so unique that you're probably pretty famous at your school. So there are lots of kids who are jealous. Am I right so far?"

"Well, that's pretty accurate. What do you mean by fatal?" Harry was still uneasy and had found the place in his waistband where he always kept his wand just in case. Suddenly, he recalled the prediction of leaving the second week of August.

"I'll get to that. She sticks up for you when people get on you, because she knows what a good person you are. And, based on how fast you defended yourself and how confident you were when I challenged you about your scar, you aren't easily intimidated. How am I doing? Just nod if you want to hear more."

Harry nodded. He wondered if Pappy were playing with him. He became aware of the need to block his thoughts like he'd been taught in Occlumency.

"So, because you two, Hermione and you, get along so well, you have adventures and laughs apart from the others. You even do special projects to help one another. Right?"

Harry was confused and wasn't sure what to say. Were there people who had magical parents and didn't know it or had they possibly developed magical abilities without any instruction? Other than a hoax or a setup, Harry figured that these could be the only explanations. He listened closely for the truth in Pappy's voice.

"Pappy, that's kind of amazing. You are so close on so many things. Not perfect, but so close that it made me nervous." Harry explained.

"Harry, don't be afraid of loving this girl. She is probably good for you. I sense a connection between you that will take time to grow. It's growing now, but it's scary for both of you. Even though it's growing now, don't make the mistake of thinking she's fallen madly in love with you already. If you take her for granted at first, it's possible she never will. That brings Francine's and my story to memory. You are changing Harry and it's hard to tell whether she likes it or not. There is a warrior sense about you that means distance and danger. Mine was snotty and boorish. She has to determine if there is room for her in your life as more than a friend."

Harry was pacing again, but Pappy didn't seem to mind.

Harry had tears in his eyes. He knew why Hermione struggled so much between him and Ron. Ron, Harry guessed will always be a homebody or at least a very family oriented man. Harry knew he was more the vagabond. Right now he had no choice as he waited to kill Voldemort or die at his hand. After that, he had no earthly clue. He'd probably do the same thing as now as an Auror.

"Harry the first three years of our marriage proved difficult, because I couldn't change overnight. I liked being the bully after so many years of being the punching bag. Even though we were married, I had to show her I loved her. She gave me hell when I was trouble for someone. I knew it hurt her to do it. She did it because she loved me. She remembered the mild, tender boy."

Harry stopped pacing and looked back at Pappy. He'd paused and Harry wondered if there was a reason.

Pappy continued. "The more I did to prove my love the less time I had to be mean to other people. Telling her didn't matter. Treating others nice and using my gift to lift peoples spirits gave Francine great joy. One day a car cut us off going to the petrol pump. I was mad. She was sure I'd knock the guy out. I told him that he had a real nice car and probably needed to get going because he was in a hurry. The man looked at me and said, you know I cut you off. What do you want? I want to show my wife that I can have a conversation with a person like you without killing him for once. The man got back into the car and went to the now free pump on the other side. I never told her what I said, but she thought the world of me from that day forward." Pappy started to laugh but actually began to cry. As rough as his speech was, he had improved.

"Harry, I am not ashamed of crying. I love my memories, but I lost her a long time ago and it still hurts. When you love someone you have to feel the emotion…whether it's pain or happiness…and do what's natural. If you don't they will never feel how much you care about them and you will slowly die inside. They will only be able to guess how you feel."

Harry thought he knew what Pappy meant. So he didn't ask.

"Show Hermione that you love her in everything you do. Telling her all the time will only put expectations of kindness and perfection in the way that you can't live up to. I learned that with Francine. I told her I loved her everyday after I began to be able to speak again. It wasn't enough. When I realized that by showing her in the way I treated her and other people, she saw that I had learned to love and she began to love me as much as I loved her." Pappy sat and waited for it to sink in. "Do you understand what I am saying Harry?"

"Sort of. I shouldn't tell her I love her, I should let my love show rather than tell her. She'll figure it out." Harry said.

"You understand part of it. I didn't say never tell her you love her. Just don't say it without the little kindnesses that separate you from the other boys who will have crushes on her and maybe she'll have crushes on them too. Don't make them hollow words. If something happens to her that makes you sad, express it. Let her know in your actions that you understand. Does that make sense?" Pappy asked.

"Yeah. Yes it does. But what if she doesn't feel the same way?" Harry asked with baited breathe.

"You may have to convince her more than you think Harry. I mean do you want have a high school girlfriend?" Pappy paused.

Harry started to answer. "I don't…" Pappy put his hand up to signal for him to stop.

"Do you remember I would ask you some difficult questions?" He paused. These are the difficult ones Harry.

"Okay." Harry said.

"Do you want her to be the person you spend the rest of your life with? Would you give up your life for hers? Would she give up hers for you? Do you think you could forgive her if she had to have time to herself and date other people? Could you live with the fact that she might think she loves someone else while you persevered and did not give up on your dream to be with her? Those are big questions Harry. She may want a boyfriend and not a long-term relationship right now. I can only guess. But if you love her, express it as long as you have the life's breathe to do it. If you do that, I think she will see the light." Pappy predicted.

There was a long silence. Harry grabbed the broom and swept the shop. He stopped and looked out the window onto the street. He wished that Hermione would pop out of one of the shops running toward him with a smile. He was happy, sad, confused, determined, and tired. He finished sweeping and walked over to where Pappy was sitting and pulled up a chair.

"Pappy, I may have more questions. Will you help?" Harry asked expecting a `yes'.

"Harry, if you really need to talk…yes. I would really rather you ask them now. I don't like to talk about this too much, because love is about actions as much as it is about desire, emotion, and excitement. I have already told you all I know and all I think you need to know. And, frankly, my heart hurts too much when I think of Francine with such vivid memories." Pappy had said yes, but he'd wanted to say no.

Harry was happy but a little confused. How does a sixteen year old boy determine whether the girl he loves is the one. The girl that would be the one he loved most forever. And if he does know, what can he do to prove it like Pappy described?

Harry wrote back to Hermione and Ron that night. He was careful not to spill the beans to either of them about how he felt. He wanted to just get to Ron's and enjoy some time with his best mate before Hermione showed up.

The next few weeks were a trial for Harry. He waited everyday to hear from Hermione. He got one more letter from her that sounded much like the last one and nothing from Ron until the day before they were going to pick him up through the Floo Network. Quickly he packed his things and went to say good-bye to Pappy.

Pappy was surprised that he hadn't had more warning. They chatted for an hour or so, when finally Pappy handed Harry a box. Harry looked inside and found the figurine and the music box. He'd almost forgotten the reason he'd become so close to Pappy and the reason he'd learned so much about himself and how he felt about Hermione. "Thanks Pappy, how much do I owe you?" He was afraid that Pappy would ask for more than he had left.

"Harry, you taught me more than you know this summer. I think you've paid enough. If you feel you must, twenty-five pounds will do the trick." Harry threw his arms around Pappy and gave him a hug. It seemed natural. Pappy had become the best friend he'd ever had in the muggle world. "Thank you, Pappy. You have no idea how much this means."

"See, Harry, you didn't even have to say anything. I knew how you feel by your actions and I hope you know how I feel by mine. Write to me. I look forward to hearing from you." Pappy smiled and had the glint of a tear in his eye. "I hope everything works out with Hermione." Harry started to give Pappy the twenty-five pounds, but the look on his old friends face told him he would be slightly offended. He walked out the door into the slowly fading sunlight and waved to Pappy. He thought maybe he even loved Pappy.

Harry was glad Pappy hadn't asked where he went to school. Maybe Pappy knew, but preferred not to say. Harry guessed he did and that the old man was just happy with his life as it was. Harry waved again. Harry had gotten so involved in the stories about Francine, Pappy and Ian, Francine's boyfriend from years ago; he had never asked Pappy about Godric's Hollow or what the first tall man looked like or what the content of the rumors he was avoided so many years ago or even what he thought about Hermione's letters. He decided he'd talk to Dumbledore and write Pappy for more information if Dumbledore thought it was safe. Almost every thought since he met Pappy had been about Hermione or the odds and ends he and Pappy would talk about. He had a horrible feeling that he wouldn't see Pappy again. He shook the thought off.

Document created with wvWare/wvWare version 1.0.0

-->