Petra shrugged. “As real as I get these days.”
“So I’m not dreaming,” he confirmed, looking around at the ruddy shimmering water, the distant wood filled with purple dusk and chirring crickets. “But I am, er…” he glanced back at Petra again, frowning, “asleep?”
Petra shrugged again. “Actually, I don’t think so.” She patted the bench next to her, inviting him to join her, and then moved an object that was sitting there in her shadow, covering it with her hand. “I think you come to me sometimes when you sleep, but for real. This is no vision, not for either of us. I think that somewhere in Gryffindor tower there’s an empty bed with your name on it.”
James moved to Petra and settled down next to her, but slowly, uncertain that any sudden movement might not break the moment like a soap bubble.
“Actually,” he admitted, settling his hip and shoulder next to hers, feeling her warmth, “my bed still says ‘whiny Potter git’ on the headboard. A gift from Scorpius his first year.”
Petra nodded and smiled. He turned aside to her. She looked out over the waves. The burnished gloaming reflected in her eyes, making them look as deep and vivid as the lake itself. Quietly, he asked her, “Is this place really here? Or are you making it?”
Petra considered the question. “I think it’s real. But it’s not in the world that we know, or at least not in the time that we know. I think this is a memory made real again. This is my grandfather’s farm back before grandma died. Before I was a little girl here. Back before the gazebo had broken away from the dock and sunk to the bottom of the lake for all those years.” Her eyes unfocussed as she went deeper into the thought. “This is the gazebo back before your grandparents died at the hand of Voldemort. Before any of the ugliness happened. Back when the world was simple, with beauty still to be found in it. When there was still the possibility of love and light and hope. I come here with Izzy every night. But I don’t make it happen. I just know where to find it again, to reach it back in those long-forgotten days of the past.
Maybe it’s because of those secret hours I spent asleep in the World Between the Worlds, where there’s no such thing as time. Maybe it happens just because I want it so much.”
James listened to her words, but barely heard them. Part of this was because what she said sounded so bereft, so prosaically hopeless.
Another part was because his mind was still reeling with the suddenness of his appearance in her presence, unprepared and inexplicable. But mostly he barely heard her because all of his attention was focused only on looking at her, soaking up the warmth and solidity of her presence, memorizing the smoothness of her cheek, the solemn vibrance of her eyes, the lustre of her dark hair as the wind teased it, trailing silky brown ribbons over her shoulders.
He wanted to put his arm around her but didn’t dare. He wanted to breath deeply the simple intoxication of her scent—floral soap and sun-warmed skin—but knew he could never get enough. So he simply stared at her instead, musing pointlessly on a fate that would bring them together like this, if only one more time, only for them to be taken apart again forever.
“I’ve been studying,” Petra said, glancing down at the book on her lap. James followed her gaze. The book was huge and old, with pages as heavy as lambskin, covered in dense penmanship, most of which seemed to crawl and writhe before his eyes. Somehow, James knew what it was, even though he’d never seen such a thing before.
“It’s one of the Volumes of the Unknowable Enigmas,” he said, as if the information was coming into his mind from Petra herself, through the invisible ribbon that connected them. “The one you collected when you broke into the Armory of Forbidden Books and Artifacts.”
Petra nodded. “But it’s of little use. I took it mostly to learn about Horcruxes, but I also thought I could use it to learn how to break through to alternate dimensions without having to go through the Vault of Destinies and the Loom.” She shook her head and closed the book on her lap with a thump. “But it’s no use. There are theories, but none of them have ever been tried or proven. They’re just ideas, and not very practical ones, at that. No one can break through. Not without the Loom. Not without the right key to the right dimension.”
James sighed, deep and hard. This was the last thing he wanted to talk about with Petra. But he knew there was nothing else to talk about. This was all that was left.
“When will it happen?”
Petra shook her head blandly. “It’s not up to me. And I’m glad it’s not. I want it to be over as soon as possible. But I’m also afraid to go. I’m afraid to lose Izzy. Afraid to become another version of myself that I barely know. Morgan was broken by her choices. She didn’t have any hope left. She had nothing to lose, but nothing to live for. I don’t want to become her in the world that she came from. But I don’t have any choice.”
James shook his head as he listened. “But why, Petra? You don’t have to do it. What do you gain by it?”
Petra turned to him finally and looked into his eyes, as if reading what she saw there. “I don’t gain anything by it. But everyone else does. I’m not going to that dimension to become Morgan. I already am her. You know that. When Morgan died in this world, she became a part of it. She stopped being the Crimson Thread. Now, she’s Petra, and I’m Morgan, the Thread plucked from another dimension. It’s how the balance of destinies works: corpses don’t count. This is no longer my world. It rejects my being here. Its destiny breaks down more and more the longer I stay. I can’t let myself be responsible for that. I have to go to the world that knows me, no matter how much I may hate it.
It’s the only way to save this world, and the people that I love in it.”
“Like Izzy,” James nodded sadly, looking across at the sleeping girl.
Petra sighed and said quietly, “Not just Izzy.”
James turned back to her, unwilling to accept her version of the truth. “But, what if you’re wrong?”
Petra’s eyes hardened slightly. “I’m not wrong. I feel it. I know it. I’m certain.”
And yet, suddenly, James wondered: was she really certain?
There was a stubbornness in her words that hinted that she was trying to convince herself as much as she was him.
“There must be another way,” James insisted, slumping next to her, turning his own gaze away, letting it rest again on Izzy’s sleeping form. Her breathing was slow and deep, her back turned to James, her blond hair bronzed with the dying sun.