Chapter 1: not the traits of a hero
Chapter Text
There are very few worlds in which Petunia Evans (subsequently Dursley) might ever have been generally considered to be a nice person. She was petty, spiteful, vicious. She was superficial, valuing propriety and reputation over decency and honesty. Above all, she valued normality, with her supreme goal being a picture-perfect, textbook-standard, ‘normal’ existence. And she adored her baby sister at least as much as she resented her, always.
These are not the traits of a hero; but they do not inevitably make a monster, either. The path of monstrousness begins with small steps. If you are suddenly presented with a second child to care for, without so much as a day’s warning, it is only reasonable to dress him in the baby clothes you already have in the house: those belonging to your first child, or perhaps – if your own son is a little larger – the clothes your first child has recently outgrown and you have not yet disposed of. If your new ward screams blue murder at the sight of a crib – one which you went to some trouble to obtain, making a gruelling expedition to Mothercare with two squalling toddlers – and absolutely refuses to sleep in one, when he has been reasonably compliant about sleeping in his blanket-lined basket for the previous ten days that you have had him, then it is not wholly unreasonable to allow him to sleep in the basket until he outgrows it, or indeed to feel a certain amount of chagrin on account of the wasted time and funds. And if, even once he is two years old and no longer fits in the basket, he still howls in terror and anguish at the sight of wooden or plastic bars, making cribs and playpens utterly impractical, but still being small enough that a full bed with no bars is not safe – well, other sleeping arrangements need to be investigated. And you do still have that second crib mattress, unused. Whether you disassemble the crib in what was supposed to be his bedroom and set up futon-style bedding on the floor of the room incorporating his crib mattress, perhaps making extra allowances to ensure the child is not bothered by draughts, or whether you throw the crib mattress into the cupboard under the stairs... well, perhaps that is where the distinctions between monstrousness and decency begin.
And for goodness’ sake, everyone who has ever had primary custody of a baby or toddler has had moments of feeling exceptionally overwhelmed, exasperated, at the end of their tether. And that goes doubly so for those who spend hours at a time alone with two toddlers, and triply so for non-magical carers of magical toddlers. Making mistakes, having less than ideal moments: all that is just part and parcel of being a parent. The key question is how severe the mistakes are, to what extent you acknowledge them as such, and what lengths you go to not to repeat them. And that is where the Petunia Dursleys of various different universes show variation.
In no universe does Petunia Dursley have a clear idea of what parenting multiple children without favouritism looks like. It’s not something she’s ever experienced. Her own parents could be outrageously partial at times, she never knew her mother’s parents, and her father’s parents were not very good at paying sustained attention to any child or grandchild, let alone balancing it. They tended to show vague, distracted fondness to any child in their presence not doing something troublesome, keep everyone in line by snapping at them, and for the most part, operate an out-of-sight-out-of-mind policy towards their (numerous) adult children and (hordes of) grandchildren and great-grandchildren. That horrible Snape boy was an only child, and nothing about him should be emulated anyway. Petunia’s closest friends in school had been only children. In fact, the best model she can think of for a sibling relationship that isn’t atrocious is that between her dear Vernon and Marge, and goodness knows she isn’t over-fond of Marge.
But in some universes, Petunia makes an effort to learn. In no universe is Petunia Dursley an excellent parent. She chose to marry Vernon Dursley, and that with a fairly shrewd and almost entirely accurate character assessment of the man. She knew who she was marrying. Those were the traits she liked and valued. Also, see above under ‘spitefulness’ and ‘superficiality’. But in some universes, her guardianship of those two children, Dudley and Harry, is at least... passable. Better than many. Better by far than it might have been. And certainly much, much better than Minerva McGonagall had feared it might be, or than Albus Dumbledore had intended it to be.
The other thing about Petunia Dursley is that she was never stupid. Wilfully blind, of course, when she wanted to be. Narrow-minded, with fierce ambitions limited in scope, absolutely, and content in circumstances that would drive most intelligent women insane. Dull in the sense of boring, by all means. But not dull in the other sense. When she wanted to be, she could be quite sharp-witted. Her sister Lily had been sharp-witted too, but the sharpness of Lily’s wits was more like a broadsword. Genuinely mighty, very noticeable, and employed with conspicuous heroism to reap great rewards (her stellar OWLS, her remarkable NEWTS, a number of highly lucrative patents, her son’s mysterious survival...). Petunia’s sharpwittedness was more like a stiletto or flick-knife. Seemingly small, passing unnoticed until the moment she judged it should be deployed, and so deftly that even (especially) the ones she used it against hardly ever noticed it, let alone noticing the gains she had made or the damage she had dealt.
Had she had magic, Petunia Dursley would have made an excellent Slytherin. Sometimes, that does mean evil, or a decent approximation thereof. But sometimes, it just means cunning, ambition, and ruthlessness. And sometimes that’s what’s needed.
In this universe, Albus Dumbledore does not appear to Harry Potter as a benevolent saviour.
Chapter 2: just like Lily
Chapter Text
Naturally, after the trauma of seeing his mother killed with magic in front of him, and having the protective magic she had placed on him rise up and through him, turning a man to ashes (not that he necessarily understood that consciously or remembered it clearly, but regardless), after all that, Harry’s accidental magic was rather slow to return. Even as a relative newborn, he had made lights flicker when he cried. He had turned things – and people – strange colours. (‘A Marauder already,’ his father and godfather had declared.) Later, he had summoned toys, bottles, food, and even, on occasion, the hapless cat. He had spent much of the summer of 1981 in the cottage garden with his mother, making flowers dance in the air, open and close, his accidental magic mimicking her own wandless magic. (She did not teach him to fly unaided. He was quite enough of a menace on that toy broom Sirius had given him.) And in May of 1982, in the admirably near-pristine flower garden of number 4, Privet Drive, seated on a blanket with Dudley and a collection of their toys, while Petunia weeded nearby, Harry threw the discarded dandelions and forget-me-nots into the air, made them spin in circles around him and a delighted Dudley, enlarged them and changed their colours and made them dance. When Dudley’s laughter and clapping grew particularly exuberant, Petunia turned around, to check the boys weren’t doing anything bad, and froze.
Just like Lily – Lily’s weirdness...
She could have shouted at Harry and slapped him, before shutting him in the cupboard where they normally kept his basket when he was not using it, and leaving Dudley bewildered and howling. She could have ignored the evidence of her own eyes, snatched the weeds away and thrown them in the bin, clinging a little longer to the notion that her family was perfectly normal in every way, thank you very much. Instead she wept. She missed her sister acutely, and while Harry had her eyes, she had not been able to see much else in the way of resemblance. But this – the innocent happiness, the weirdness with the flowers, the joy he took in it, his instinct to share that joy – it was hers. Harry was truly Lily’s boy. And Lily was gone. They had been distant for years, but they had been close once, had shared moments just like this. Rather than bewailing the loss of her wholly and purely normal life, Petunia Dursley mourned for her sister.
And Harry comforted her. As soon as he saw his Auntie crying, he let the flowers fall and toddled over, supplying her with cuddles, declarations of consternation, clumsy comfort and affection. Dudley started demanding hugs, too, and for a while they all huddled together in the garden, grieving. And then Harry started apologising, and Petunia pulled herself together.
“It’s not your fault I’m sad, dear.” Harry gazed at her quizzically. “You just reminded me of your mummy. She was my little sister, and she’s gone, and I miss her.” Harry nodded, and patted her clumsily. He missed her too, though he didn’t have the words for it, or any clear memory of her. Dudley still looked confused. “You know how I’m your mummy, darling, and Harry’s aunty? Harry’s mummy was your aunty. Your aunty Marge is your daddy’s sister, and your aunty Lily, Harry’s mummy, was my sister.” She hadn’t really thought of Lily in relation to Dudley like that, before, but it was true, wasn’t it. “She would have loved you just like Aunt Marge loves you, bringing sweeties for her handsome little man.” Probably they would have been unnatural sweeties, like those horrible jumping chocolate toad things, but that was beside the point. And now, of course, Dudley wanted sweeties. She took the boys inside and put the kettle on. It was about time for tea and biscuits, anyway.
Later that afternoon, once the boys were having their their nap, Petunia set herself the task of thinking things through. When she and Vernon had taken Harry in, they had sworn they’d stamp the weirdness out of him. That they’d provide him with a proper, normal upbringing. Vernon had believed, and she had hoped, that if they tried hard enough to make the boy normal, he’d become normal. That they could keep him safe, away from the freakish world that had taken Lily from her and got her killed. Petunia had always had her doubts about that plan, but she had wanted so badly for it to work, and Vernon had been so confident that it would. But she had been right and Vernon wrong. Not that that was so surprising, after all. Vernon was so wonderfully normal, and she loved that about him, and while she herself was also perfectly normal, with her it was a matter of choice and inclination, rather than simply being inevitable. Petunia had grown up with a sister who was not normal. She herself was not like that, but she was more of an expert on... freakishness, weirdness, that horrible world of strangeness – than anyone else in the family now living. And as the expert, she would do what she could to keep her family as safe and as normal as possible.
So. Harry was like Lily – he had those strange abilities. (She didn’t like to use the word ‘magic’, and it wouldn’t be kind to call them ‘freakish’ or ‘unnatural’, even it was accurate, so she decided ‘strange’ and ‘weird’ were nice, neutral words.) No amount of scolding had stopped Lily from doing weird things, and although Petunia was not prepared to be as lenient as her own parents had been, she didn’t think she’d be able to stop Harry doing anything weird at all. Perhaps she could talk to him, make him understand that it was all right to do weird things if he was on his own, but that he mustn’t do them in front of other people – especially not the neighbours, or Vernon, or Marge.
And she had better resign herself to the prospect of a letter coming for Harry when he turned eleven, of Harry going away to that school. She had hoped not to get too attached to him, so it would hurt less when he left, but now she felt that might be a lost cause. He was a sweet boy, and already attached to her, and to Dudders, too. (He hadn’t really bonded with Vernon, but he played very nicely with Dudley.) Harry was not even two, yet, and the letter would come when he was eleven. So she had nine years. And even then, he would come back for the holidays. Perhaps she could gain and keep enough influence over him that he acted normally during that time. Perhaps he could even try to be normal despite the special abilities. What had that teacher said, when she came with the letter? That Lily going to the Grammar school with Petunia wouldn’t be a good idea, because Lily’s outbursts of weirdness would keep getting stronger, and less controlled, without training? That without that training, she might do something like blow up half the school if a boyfriend left her for another girl?
Another painful memory – yes, OWLs. Stupid name for exams that were basically O-Levels, only in weird subjects. After getting those, Lily had wand rights (horrible idea), could have come back to the normal world, studied for O-Levels, maybe even A-Levels, got a proper, respectable job, without anyone from that horrible world taking her memories away or forcing her back, or putting her in a prison guarded by soul-sucking demons. Lily had laughed when Petunia had asked if that was what she was going to do, offered to get her prospectuses for her own secretarial college and other places like it. “But Tuney, why would I want to do that?” she had giggled. “I’m a witch! I have magic!” Petunia had burst into tears, and swept out of the house and back to London, to her poky bedsit and her nice, respectable secretarial job, and her nice, ordinarily romantic dates with Vernon.
So Harry would spend at least five years away at school, maybe seven. Perhaps he would come back to the normal world after that. Perhaps he would go and get a job in that weird, horrible, other world, and he would write to her and Dudley occasionally, as Lily had. Perhaps he would visit from time to time, and do his best to pretend to be normal while he was here. Lily had said that she wanted to visit, but that it wasn’t safe, with the war on. Well, her Harry would not go mixing himself up in any wars. He could resemble Lily as much as he liked, but he was not allowed to go and get himself killed like she had. She wouldn’t have it.
That afternoon, Petunia decided that, while she would put off talking to the boys about weirdness for as long as she could, she was certainly not going to be able to avoid all mention of it until the boys were eleven, as the letter had requested. Which, come to think of it, was just as well. Petunia was in no mood whatsoever to oblige a man who thought it appropriate to leave a child on a doorstep overnight in November, or indeed to break the news of her sister’s death to her by letter, rather than in person. No manners, some of these disreputable types, no decency, no sense. She would bring her boys up better than that – and she wasn’t going to be doing that man any favours.
After that, the summer of 1982 passed relatively peacefully. Petunia’s sister-in-law Marge came to stay for a few days before Dudley’s birthday, thankfully without any of her horrible smelly dogs. She largely ignored Harry, focusing her attention on Dudley, but since it was Dudley’s special day, Petunia didn’t mind, and it wasn’t as if she was cruel to Harry. She took Dudley for a special outing the day before his birthday – apparently a friend of hers ran some racing stables, or something like that, and Dudley was quite eager to see the ‘horsies’. While Dudley was out, Petunia could work on his birthday cake, and that way, Harry could make Dudley a birthday present without Dudley knowing. Of course, he was too young to do much, but she gave him a bowl of melted chocolate, some marshmallows, raisins, broken biscuits and cereal, and let him mash them all up together before dropping handfuls into paper cases, and licking the bowl clean. Of course, he needed a bath afterwards, and then she had to clean the kitchen again while he had his nap, but at least Harry was showing the proper frame of mind towards her Duddykins, wanting to do nice things for Dudley’s special day. He was a good boy, really. And Dudley’s birthday went wonderfully well, and she made sure he thanked everyone for his nice presents, including Harry. He was a little angel.
July was largely filled with a battle of wills between Petunia and everyone else in the house regarding Harry’s sleeping arrangements. He was starting to get too big for his basket, and even with the crib taken away he was uneasy with the bedroom. She had, herself, been rather frightened of spiders and rats as a child, but honestly, what kind of child has a phobia about bedrooms? Perfectly ordinary, nice, normal bedrooms? He seemed to prefer small, enclosed spaces to sleep in, and Vernon was all for just throwing the crib mattress into the cupboard under the stairs and having that be the end of the matter, but Petunia put her foot down. Having a child sleeping in a cupboard was not normal, especially when you live in a four-bedroom house. Faced with the prospect of what the neighbours might say, and what his colleagues at Grunnings might think, if word ever got out that he had a nephew who slept in a boot cupboard, Vernon capitulated. Soon, he was quite convinced that it was his own insistence that the boy should not be coddled and humoured, that it was his own notion of propriety that forbade them from going along with the boy’s bizarre desire to pursue eccentric habits. He was a fine, hard-working man with a lovely home, everything as it should be, and that meant little boys should sleep in their own bedrooms, and no nonsense.
For his second birthday, Harry did not get as many presents as Dudley, but he was quite content. He had a birthday cake (of which Dudley ended up eating two slices to every one slice of Harry’s, as he did for most cakes), a box of the same kind of chocolate confections Harry himself had made for Dudley (which had taken twice as much chocolate to make, because Dudley liked to eat as he worked), and, from his loving Aunt and Uncle, a Wendy House. Vernon was of the opinion that it was a very girly toy, but of course Harry couldn’t help not being as manly as his Dudders, and he had better take good care of his nice birthday present, and be properly grateful for it. Harry was – especially once he understood what it was for. Rather than assemble it in the back garden, like the picture on the box it came in, Aunt Petunia took it straight up to Harry’s room, and assembled it in there. Then she put clean sheets on the mattress they had been encouraging Harry to use for the last few weeks, and placed the mattress on the floor of the Wendy House, where it just fitted nicely. She added a quilt (with a pattern of dogs on it) and a pillow (with matching pillowcase), and Dudley’s least favourite teddy bear.
“There,” she told Harry, with a hint of irritation in her voice, “a small, enclosed space to sleep in, like you prefer, but it’s nice and respectable, in a proper bedroom, and it just looks like a lovely toy that plenty of normal children have. We can see about a proper, big boy bed when you’re older. So no more nonsense. I hope you like it.” Harry beamed at her.
“I love it, Aunty! Thank you, thank you!” He hugged her about the legs, and then clambered back downstairs, to hug Uncle Vernon and Dudley too, and thank them, and share his new sweeties with them.
Even here, somewhere that was at least a contender for the best of all possible worlds, Harry grew up believing that the peculiar things that sometimes happened around him were both strange and unwelcome. But here, it was ‘weirdness’ rather than ‘freakishness’, and it was not his fault. Some people were just born with weird abilities. Harry’s mummy had had them, and so did he. It was just one of those things, like having red hair or needing glasses to see. And rather than being expected not to use magic at all, he was expected to control it, and to be discreet about it. Making toys zoom around his room got him approving nods (and sad sighs). Outbursts when he was angry or scared got him punished, generally the same kind of punishment Dudley got for really awful tantrums: perhaps the naughty corner, or being deprived of pudding. Once, when Harry was very naughty, and shouted at his kind Aunt and Uncle, and made the lights flicker, Aunt Petunia took all his library books away from him, and locked them in the cupboard for two whole days. For that whole time, he had no picture books to look at, only Dudley’s cartoons on the telly to watch, as and when Dudley wanted to watch them. (Once, when Dudley was very naughty, and threw a screaming temper tantrum in front of a group of his mother’s friends, and smashed a porcelain cake-stand and a vase of flowers, he was deprived of television (apart from the news bulletins his parents liked to watch) for two whole days. He had to resort to sharing Harry’s picture books for that whole time, and they were very boring, with hardly any slapstick violence at all.) Even here, Harry still thought of his weirdness as something vaguely distasteful. It was not something terrifying and inexplicable that would bring about harsh punishments; but it made his uncle uneasy and cross and distant whenever it happened in front of him (increasingly rarely), and even Aunt Petunia, who was very understanding, and praised him for his control over it, would be sad whenever she caught him using it. She tried to hide it, but Harry could tell. His weirdness reminded her of her sister, his mummy, and Aunt Petunia was very sad that her sister had died. Harry was a good boy, and he didn’t want to make his Aunt sad, but if he tried not to use his weirdness at all, it would be more likely to start happening whenever he felt emotional, no matter who else saw. So he practiced diligently, in private, every day, like a good boy.
Chapter Text
Petunia had done a lot of thinking, in the years before the boys started primary school. She had seized on Vernon’s comment about the Wendy House being girly, and Dudley being ‘more manly’ than Harry, and she had paid attention to the way the relationship between Marge and Vernon worked. They were genuinely fond of each other, and seemed to understand each other well, with no undercurrents of jealousy and resentment, no talking at cross purposes and coming away crying, like she and Lily had had. And part of that, Petunia reasoned, was that Vernon and Marge had well-defined roles. Vernon had been the boy and Marge the girl; Vernon was a gentleman and Marge a lady. He poured out her brandy and gave her a lift from the station and carried her bags upstairs, and she praised and respected him, and appreciated his kind gestures, and lavished attention on his son. She was the elder of the two, and had apparently spent much of their childhood bossing him around, as well as praising him for doing well. Vernon worked in an office, indoors, wearing a nice suit, and Marge’s dog-breeding business was much more outdoors and hands-on, but they were both respectable businesspeople, with admiration for each other’s acumen and pride in each other’s successes. Marge liked to travel around the country, and kept up many connections in hunting, horse-racing, dog-racing and even dog-fighting circles; Vernon was more of a home-body and a devoted husband. Perhaps, Petunia thought, the problem with their own parents had been that Lily had taken all the good roles and left none for her. Lily had been ‘the pretty one’ and ‘the clever one’, leaving neither of those roles for Petunia, and while Petunia had tried to be ‘the hard-working one’, ‘the well-behaved one’, ‘the sensible one’, ‘the respectable one’, and so on, none of those roles were interesting enough to win their parents’ attention, and Petunia’s status as the oldest hadn’t been enough for Lily to keep looking up to Petunia and respecting her, once she had that horrible Snape boy to learn from, and that horrible world of freakishness to discover.
And so, Dudley was ‘the manly one’, and Harry less manly; Dudley was naturally ordinary and normal, and Harry had to work at it. Vernon loved the idea of Dudley following in his own footsteps, and Petunia played up that idea, declaring at every opportunity that Dudley was a fine little man, just like his father. While Petunia did, from time to time, touch on Harry’s resemblance to Lily, she became increasingly aware that he was not entirely like Lily. Lily had loved attention; Harry didn’t care for it. Of the boys, while Dudley was ‘the boisterous, manly one’, Harry was ‘the clever, quiet one’. She took both boys to playgroups, to storytime at the local library, and to a variety of other normal and respectable activities, making it clear to everyone that her parenting was above reproach and she was willing to put in lots of extra effort, not like some people. And it was, indeed, quite clear that Harry was the clever one. He had a much better memory than Dudley, a better attention span, and he picked up the beginnings of reading and maths much quicker than Dudley, even though Petunia probably spent twice as long working with Dudley as she did working with Harry. But Vernon ‘wouldn’t want some swotty little nancy boy for a son anyway.’ Dudley did quite well at sports, and loved the acclaim he got when he won things. Harry was thankfully not very interested in competing. He’d play along, and he wasn’t horrible, but he wasn’t an athletic star, either, coming solidly middle of the pack. He would much rather read. As well as sports, Dudley loved TV, and had the privilege of choosing which channel they had on at home; Petunia helped reinforce that dynamic between ‘the sporty one’ and ‘the bookish one.’ Dudley got to drink soft drinks, and Harry was given milk to drink with his meals, because he was so small and skinny and they had to make sure he was healthy; Dudley was a fine, robust figure of a boy (somewhat chubby but nothing too excessive at that stage). Harry ate his fruit and vegetables obediently, while Dudley was allowed to eat smaller amounts of ‘rabbit food’ and more in the way of meat and cake and sweets. Dudley was loud and Harry was quiet; Dudley was very open and prone to charging ahead, and Harry was watchful, lurking in the background, taking everything in and only acting once he felt he knew what was going on. A fine pair of boys, Petunia felt, and most of the neighbourhood agreed.
(Of course, boxing one’s children into narrow stereotypes at an early age isn’t exactly best practice when it comes to parenting. But it was the best Petunia knew how to do, and it did at least ensure Vernon and Dudley were far more accepting of Harry than they might otherwise have been.)
Petunia’s other focus for scheming, besides the means to achieve sibling harmony (or cousinly harmony), was the formation of a decent cover story regarding her sister and (shudder) brother-in-law. Since Harry was due to return to that world once he turned eleven, she couldn’t just tell him any outright lies. Simpler though the story of a drunken car crash would have been, it just would not do. No, Petunia had to work out what had really happened, and then find a way to frame that truth in terms that sounded utterly, absolutely normal, and only reflected positively on herself and her family. And besides wanting to keep Harry’s trust, she also wanted him to learn from the story of his parents, so he would not go around repeating their mistakes. He was Lily’s first, of course, Lily’s son, not hers, but he was her nephew, and it was she who had the raising of him, and she was not going to allow him to go and get himself killed at a ridiculously early age. No. Harry was going to be better than Lily; he was already clever, like her, but less of a show-off than she had been, and less impetuous; and being better than Lily meant learning from Lily’s mistakes.
So Petunia gritted her teeth, and let Marge take Dudley off for a couple of days to visit a friend of hers who bred Shetland ponies for exhibition, and had Mrs Figg take Harry during the day-time while Dudley was gone. (‘Dudley gets to learn about ponies, dear, and you get to learn about cats. Be good for Mrs Figg, won’t you, and no nonsense.’) Then she went to her delicate, ladylike escritoire in the corner of the living room. It was an elegant thing, her writing desk. It had been a gift from Vernon, for the first Christmas after they were married. She used it to keep her notepaper in, a variety of dainty cards for well-wishes in appropriate situations, her fountain pen, stamps, address book, and other things a respectable lady uses to attend to her societal duties. It had two drawers, each of which locked with a tiny key that she kept on her key-ring with the house keys. One drawer held her passport, her diploma from the secretarial college, her birth certificate, the birth, marriage and death certificates of her parents, Dudley’s birth certificate, Child Benefit registration forms for Harry and Dudley, and other such things.
The other drawer held things that were less normal. Letters from Lily, lots of them, many crumpled in anger and then carefully smoothed out. An invitation for Lily’s wedding. Lily’s birth certificate. Duplicate marriage certificates and death certificates for Lily and (ugh) James, and a birth certificate for Harry. She’d had to send off to Somerset House for those herself, because some people couldn’t keep proper track of the necessary records. (She had considered not bothering, but then decided that it would be weird for Harry not to have access to them when he was older, and besides she wanted to have proof on hand that she was Harry’s nearest relation, all others being dead, and her guardianship was wholly legitimate.)
Finally, the horrible, callous letter from that man, Albus Dumbledore. She took it out of the envelope and glanced over it, but it made her head hurt, her knowledge of his negligence and freakishness warring with the impression that he was a wise and benevolent man, so she put it to one side. Perhaps it was the green and purple ink giving her a headache. So garish. Little Whinging library had a self-service photocopying machine, one that could reproduce documents in nice, sensible, black and white, so she would go there after lunch. She skimmed through Lily’s letters briefly, setting aside the ones that mentioned the war and Lily’s involvement in it, and everything that mentioned Harry. They would be photocopied too, so she could annotate them as she wished, without damaging the originals. Yes, and she would visit the stationer’s, too. When she was studying at the secretarial college, and she found a topic particularly difficult, it had helped her to make notes in a notebook, and then go over them. It clarified things. And goodness knows this horrible mess with Lily’s wastrel friends and that stupid war she got herself involved in needed all the clarification that could be supplied.
The photocopying went without a hitch. In the stationer’s, she carefully selected a dark blue exercise book for herself, and (to her own surprise) a cheap spiral notepad with a smiling cat on the front, for Harry, and a small box of coloured wax crayons to go with the notepad. Then, for Dudley, she bought a video, a Western film with some cowboys (very manly, horses, and loud bangs – Dudders would love it) and a box of chocolates. It was already strange, three days without her Duddikins, and only seeing her nephew first thing in the morning and last thing at night. She would miss them both when they started going to primary school every day, she realised. And then, later, there would be boarding school. She added a little extra chocolate for herself – she needed cheering up, and strengthening for the ordeal ahead.
Once she was back home, sitting at her desk, she dithered. She really, really didn’t want to look at that letter again, even the photocopy. Her head had hurt. But needs must. She put the original letter back in the drawer and locked it, took out her pen and opened the exercise book. ‘Letter addressed to Mr and Mrs V Dursley,’ she wrote, ‘found on the doorstep of number four, Privet Drive, at approximately 6 a. m., on Wednesday the 2nd of November, together with an infant in a basket.’ Her first read-through of the letter did not bring back the horrible headache, or the strangely positive thoughts about Albus Dumbledore. It did, however, induce a whole range of emotions: anger, sorrow, confusion, defensiveness, bewilderment, resentment... She closed her eyes and breathed in and out.
Like in secretarial college, she would start with the basics. She had noted who the letter was for, and who it came with. The letter was from Albus Dumbledore. And who was Albus Dumbledore? Well, he gave a list of his titles below his signature. Headmaster of Hogwarts. Hogwarts was the school Lily and the Snape boy had gone to, the school Harry would go to. And as he reminded her at the beginning of the letter (‘We have corresponded before, Mrs Dursley, and then as now I wish I had better things to tell you than the news I must sorrowfully impart’) she had written to him once before, when she was young and silly, begging him to let her go to the school where Lily went. Foolishness. She knew better now. She hadn’t kept his reply letter – she had been too angry – but from what she could remember, it was an unpleasant mixture of kindly and patronising. It was just as well he hadn’t let her go – she was better off without all that nonsense – but he had hurt her feelings more than a little. Fine. Headmaster of a boarding school, a secondary school for weird people. Next title: Supreme Mugwump of the International Confederation of Wizards. Ugh. Apart from all the weird words, ‘International Confederation’ was clearly an organisation of some kind, one with branches in many countries. Whether it was like the U. N. for weirdos, or Interpol for weirdos, or something like Greenpeace for weirdos, she couldn’t tell. But there were people with freakish abilities in other countries, not just Britain, and they talked to each other and formed organisations, at least one of which was this precious Confederation, and Dumbledore was somebody quite important in the organisation (‘Supreme’). So he had people all over the world, or at least in some other countries, who respected him and listened to him. Ugh. Silly weirdos, giving such importance to a man like that. Finally: Chief Warlock of the Wizengamot. Chief Blah of the Blah. An important person in a different organisation. Definitely someone of importance in the freakish world, overall, and someone who wanted everyone to know he was important and should be listened to.
And there was something else, too, something with the war. Yes. She had another skim through those letters of Lily’s she had copied, underlining key parts. Yes. Albus Dumbledore had led ‘the Order’, a hush-hush secret organisation, during the war. Lily had been a member, as had her husband, and his friends, and most of Lily’s friends that she had met in school, and some of Lily’s school teachers. In fact, ‘the Order’ seemed to make up one side of the war, with a freak whose name Lily did not like to use (honestly, ‘He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named’, ‘You-Know-Who’, how ridiculous), and his minions, the Death Eaters, making up the other side, and the special government for weirdos, ‘the Ministry’, being caught in the middle. So that was a fourth title – Leader of the Order – a title that the man did not put on his correspondence, but one which definitely gave him a lot of power. A general in a war, for goodness’ sake! And it was that war that her sister had died in, her and her husband both. In fact – Petunia looked back at her photocopy of the Dumbledore letter – Lily’s death had apparently ended the war. This You-Know-Who, a ‘terrible Dark Wizard’, had come to the house Lily’s family lived in, tried to kill the entire family, and had been defeated, banished, leaving only Harry alive, albeit scarred. Some of his followers had been sent to that prison, the one with the soul-sucking demons, but others had got away with it, and then lots of other idiots had decided to venerate Harry as a hero. Such nonsense. The freakish world was apparently at peace now, but this Dumbledore fellow still felt Harry should be kept away from it until ‘the right time.’
So, that was what had happened. However, Petunia couldn’t exactly tell all and sundry that there had been a secret war, hidden from normal people, and that Harry’s parents had fought in it. Perhaps that there had been a terrorist organisation, and Harry’s parents had worked for the government, fighting terrorism, and an operation had gone wrong? No, that wasn’t right, either. Organised crime, that was it. Harry’s parents had been good and brave, but very reckless and nosy. They had got involved with an organisation that liked to expose organised crime, to write newspaper articles about them, to investigate them and send evidence to the police. Of course the criminals were very bad, but it might have been better to leave the police to it – or to go and work for the police, rather than a private organisation. But they admired the man who ran the organisation very much, and they knew the criminals were doing bad things, and they wanted to be heroes and stop them. Yes, this was good. And Harry’s parents had helped break up a particularly scary gang, but they had got killed in the process, leaving him an orphan. The leader of the crime-fighting organisation had taken charge of things afterwards, dropping Harry on Vernon and Petunia’s doorstep, leaving a letter rather than breaking the news in person. So there were lots of details Petunia couldn’t tell Harry, because she didn’t know herself, and she didn’t like talking about it anyway, so Harry shouldn’t be too nosy. And he shouldn’t go into too much detail about it outside the family, in case he attracted attention from the wrong sort.
Vernon came round to the benefits of the story with surprisingly little persuasion. After all, having a brother-in-law who had worked hard to bring criminals to justice, albeit in a foolishly reckless way, was far more respectable than having a brother-in-law who had been killed while driving drunk. And if anyone remembered anything he had said earlier that might have contradicted the new story (such as his wife not having a sister), he could just make ominous comments about the need for discretion, and how important it had been for him to be careful and maintain distance, especially with a young family of his own to support. And there was always the tactic his wife used when she wanted to change the subject: ‘It’s all very sad, you know. I don’t like to dwell on it.’
And then, after all that, Petunia got to welcome her boys back. She knew from speaking to Dudley and Marge on the phone in the evening that there would be photographs of Dudley riding ponies, feeding them apples, having dinner with his Aunt and her friends at nice restaurants. Harry had told her, after the first day at Mrs Figg’s, that one of his jobs there was helping a litter of kittens get used to humans, so when she came round to collect him on the day Dudley was due home, she took her camera, and snapped a few pictures of Harry playing with the kittens. They already had a few group pictures including Harry displayed in the living room; it was probably about time they had one of him alone, to go with the dozen or so with just Dudley, and the kittens were suitably photogenic.
Notes:
Dog-fighting is a very cruel sport, illegal and immoral and (incidentally) not respectable at all. Please don't confuse _Petunia_ thinking it's a normal thing for Marge to be doing with it _actually_ being a normal thing for anybody to be doing.
I do, however, think canon-Marge is very much coded as having connections to dog-fighting circles. Yes, some people who breed bulldogs breed them purely to sell as pets, and are quite ethical about it. However, Marge is _not_ an ethical dog-breeder - the way she talks about disposing of unwanted puppies in PoA makes that _very_ clear - and her enthused and amused reactions to Ripper's displays of aggression against Harry are also very sinister. People who want dogs as _pets_ (or working animals like sheepdogs, sniffer-dogs etc) find aggression a worrying trait they try to breed and/or train out of them. People who want dogs for bloodsport - or for parading around with to intimidate their enemies - are more likely to admire and encourage the trait. If you suspect somebody is raising dogs for fighting or other sinister purposes, contact your local authorities (discreetly, since there may be gangs involved).
https://www.webtoons.com/en/canvas/loving-reaper/friends/viewer?title_no=353275&episode_no=12
Chapter 4: St Gregory's
Chapter Text
Once the boys’ fourth birthdays were out of the way, Petunia took them shopping for their school uniforms. It was the first time Harry had had a whole outfit of entirely new clothes, just for him. With his being smaller and younger than Dudley, it had been entirely appropriate for him to wear the clothes Dudley had grown out of (with new socks and underwear of course); it had certainly never done Lily any harm to be dressed mostly in Petunia’s castoffs (or, in some cases, clothing unwillingly relinquished). Still, Harry looked very proud and impressed with his new grey trousers, his white polo shirts and his light blue sweatshirt with the ‘G’ for ‘St Gregory’s’ embroidered on. He was a little bemused by the elasticated blue-and-grey-striped tie, but nodded obediently when told how smart it was, and that he would learn how to tie a proper tie in a few years’ time. Dudley, who had been fidgeting with boredom, brightened up at the sight of the tie, and started playing with the elastic, making twanging noises. They also bought stationery, and each boy was permitted to choose his very own pencil case. Dudley picked one with racing cars, and Harry one with dancing animals. Later, Petunia would write each boy’s name on his pencil case in permanent marker, and sew name labels into their clothing. She still didn’t feel quite ready to relinquish them yet, but it had to be done. She wasn’t the only parent crying at the school gates on the first day, and there was nothing wrong with that. The house seemed horribly quiet at first, but she soon adjusted, improving her cleaning regime to make sure everything was spotless, patching up the little dents in the woodwork and scratches on the wallpaper that had gone unnoticed when she had had toddlers to look after, and developing more ambitious plans for the garden. Yes, her life was quite nice and normal these days, she told herself. Her house and garden looked like magazine illustrations, her husband was doing very well at work with a possible promotion in the offing, and her son and nephew were going to a very respectable primary school.
Harry loved St Gregory’s. He got to learn and study all he wanted. He learned to read quickly, and his writing grew slowly more legible. He was very proud of being able to count, and he knew the days of the week and the months of the year. He did feel a little wistful that his time in the garden with his Aunt was curtailed somewhat by the five days a week he spent in school, but he knew you couldn’t have everything, and having access to the school library – a whole library, right there in the school building! – made up for a lot. His life became a little more difficult when the teachers started writing things on the blackboard and expecting him to read it, but as long as he managed to sit near the blackboard, at the front, he could manage.
Dudley quite liked St Gregory’s, too. He didn’t particularly enjoy studying, but the pace of the lessons was slow and gentle enough that he could put in very little effort, and still do OK. He liked playing Tag and football in the playground, climbing the climbing frame, and eating large portions of the school dinners. At home, his mum made sandwiches for lunch and a cooked meal in the evening, but here, he had a cooked meal at lunchtime, as well as the one in the evening, and sometimes the dinner ladies would let him have seconds if he looked particularly wistful. He liked P. E., too, and he liked his classmates Malcolm and Gordon. Gordon had introduced him to arm-wrestling, which he often won, and Malcolm knew lots of funny jokes, sometimes with naughty words in. The boys would elbow each other and snicker whenever anything amusing happened, like the time their classmate Tina wet herself, or the time Jason insisted ‘circle’ began with an ‘s’, because it was an ‘s’ sound. Life wasn’t perfect – Dudley would have preferred to do more sports and running about, and less sitting at desks with books, and he missed being able to eat snacks whenever he wanted – but life was good. Especially since Malcolm and Gordon liked many of the TV shows he also watched, and they could talk about them afterwards.
The two boys had good school reports to take home for Christmas, Harry’s praising his studiousness, and Dudley’s praising his friendliness, and saying how well he had settled in. Harry’s report also had a note suggesting they get his eyes tested, since the way he held his books close to his face, and craned his head to look at the blackboard, made the teacher suspect he might need glasses. So they had a family outing to the shopping centre, where Vernon took Dudley to see Santa, and Petunia took Harry to see the optician. It transpired that Harry’s eyesight was indeed horrible, and he badly needed glasses, which he would be able to get on the NHS with only a small contribution from Aunt Petunia, if he went for some of the cheapest frames. Harry tried all the different NHS frames for children on, and since Aunt Petunia really seemed to feel the round ones didn’t suit him, they went for the cellulose acetate frames, in a pearly white colour referred to as ‘Crystal’. The nice receptionist lady said he would look very charming in them, and that they should be ready towards the end of January, and that was that. Aunt Petunia hardly scowled at all when handing over the money, even when the receptionist repeated what the doctor had said about Harry needing an eye test every year while he was young, and perhaps once every two years once he was grown up. Rather than grumble at him, his aunt actually said that it would be much easier for him to see the blackboard once he had glasses, so they were really an investment in his education, and he was to work hard and not disappoint them.
While the glasses made Harry’s schoolwork much easier, they did – indirectly – lead to the first time Harry and Dudley got in serious trouble at school, the best part of a year later. Piers Polkiss, a rather unpleasant little boy with a face like a rat, decided that Harry’s glasses made him a ‘swotty, speccy pillock’, and poked Harry in the chest to accompany his comments. Dudley, who called Harry a swot and a bookworm on a fairly regular basis at home, took offence nevertheless, and punched Piers in the face, giving him a rather dramatic nose-bleed. Then, when the teacher told Dudley off for bullying, Harry – quiet little Harry who had never been heard to raise his voice in the whole year and four months he had been a pupil there – screamed that Dudley wasn’t a bully, Piers was the bully, Dudley was a good cousin protecting Harry, and it wasn’t FAIR if Dudley was going to be punished for being GOOD. The lights flickered in time with Harry’s shouting, and then went out altogether with a loud bang. Piers was sent to the school nurse, and Harry and Dudley to Headmistress Rommele. Since the two boys proved largely unrepentant (‘I’m big and strong, and Harry is small and skinny, so I have to protect him!’ ‘You don’t punish people for being good, you punish them for being naughty! Dudley was right!’) the boys were left sitting in the hall while their guardian was summoned. Vernon Dursley was still at work, so it was Petunia Dursley who strode into the school and (with Harry and Dudley glued to the keyhole) gave the Headmistress a piece of her mind. She then told the boys (in the Headmistress’ hearing) that she was proud of them both for sticking up for each other, and she was taking them out of school for the rest of the day, as the Headmistress asked, so they could reflect on their actions, and think about what they did wrong, as well as what they did right (this last with a poisonous glare in the direction of Mrs Rommele). Then she took them out for hot chocolate with whipped cream on top, and helped them craft their apologies.
Their teacher, who had thought that the boys might baulk at apologising in front of the whole class (and thus give her licence to punish them again), was taken aback when they thanked her for the opportunity to do so. Dudley went first.
“I am very sorry, Piers, for not giving you the op-por-tun-i-ty to stop bullying Harry before I punched you on the nose. I should have asked you to stop, and only hit you if you kept poking him. And I a-pol-o-gise to everyone else in the class for making an un-sight-ly mess, and I have sent a-pol-o-gy cards to the school nurse and the cleaner for giving them extra work.” While everyone gaped, Harry went next.
“I am very sorry, Miss Wilmarth, for my very dis-res-pect-ful tone when I tried to explain what had happened. I should have said ‘Excuse me, Miss Wilmarth, but Dudley is not a bully’, and I should not have shouted. I a-pol-o-gise to everyone else in the class for dis-rup-ting the lear-ning en-vir-on-ment, and I will try not to shout in class in future, even when something is wrong.”
Miss Wilmarth fumed. There was nothing much she could say or do, for now, but from that day onwards she had Harry and Dudley firmly pegged, in her mind, as troublemakers. Where, previously, she had picked a child at random whenever she needed an errand running, and given that child a gold or silver star for doing it, now she would almost always pick Harry, especially if the errand involved carrying a pile of heavy books or doing something else which might prove taxing for a five-year-old who was one of the youngest in the class, and thin besides. And he didn’t get any stars for it. Dudley, on the other hand, she would single out in class. Woe betide him if he had not prepared for his lessons, or if he failed to understand something. She would ridicule him for every mistake he made. In a perverse kind of way, she ended up doing the boys a favour, however inadvertently. After school, in the lulls between Dudley’s favourite TV programmes, Harry would coach Dudley, drilling him on the times tables they were supposed to be learning, going over the assigned reading with him, helping him with mnemonics for the upcoming spelling tests. Miss Wilmarth was simply not given any room to make Dudley look bad. And the few times she tried, it did not go well.
“Excuse me, Miss, but you told us to learn the names of the Tudor monarchs, and Elizabeth the First is the last of them. So if you wanted Dudley to tell you who was the monarch after Elizabeth the First, you would have needed to tell him to learn the Stuarts as well, Miss, and I don’t think you did, Miss, it’s not in my diary, or Dudley’s, or Malcolm’s, or Gordon’s, Miss, I checked.”
“Excuse me, Miss, but Dudley hasn’t learnt the eight times table yet, Miss, or the six times table, he only prepared for the five times table, like you told us to...”
“Excuse me, Miss, but our textbook doesn’t list what all the fossil fuels are, it just gives coal as an example. Is there another book you would like us to read that gives more detail? I don’t mind extra reading, Miss...”
Oh, Miss Wilmarth disliked Dudley, but she absolutely loathed Harry. And Harry and Dudley fully returned her antipathy. But they themselves grew a lot closer that year. It became generally accepted in the school that no-one was to attempt to bully Harry, or they would have to deal with Dudley, and possibly his gang, as well. And Harry himself came to accept that since Dudley was less academically inclined, it was his job to help Dudley keep up to scratch, to explain things to him and coax him and praise him. Of course, Dudley still called Harry a swot, and scrawny, and made occasional jibes about Harry’s less manly tastes in hobbies and decor, just as Harry still rolled his eyes at all the things Dudley didn’t know, or didn’t know how to do. But that was different – they were family, and nobody outside the family was allowed the same liberties.
Petunia was so proud of her boys. And Vernon, while a little disconcerted with his son’s new studiousness, was reassured by the extent to which Dudley was studying ‘to the test’, rather than for the love of the subjects, and delighted by Dudley’s association with Malcolm and Gordon, and their shared love of arm-wrestling and other trials of strength.
Meanwhile, Miss Wilmarth fumed, and dropped little comments here and there about how awful Harry and Dudley were, one boy a horrible little thug, who had to be cheating to get the marks he did with his lack of intelligence, and the other a ghastly know-it-all who thought himself better than his company, and had no friends. She expressed sympathy in particular for Mrs Rosencraft, who would have to have both boys in her class next year, and it really wasn’t fair to put anybody else through that ordeal for a whole year, if only something could be done about it...
Headmistress Rommele considered the matter. Neither boy’s behaviour was remotely expulsion-worthy. Gracious, they’d have none but only children left, if they threw out every child who over-reacted when someone was unkind to their younger sibling, or every child who coached a less academically able sibling in preparation for tests. If Dudley was still punching everyone in the face upon the slightest provocation, or if Harry was doing Dudley’s homework for him, that might be another matter, but they really weren’t. And if not expulsion, then Miss Wilmarth’s comments about Dudley’s intelligence rather implied it might be appropriate to hold him back a year. While he did have a summer birthday, his marks were solidly above average for his year group, so that was not feasible. Harry, on the other hand... if Mrs Rosencraft really objected to having Harry in her Year Two class with Dudley next year, it might well be worth moving him up to Year Three. She’d have to talk to Mrs Dursley, of course.
And so it was that Harry Potter spent much of the Easter Holidays with his Aunt, going over the Year Two syllabus Mrs Rosencraft had given her. The maths was all stuff he knew how to do, and his reading and writing were more or less at the appropriate level, though there was always room for improvement, he knew. For the history and general knowledge, he had a reading list and had been permitted to borrow the books from the school library. It was the science that was the sticking point. Yes, there were textbooks, but some of the Year Two science also had a practical component. For most of the Easter Holidays, the windowsill of Petunia’s otherwise pristine kitchen was taken up with a series of jars. Broad beans sprouting in water, with bits of cardboard around them partially blocking the light; celery sticks resting in jars of coloured water; coloured paper, partially obscured by thick cardboard, being allowed to fade in the sun. Dudley, meanwhile, was spending the week at a rugby camp, together with Malcolm and Gordon. All three of them shared Uncle Vernon’s view that it was a pity it was touch rugby, rather than something more manly and physical, but it was good practice for when they were allowed to play proper rugby, and in the meantime, they still got thoroughly covered in mud when they played. Petunia was devoutly glad when the experiments ran their course, and she was able to clear them away, but it was easily worth it: for Harry’s happy smile, for the knowledge that she was getting one over on that ghastly Wilmarth bitch and that simpering Rosencraft fool, and for the thought that if Harry was accelerated a year, he would get the opportunity for one year of normal secondary school before his letter came. (A 2:1 ratio of genuine caring to spite. Not bad.)
When Dudley turned six, Aunt Marge came to his birthday party, bringing with her a bulldog pup called Ripper. When Harry held out his hand for the dog to sniff, as he would do to an unfamiliar cat, Ripper reacted with confusion and anger, and would have bitten him had Dudley not intervened. Dudley being more used to his Aunt’s dogs, managed to calm the creature down and talk Harry through Interaction With Dogs 101, rather proud that he was able to teach his cousin something useful, when it was normally the other way round. Harry eventually managed to make his way into Ripper’s better graces by saving the dog tidbits, although he never quite attained Dudley’s favoured-person status, doubtless due to Marge’s feelings towards the two boys.
For Harry’s birthday, he was allowed a small shopping spree in the charity shop and the second-hand bookshop, and a bookcase was added to his room to store his new treasures. He was also permitted to take some unwanted meat scraps around to Mrs Figg’s to share with her cats, as well as a slice of the birthday cake for his babysitter. Dudley (doubtless with Aunt Petunia’s money) had picked out an Encyclopedia for Harry, ‘because you like knowing stuff about everything.’ It was a little above Harry’s reading level, but he was sure he would improve with time.
In September of 1986, Dudley started Year 2, and Harry started Year 3.
Chapter Text
In November of 1986, Vernon Dursley received a promotion, from Senior Manager to Director. He was now in a position where he didn’t actually have a boss, only four other people of equal status to him, and of course the interests of the shareholders to consider. He got to move in to an even more palatial office, and he was now partly responsible for deciding company strategy. It was a heady time for him. Of course, his salary also increased substantially, to the point where he was finally able to do something he had been longing to for years: he put Dudley’s name down for Smeltings. His boy was going to attend the best and finest of public schools, just like his father! He and Petunia took the boys out to dinner in a fancy restaurant to celebrate the news. Dudley had an entirely new suit with a bow tie, and Harry had a new shirt, to wear with his school trousers, and Dudley’s old blazer and bow tie. Petunia had a lovely dress with a stole and some tasteful jewellery, and they looked like the model of a fine and respectable family.
Over the starters, Parma ham with melon for Petunia and the boys, and foie gras with truffles for Vernon, the man of the hour waxed lyrical about Smeltings, what wonderful times he’d had there, the boxing and the rugby and the rowing, the tradition of the Smeltings Sticks, how it had toughened him up and made a man of him, and how proud he was of his Dudders following in his footsteps, that Dudders was surely destined for great things and would go on to make a tremendous success of himself. His audience provided all the right approving comments at the right time, until after the starters were cleared away, and Dudley piped up:
“But what about Harry, Dad?”
“I’m not sending Harry there!” Vernon spat out, immediately. For a moment, there was silence, and then he adopted a more conciliatory tone. “It’s not the right kind of place for him at all, you know. Even if I wanted to send him, he wouldn’t be happy there. It wouldn’t do. Smeltings is for fine, manly boys like you, Dudders, and a little swot like Harry wouldn’t fit in. He’d be miserable. No, no...” This was when Petunia decided to intervene.
“Besides,” she told her son, “Harry’s father already put his name down for the school he went to, did it when Harry was a baby, apparently. My sister went there, too, on a scholarship. It’s not as prestigious as Smeltings, of course, but if it was good enough for Harry’s parents, it’ll be good enough for him. Two boys in the family going off to boarding school, very impressive, although thankfully it won’t be for a good few years yet. But you’re very kind and considerate to think of your cousin, Dudley. Such a sweet boy, isn’t he, Vernon?” Vernon nodded, bemused. He didn’t want to discuss his sister-in-law’s weirdness in public, and he still wasn’t too happy about the boy going to one of their schools, but his wife had persuaded him that those weirdos with their separate freaky society didn’t care what normal people wanted, and would have their own way regardless. If they wanted Harry to go to their freak school, go he would, regardless of his guardians’ wishes. All they could do was keep him as normal as they could while he was here, bring him up properly. And he supposed it would look impressive to outsiders.
“Yes indeed, dear,” he said. “Only right and proper, a boy going to his father’s old school. Traditional. Very important.”
The boys exchanged glances. It was already a little strange not being in the same class at school, and even then, they still walked to and from school together, and lived in the same house, and Harry still helped Dudley prepare for tests and things during the advertising breaks, and when Dudley didn’t care for the TV programme that was on. Living away from home, and away from each other, was rather a daunting prospect. Harry hoped it wouldn’t be soon.
“Please, Aunt Petunia,” he asked politely, “could you tell me how old we’ll be when we go away to boarding school?”
“Eleven,” she answered quickly. “You’ll be eleven. You’re only six now, so that’s how many years?” Dudley looked confused. Harry opened both hands, balancing the salt-cellar between them. He then folded down one finger at a time on his right hand, put the salt-cellar down, and held up his left hand again, with the fingers and thumb still extended.
“Five!” Dudley answered proudly, and Aunt Petunia nodded.
“That’s my good boys,” she said, watching with approval as Harry moved the salt-cellar back to its proper place on the table. “Clever boys. No, don’t worry, we’ll be keeping you at home while you’re young, and then when you’re big boys, and ready for a more character-building education, you get to go away to school. You’ll still be back for the holidays, of course, and you can write to us, and to each other. Besides,” she added, noticing that Vernon looked a little disgruntled at the boys’ attitudes, “it’s a tremendous privilege, going to a boarding school. It’s very prestigious, very impressive. It’s not every parent who works hard enough to get an important enough job that they can afford to send their child to a fine school like Smeltings.” Vernon preened. “Even for us, it’s a big investment, and we’re choosing to do it because your future is very important to us, Dudley. You’re our treasure.” Dudley grinned, but Harry looked a little wistful. “And Harry, your parents wanted you to have a good education, too, and so do we.”
And that was that. Vernon spent most of the rest of the evening talking about his promotion, and his plans for making Grunnings even bigger and more successful as a company, and what a wonderful school Smeltings was, and how proud his own father had been of sending his son there. The food was delicious, and Harry quite liked the experience of dressing up, and going to such an elegant place, taking part in grown-up conversation about the future, and carefully watching his aunt to make sure he used the right cutlery, with the right table manners. He didn’t want anyone to think he was a baby, who couldn’t be trusted, or a bad boy who didn’t deserve to go anywhere nice. No. He was a good boy, and a clever boy, and he was going to go to an impressive school when he was older.
Later, when it was just the two of them (Aunt Marge had taken Vernon and Dudley to watch the horse races, all dressed up in their nice suits), Aunt Petunia explained a little more to Harry. About how Hogwarts was really a school for weirdness, although this was a secret, and as far as anybody else was to know, it was a nice public school like Smeltings, only perhaps not quite as prestigious. More academic, maybe, and less focused on sports? That she wished she could just send Harry to a normal school, but his parents had already made the arrangements, and besides, it wouldn’t be safe. She explained to Harry that as he got older, his special abilities would get stronger, and while she knew he was being very good and working hard to learn to control them on his own, the school would teach him how to control them better, and how to do useful things with them, like healing broken bones in a moment, or teleporting hundreds of miles in a single second. (Though a lot of what the school taught was silly nonsense, no good in the real world.)
Harry cried at this. He didn’t want to be weird, and spend time surrounded by weird people. He wanted to be normal, and ordinary, like Aunt Petunia and Dudley and Uncle Vernon! But his Aunt cuddled him and comforted him, and the lights only flickered a little bit, and stopped doing it when he focused on calming himself, and breathing in and out.
“See,” she said, “that’s my good boy. That’s what I’ve taught you, ever since I’ve had you here. Control and discretion, and being sensible. Well done. You won’t have to go and live with weird people forever, you know. Once you’ve finished school, and you know how to control your abilities properly, you can come back and live in the normal world, catch up on your normal qualifications, and get a proper job, if that’s what you want then. And even if you do decide to get a job in that other world, you still know enough about being normal that you can visit the normal world, and seem perfectly normal when you come and see us. And you’re only little, you won’t have to go away to school for a long time. Besides, you might like it there. My sister loved it. And if nothing else, at least you won’t be the only child there from a normal family. There will be plenty of others like my sister was, born with strange abilities even though everyone else in the family was normal. You won’t be alone. It will be all right.”
Harry dried his eyes, and went back to memorising his twelve times table. They had a test on it next week, that and the six times table, which he already knew. He was going to study as hard as he could for his normal subjects, while he was still in normal school, and allowed to. Petunia, meanwhile, was stewing. Her poor nephew had been utterly distraught, and she blamed Albus Dumbledore. (Of course, it was she who had fostered in him that fear and disapproval of the magical world, but she didn’t consider that.) Snatching children away to that other place, regardless of their own wishes or their guardians’ wishes, horrible. It had hurt, having to break it to him, seeing him hurt like that. She wished she hadn’t had to do it. Of course, that awful man hadn’t wanted her to do it, either. He had told her that the (ugh) wizarding world was full of people who might resent Harry for his role in the downfall of that You-Know-Who person, and people who would think he was a hero, and give him a swollen head from too much attention. So Dumbledore’s solution was to have Harry grow up ordinary and humble, away from all that, until it was time for him to come into his inheritance, and he humbly begged Petunia to keep all knowledge of the (ugh) wizarding world from Harry, for the boy’s own good, and the good of her family and their world. For the good of Albus Dumbledore, more like. Manipulative old codger.
And how on earth did that man think Petunia was going to be able to keep Harry from all knowledge of anything to do with special abilities until he turned eleven? Keeping him away from other weirdos was one thing, but the boy had abilities of his own! He used them! She had grown up with a sister who used them! How was she supposed to tell him there was no such thing as magic, when he was using it in front of her? What good would it do to tell him lies and deny the existence of things that were patently, obviously real, when the facades would all come crumbling down on the boy’s eleventh birthday? Wait a moment... She paled, and her stomach lurched. She ran for her notebook (startling Harry, who had never seen her panic before), and started jotting frantic notes. If she had told him lies his whole childhood, and then he had found out when he turned eleven, he would stop trusting her and respecting her. If she had told him the evidence of his own eyes wasn’t real, it would be bad for him and for her and for their familial relationship. (She didn’t know the term gaslighting, but she’d had a friend in secretarial college whose boyfriend had been like that, making the friend all anxious, and constantly doubting herself, and it was a bad business all round. She’d been so glad when they finally split up.) If she didn’t tell him anything about his parents, about their past, he would be anxious to hear about them from other sources, and would latch onto those other sources, discarding her. It would be like Lily and the Snape boy, only a thousand times worse. And even simpler than that: Albus Dumbledore wanted her nephew to come unprepared into the freakish world. He wanted him ignorant. He wanted him to be a blank slate. He wanted him vulnerable.
Petunia Dursley was not having it. Her nephew was not going to be ignorant or vulnerable. And like she had promised him earlier, he wouldn’t be alone. He would have his family supporting him, always. He would be well prepared to weather what ever nonsense that Dumbledore freak came up with. Dumbledore had underestimated Petunia Dursley. And by the time he worked out that he had done so, it would be far too late.
Notes:
In the UK, every child is entitled to a free education at state schools; however, some parents choose to send their child to independent, fee-paying schools instead, mostly either because they believe the education is better, or because they wish their children to make friends only with the children of people they perceive as being 'like them'. Thus, all UK schools are either 'state schools' or 'independent schools'. Some of the older, more traditional and prestigious independent schools call themselves - or are known collectively as - 'public schools', like Eton and Harrow. Smeltings is very much depicted as one of those schools - see also the ludicrous uniform. Yes, the terminology can be a little confusing - I'm not even going into the various meanings that the term 'grammar school' can have, and the historical implications. The main thing to focus on is that Vernon, at this point, is planning to outlay a large amount of money in order to provide Dudley with what he sees as a better future, and to give himself bragging rights and bolster his own self-image as a successful man; he is also going to let people believe he is spending twice as much money as he really is, in order to do the same thing for Harry.
Also, foie gras is a delicacy, goose liver where the geese in question have been force-fed in a procedure that is rather cruel even by the usual standards of farming. Many people who are happy eating meat and dairy in general will refrain from eating foie gras because of the animal cruelty. Vernon Dursley is not the kind of person who cares about that kind of thing.
Chapter 6: a healthy (normal) balance
Chapter Text
It became a common sight, in the Dursley household of an evening, to see Vernon and Dudley Dursley sitting on the sofa, with cans of fizzy drink and beer on the table before them, watching boxing matches on the television. Sometimes they were joined by Malcolm and Gordon. Petunia, meanwhile, would be reading magazines about fashion or gardening while smiling indulgently, and Harry would be poring over his textbooks, or sometimes his library books, but even they seemed related to the topics he was studying at school. If Harry had eaten a suitably large amount of dinner, he would be permitted to have a handful or two of the crisps and peanuts the men of the house were devouring, but never too much, in case he spoiled his breakfast.
Vernon also began spending more time on the phone than he used to, apparently phoning up fellow Smeltings alumni, mentioning his son was soon to be going to Smeltings, and deploring the lack of boxing clubs where he could introduce his son to ‘the noble sport’. Apparently all the gyms and sports clubs Uncle Vernon knew didn’t approve of having prepubescents punch each other, and he and his friends agreed this was most unfair of them. The kind of namby-pamby, wishy-washy thinking that was increasingly endemic in modern society, and thoroughly enervating for the nation’s moral fibre, in his humble opinion. Eventually, Vernon’s dedicated networking paid off, and he discovered the existence of a gym approximately five miles from Little Whinging, one which had dedicated boxing classes for younger children (7-12 as well as 13-17). Of course, Dudley, Malcolm and Gordon were still too young for the classes, but only by a few months. In the meantime, the teacher, another Smeltings alumnus, although young enough that Vernon had left Smeltings before he arrived, was happy to give some recommendations for budding young boxers. Dudley and the gang were quite disappointed they weren’t supposed to punch each other without proper safety equipment and supervision, and they were rather leery about using skipping ropes, which they had thought were only for girls, but upon being assured by Vernon that real boxers used skipping ropes all the time, they complied, and grew quite competitive over it.
By February of 1987, Dudley was noticeably losing some of his baby fat. He wasn’t thin by any means, and he still had a round little face, but his arms and legs were showing signs of muscle under the fat, and he could jump and climb trees and swing from the monkey bars in a most impressive fashion. Harry, on the other hand, was still skinny, but showing very little sign of muscle, and not gaining as much height as one might like. He had bags under his eyes, and he really didn’t seem to be taking any exercise to speak of – just reading, always reading. It took actual coaxing to get him to help his Aunt in the garden, which he had always loved, or to go and play with Mrs Figg’s cats. Petunia put her foot down, insisted he join her in the garden one Sunday afternoon, and demanded answers. Was he finding Year 3 too much for him? There would be no shame in it, when he was nearly two years younger than the oldest of his classmates. She had high expectations of him, yes, but she didn’t want to put too much pressure on him. It transpired he was frightened of missing out on the real world, and trying to cram as much proper, normal, real world education in as possible, before it was snatched away. Once again, Petunia cursed Albus Dumbledore (rightly or wrongly). It took her a moment to even calm down enough to speak.
“Harry, dear,” she eventually said, “I think there’s been a misunderstanding. Trying to cram in as much academics as possible, making yourself poorly by not getting enough sleep and not taking enough exercise – that’s not a good way to experience the real world. That’s not a normal life. It’s bad for your health, and I’m not going to let you do that. I want you to be healthy and happy, as well as doing well at school, and I want you to have a normal life.” Harry nodded, shamefully. He wanted so much to be normal, and apparently he had been doing it wrong. “It’s all right, dear. This is part of my job as your guardian, to pay attention to you and notice when you’re making mistakes, so we can correct things.” It should have been Lily doing this, she thought bitterly, and then steeled herself to continue. “You got into bad habits, and you could have been hurt if you’d kept them up, but you meant well, so I’m not going to punish you. We’re going to work out together what’s healthy and best for you, and help you get into new habits, and lead a nice, normal life.”
For the next month, Harry was not allowed to do any studying apart from his actual schoolwork. Petunia put her foot down. Of course he was to do his homework, and revise for tests. And of course he could keep coaching Dudley – that was a very good thing for him to be doing. And when he was given his homework assignments back, he was still allowed to read over them and note down all the spelling and grammar corrections, so that he was able to get them right next time. That was a very good, grown-up habit to have. But no more learning extra difficult maths that they hadn’t covered yet, no more combing the dictionary for difficult-seeming words, no more memorising history and science topics that Harry knew were part of the Year Four or Year Five curriculum, rather than being required for Year Three. Oh, and she was taking away his photocopied outlines of the Year Three, Year Four, Year Five, and Year Six curricula, with the tick marks on. Perhaps at some point in the future, he might be able to reprise these studies, but for now, Petunia was adamant. If he wanted to be normal (and he did, oh, he did), he should cut down to the standard topics, to leave room in his life for other things that weren’t study, so he could have a normal, balanced existence.
Harry didn’t know what on earth he was supposed to do with all the extra time he would have. Dudley gaped at him (he himself found doing the minimum amount of work to get decent marks quite a large time commitment, and would have loved to have more time to watch TV or have contests of strength with his friends). Aunt Petunia laughed, and ruffled both of their hair.
“You like gardening, dear, and you like cats.” Harry nodded; he genuinely did. Apparently, gardening was good exercise, and spending time with Mrs Figg’s cats was also good for him. As a concession, Petunia also told him he was allowed to read books about cats if he wanted to. While that did count as research and studying, it wasn’t directly related to school, so she was willing to exempt it from the general ban. Perhaps he should see if there were any other animals he particularly liked, and he would be allowed to read about them, too. She hadn’t seen him reading any fiction for a while. Perhaps he could take that up again. It didn’t do to spend all one’s time with one’s nose in a book, but having some knowledge of literature was the mark of an educated person, though it was important not to be snobbish about it. He should be careful to take plenty of exercise. He didn’t yet have a sport he was interested in, like Dudley, so he should try lots of things and see what he liked best. Harry could do that. And it might help with the other thing he urgently needed to work on – making friends.
Harry was rather daunted by the prospect, but Aunt Petunia gave him some good advice. He was acquainted with his classmates by now, wasn’t he, even if he wasn’t close to any of them. Had he noticed any of them that had particular hobbies or interests that none of the other children seemed as interested in? He should talk to them about those hobbies, see if the hobbies seemed like something he would also enjoy. Perhaps he would find something fun, and even if he didn’t, he would have learned something, and got to know his classmate better, and gained goodwill. She also advised him to watch the games other children played in the playground, and see which ones looked like fun, and whether they would let him join in. If they said no, he should go away and ask another group, and not let himself get disheartened. Perhaps in class discussions, if anyone made any points Harry found interesting, he could go up to them afterwards and ask to talk more on the subject? Petunia had had to work all those things out for herself, over the course of several years. Lily had been the charismatic one, never her. It would have been nice if someone had given her advice like that when she was Harry’s age. At least Dudley seemed to have his father’s charisma.
Following up on his aunt’s advice was rather scary, but it did work. Alice, who was obsessed with chess and took a portable set to school every day, had long since given up on finding a classmate to play with her. Either they didn’t know how to play at all, or they did, but she could beat them so easily they didn’t want to play any more. So she mostly just did chess puzzles by herself. When little Harry came up to her and said he thought chess looked very interesting, and he would love to play with her, but he didn’t know how, and might she consider teaching him, she agreed. Chess, it turned out, was rather fun. Alice was very good about showing him where he had gone wrong, and what he might have done instead. She knew names for all the different strategies, and could tell him about famous matches between famous chess players who had used them, and he was slowly getting better. He had less success with Liam, who was the other loner in the class. It turned out Liam’s main hobby was killing insects (and other minibeasts), often quite slowly so he could watch them wriggle, and that just wasn’t fun at all. It was rather horrifying. Knowing Liam better made Harry want to avoid him as much as possible, whereas before he had been on neutral terms with him, as with everyone. At break time, when he wasn’t playing chess with Alice, he dutifully joined in the football (boring), the games of Tag (only slightly less boring), and was turned away from the games of clapping and chanting (no boys allowed).
But it was Petunia’s idea of following up on class discussions that paid the greatest dividends (or caused the most trouble, depending on one’s perspective). They were studying the Victorians at the moment, and two of his classmates, Nathan and Tahmima, seemed to find the textbook’s depiction of the British Empire very unsatisfactory. The two of them gravitated to each other as soon as the bell went for break, and Harry hovered in their vicinity. They both began venting angrily to each other, using a lot of words Harry didn’t understand, but eventually they noticed him there, and were kind enough to explain to him what was the matter. (‘Colonialism’, apparently.) The British Empire, it seemed, was a difficult subject. Some people thought it was wonderful, and some people thought it was horrible – especially those who had lived in countries that had become British colonies, and were not themselves British and white.
“My grandparents are British now,” Tahmima explained, “and my Dad was born here, like me, but they were born in Bengal, back when it was still part of the British Empire. My grandma looked after me a lot when I was younger – I still go back to hers after school most days, and one of my parents picks me up from there once they’ve finished work – and she’s told me stories about what it was actually like living in the British Empire, and it wasn’t nice.” That led into a really interesting talk about what History was, about different people writing down different versions of what happened, based on their different perspectives, and the importance of piecing things together to find out what really happened, and about how economic interests often played a big role in determining which version was chosen as the best version, rather than just picking the more accurate one. Harry learned several new words, like bias and propaganda, and, perhaps more importantly, he really felt he’d made some new friends.
Petunia was very pleased that Harry had been making friends, and had even found a new hobby – chess was quite respectable, after all. As a reward, she bought him a half-a-dozen foolscap cardboard wallets for his research notes, and two ring-binders – one for his science studies, she explained, and one for history. He could put all his maths notes into one folder, and his English notes into another – the lists of spelling words, and his homework with the corrections written out, and his photocopied pages from grammar and spelling guides that were ahead of his year level – because they were all one subject, and all things he’d cover in school within the next few years. The ring-binders, on the other hand, were so he could separate out big, general subjects like history and science into different topics. He could have one section for the Tudors, one for the Victorians, one for Ancient Egypt; and in the same way, he could have one section in the science folder for cats, one section for his notes from the How Things Work book, one section for plants, one for minibeasts, one for physics, and so on. (He added a General Science and General History section to the binders without even being told to.) On the same shopping trip, she had bought Dudley a book about famous boxers. It might be a bit above his reading level, she had reasoned, but he could always look at the pictures, and perhaps Harry could read it with him, help him along. Harry had been happy to. He was sometimes at a bit of a loose end in the evenings, when it was too dark for gardening, and he’d already done all of his homework. Unfortunately, while Vernon was very happy Dudley was reading about boxing (‘Atta boy, Dudley!’), he was less comfortable with Harry reading the book out loud to Dudley within Vernon’s own hearing. Jack Dempsey didn’t seem to bother him, but Joe Gans, the first African-American boxing World Champion, apparently evoked a distinct feeling of unease, as did Benny Leonard (Jewish), and thankfully the boys had the sense to save Muhammad Ali for when Vernon was out. ‘Cassius Clay is a slave name’, indeed. She resolved that the next book she bought Dudley about boxing would only feature English boxers.
Chapter 7: horrifyingly wizardly
Chapter Text
Summer of 1987 was an interesting one – as in the saying ‘May you live in interesting times.’ Petunia much preferred things to be suitably boring, but it wasn’t as if the universe had asked her preferences. And it could have been worse. After all that build-up, Dudley could have come back from his long-awaited boxing classes deciding he’d lost all interest in the subject, but no, he loved it. And instead of making a fuss about the head protection and mouthguard he had to wear for it, he just preened about how manly the whole outfit looked.
And to be fair to Harry, he didn’t mean to cause trouble. He did his very best to be good and normal, and he was always very polite and respectful to her, and very serious. (Not like that father of his; she’d trained him well.) For much of June, in the last weeks of waiting for the boxing classes to start, Dudley had been doing a lot of running around Little Whinging park, and making regular trips to the swimming pool in Greater Whinging, and Harry was gamely accompanying him. Of course, Petunia came, too, but she just sat on a bench in the park, or a chair in the swimming pool café, to watch them. Harry actually swam and ran alongside Dudley, and encouraged him, and told him what a great boxer he was going to be. (It was nice to see him being properly supportive of his cousin, not like Lily had been with her.) No, the trouble started once Dudley’s lessons were underway, and he was spending all day, every day in the sports centre over in the next town. Very politely and hesitantly, Harry had told her that while swimming and running were okay, and that he liked them much better than football and was happy to do them alongside Dudley as part of Dudley’s training, he still hadn’t found a sport that he liked as much as Dudley liked boxing, and was wondering if he might try some new ones, over the summer. Nothing too expensive, of course, and nothing outside the Whinging area.
And then it turned out he wanted to go to yoga classes, of all things, and the Dance School. She knew Vernon was secretly pleased Harry was less manly than Dudley, but those sounded much too effeminate for any boy under Vernon’s roof to be partaking in. And yoga was very foreign. Still, the yoga classes were cheaper than swimming, and held in the same sports centre, so she could just give him the money for the swimming sessions, pack him off to the sports centre, and it was none of her business whether he did swimming or yoga, and she didn’t want to know. And the open weekend at the Dance School was at least free, and some of his classmates were going. She could just give him permission to spend the weekend with his school-friend, and send him away with a packed lunch. Yes. And make sure he knew the importance of discretion. That taking exercise was healthy and important, but some people might think yoga and dancing were unmanly, so he shouldn’t boast about it until he had found out for himself what they were like, and even then he should talk to her privately before deciding whether or not it was OK. Oh, and if he did go to yoga rather than swimming, he shouldn’t fritter away the extra money; he should be responsible with it.
(She could have just said no, and maybe she should have; it would have made her life simpler. But Harry was a good boy, and rarely asked for anything, and it was important that he found some forms of exercise he enjoyed. And he’d clearly taken her words to heart about the importance of having hobbies, which was heartening. She was in no danger of over-indulging the boy, like her parents had Lily; she could perhaps indulge him a little bit.)
The other item that had been on her to-do list, besides ‘make sure Harry has some nice, respectable hobbies besides studying’, was ‘sort out Harry’s sleeping arrangements.’ He wouldn’t turn seven until the end of the month, and he was quite small even for a six-year-old, but he was still getting far too big for a cot mattress in a Wendy House. Dudley had been sleeping in a proper bed for a couple of years, now. Harry had apparently been taking his mattress out of his Wendy House once every couple of weeks, and trying to see if he could sleep in the bedroom, normally, without the comfort of the surrounding canvas walls, but he couldn’t do it. He could make himself stay there – he didn’t want to be cowardly, like a baby – but he just couldn’t get comfortable and relaxed enough to go to sleep. He had hoped he would grow out of it, but he just wasn’t growing out of it fast enough, and he was very sorry.
Petunia had an idea. She didn’t like it, of course, but she couldn’t see any alternatives. Harry couldn’t stay in the Wendy House. And no boy from a respectable household slept in a cupboard – it just wasn’t normal. And he wasn’t going to get over his weird bedroom phobia soon enough. That left one option. She obtained an IKEA catalogue, and some catalogues from other furniture shops, to browse through with Harry. She’d only ever heard of the things in the context of Lily’s freakish school – Hogwarts – and as something that wealthy people in Britain had done hundreds of years ago. But apparently some normal people still had them. She sighed, and summoned Harry.
Harry was quite interested to hear that there was a special kind of bed, with curtains all the way round it, called a four-poster bed, and that when he went away to boarding school, all the student beds would be four-poster beds. That his mum and dad had slept in beds like that at school. And he was gratified to hear that they weren’t just beds for weirdos – hundreds of years ago, everyone who was rich enough slept in beds like that, and even now, some people still did. And the beds and bedrooms in the catalogues looked very nice, if a bit too grand for him. He wasn’t sure if he deserved a lovely bed like that. And then he saw the prices, and panicked. Uncle Vernon would never spend that kind of money on him! And he didn’t want to put them to so much trouble, anyway. They were five times, ten times, the price of the cheapest normal beds in the catalogue! He started panicking, but he remembered the breathing exercises from yoga, the pranayama, and calmed himself. Aunt Petunia was showing him these for a reason. She must have a plan.
Of course Petunia had a plan. Here, as everywhere, Petunia Dursley kept track of all the neighbourhood gossip. The Nicholsons from Number Ten had had builders in earlier in the spring, converting their attic into an extra bedroom, so their twins (a boy and a girl, starting Year Six in the autumn) would each have a room of their own, rather than sharing with each other. About time, too, the neighbourhood thought. Propriety was important. Of course, it was a three-bedroom house, but Mrs Nicholson had had a baby the previous year, another boy, and it wouldn’t be right to make either child share with the baby. But then, with the baby and all, Mr and Mrs Nicholson hadn’t had time to redecorate, and she’d heard last week they’d finally agreed to pay Rosalind Peterson from Magnolia Crescent to do the work. Just as well. Her poor mother had been driven to distraction, with the daughter cutting her hair short, dyeing it blue, and insisting on being called Roz. And she had a nose piercing – and then had the nerve to act surprised when no business in Little Whinging or Greater Whinging would hire her for a Saturday job, or for temporary work over the summer holiday! At least the child wasn’t a complete delinquent, even if she did her best to look like one. She had left Stonewall High School with very good GCSEs, and was starting an Art and Technical College in the autumn, where perhaps she wouldn’t stand out so much. And in the meantime, the girl did know her DIY, even if she looked like a hoodlum, so Mrs Nicholson had been kind enough to take her on, to redecorate the shared room to the girl’s tastes, and decorate the attic for the boy.
And so, the Nicholson children’s old wooden bunk bed ended up in Harry’s room, along with a 5 metre roll of flexible curtain track. Harry didn’t like the bed much – something about the slatted bed bases made him really uneasy, and it had lots of scratches and dents and even some graffiti. But he was able to cover the bed bases up with the dust sheets, so he didn’t have to look at them, and he trusted that his aunt knew what she was doing, and this Rosalind Peterson would know how to turn the bunk bed into an elegant four-poster bed, like the ones in the pictures. So Harry slept in his Wendy House while Roz Peterson finished working on the Nicholson kids’ rooms; he went to yoga class once a week, and swimming with Dudley once a week, and ran round the park, and visited the library, and didn’t worry about it (much).
If it had been left to Petunia, she would have fitted the curtain track to the top of the bunk bed, screwed it into place, permitted Harry to choose from several of the cheapest options for ready-made curtains of the right size, and then called it a day. But while she knew how to do a certain amount of DIY, of make-do-and-mend, she didn’t particularly enjoy it, and since the Peterson girl was available, she didn’t have to. (In another universe, where she blamed Harry for his being dumped on her, she begrudged him every penny spent on him, and dyed second-hand clothes to make his school uniform. Here, she blamed Dumbledore, and while she still didn’t want to spend much money on Harry, she didn’t mind spending a bit, as long as she got good value for money.)
Roz Peterson, on the other hand, saw herself as an artist. She had vision. She was thorough. The Nicholsons had paid her a (very small) weekly wage, while reimbursing her for money spent on materials, or buying them for her if they were particularly expensive. She was able to negotiate the same deal with Mrs Dursley, with the caveat that she should keep costs down as much as possible, and show receipts. As far as the housewives of Privet Drive were concerned, they got to pay a fraction of what they would have paid a professional decorator, and they got to seem gracious and kind, since they were deigning to employ poor Mrs Peterson’s otherwise unemployable daughter. As far as Roz was concerned, she got to work on some fun art and design projects, which she would document for her portfolio for extra credit with college; she got to try out all kinds of fun stuff and have the materials paid for; and she’d have a bit of spending money for when she started college.
On the first day of her new employment, Roz brought round her portfolio, her camera, a big bag of sandpaper, a rasp, and a cube of cork. After photographing the bed, she let Harry leaf through the portfolio admiringly, while she attacked the bedstead with coarse sandpaper and the rasp, and chatted away to him, getting a sense of his likes and dislikes, his favourite colours, and his ideas on what was pretty and what wasn’t. Harry, who was not used to such flattering attention, soaked it up like a sponge. They took a break from the sanding to let the air clear a bit, and she drew some little sketches for Harry, of different ways the bed might look. The one they finally decided on had a canopy over the top bunk, like a tent, with room inside for storage. Harry thought it might make managing his wardrobe easier if he could have his winter jumpers in boxes for the summer, and his summer shorts and T-shirts in boxes for the winter. Perhaps he could put his school uniform away during the holidays, too. And then he had all those folders of notes sitting on the floor. He could keep those in the storage space, and maybe his library books, too, so he didn’t get them muddled up with the books that were his very own and lived in his bookcase. (Roz thought he was a strange child, to get so excited about keeping his room tidy, but his enthusiasm was kind of adorable.) She let him plan his storage space while she went back to the bed with the medium and fine sandpaper, and by the end of the day it was smooth and shining. She took more photos of it, and wrote down lots of measurements, and did the maths for the canopy frame and its angles. Harry swept up the sawdust before she could get round to it, and they were done.
The next day Harry spent with Roz was even busier. She took him round charity shops, and to a jumble sale, and even round a junk yard. (This was not quite what Petunia had intended by telling Roz to keep costs down, but so it goes.) It was all rather noisy and intimidating for poor Harry, but beyond that, it was irregular and variegated when Harry was used to the sameness of Privet Drive and its environs. (So had Roz been, and that very difference was part of the appeal for her.) Still, Roz let him hold her hand, or clutch at the bags when she had her hands busy, and he was learning lots of new things. Roz had a list of things they were looking for, and she made a point of consulting him, and encouraging him to point out to her whenever he saw something pretty. Sometimes, she noticed him looking at things even when he didn’t say anything, and made a point of examining what he’d been looking at, always finding something nice to say about his taste. In the end, as well as carrying two big bags and a giant bundle back to Privet Drive, they had reserved a couple of bigger, heavier things, that Roz’s dad was going to come back for with his van. It was almost all things Harry was sure Aunt Petunia would sniff at disdainfully and pronounce ‘junk’, but Roz had a plan for how it was all going to turn into a beautiful bed.
It took a lot of cleaning, and measuring, and sawing, and hammering, and fiddling around with a spirit level, and putting Harry in the corner with the brass polish while Roz did something a bit dangerous at the other end of the room with electric drills or soldering irons, but eventually, and after another shopping trip, Harry’s new bed was finished. The wooden frame was dark brown and gleaming, including the new framework for the canopy. The bed curtains hanging from the track were made of a blue and green brocade with a subtle swirling pattern, as was the canopy. The canopy was pierced with eleven eyelet fittings, and each eyelet had a decorative finial which held the canopy in place over its frame, and could be removed to provide access to the storage space. The floor of the storage space was covered with dark blue linoleum, as was the ceiling of the bed space, ensuring that the slatted bed base for what had been the upper bunk was well and truly hidden. In a fit of whimsy, she had added silver stars to the ‘ceiling’. There was a padded headboard, covered in dark green oilcloth, and the curtains had a dark green lining. The feet of the bed were bolted to the floorboards, and the corner posts at the head of the bed were affixed to the wall. (Roz had Views about safety, and had been mildly shocked that the Nicholsons had left the bed in a free-standing condition.) What was once the lower bunk had a new mattress, with dark blue sheets and pillowcases, a duvet, and a bedspread made with the last of the brocade fabric, and there was a second sheets and pillowcase set, in dark green, folded on the bed. There was a small reading lamp affixed to the corner bedpost, with a hanging switch, and the storage space also had a row of small lights fastened to the roof pole. Harry thought it was the most beautiful piece of furniture he had ever seen. Roz thought it was wicked, and would make a great addition to her portfolio. It had a totally different vibe from John Nicholson’s room, or Janet’s. (Yes, the Nicholsons really did call their twins Janet and John.)
Petunia thought it was horrifyingly wizardly. How does the boy do it, she thought despairingly. He hasn’t been near that world since he was a baby. And just look at it. Then she looked at Harry, and noticed his lip was quivering. Her disapproval seemed to be utterly devastating for him.
“Well, it’s not to my taste,” she said bracingly, “but it’s not my bedroom, is it? It’s yours. And that’ll be your bed until you’re all grown up and moved out, Harry, so I hope it stays to your taste, because it’ll be your time and pocket money altering it otherwise.” She moved closer to the bed, inspected the fittings and joints, the eyelets and finials, the alignment of the curtains, and the proper installation of the electric lights. “Good workmanship, Rosalind. You clearly know what you’re doing, at least with the technical skills, and the budgeting.” Roz was relieved enough that she didn’t even muster a token objection to the misnaming, or to the implied criticism.
Dudley thought the bed was very grand – but also kind of sissy. He wouldn’t want one. He liked his duvet cover with the superheroes on, and now Harry had been getting some improvements to his room, Dudley’s parents were finally getting him a TV for his room. So much better than a weird bed with poncy curtains and golden cats on top. Personally, Dudley preferred dogs. And horses. But Harry liked cats, so that was OK.
Vernon’s thoughts were very similar to Dudley’s. On the one hand, the bed was not to his taste at all. On the other hand, it looked like it had cost a lot of money, but it had actually been relatively cheap, and that was a winning combination as far as he was concerned.
None of the Dursleys had noticed, but the bed wasn’t quite finished. While the finials at the four corners of the bed had brass cat ornaments, and the finials at the ends of the roof pole each had a larger, wooden cat statuette, the five remaining finials just had small wooden pedestals with nothing on them. Roz had given Harry a small tube of superglue, a piece of coarse sandpaper, and a very detailed list of do’s and don’ts for working with them, and had told him to finish the bed off when, and only when, he could think of another animal he liked as much as cats.
So of course, as if the summer hadn’t been quite tiresome enough for Petunia as it was, Harry had to go and reveal another tiresome wizardly side to him. And she couldn’t even be cross with him for it, because he had saved Dudley a very nasty experience. It was the last week of August. Petunia was in the park, having a nice gossip with Mrs Number Eight, who was pushing her toddler on the kiddie swings. Dudley, Gordon and Malcolm had commandeered a hopscotch ladder drawn in chalk on one of the paths, and were using it to judge how far they could throw some rather large rocks they had collected. Harry was sitting nearby on a bench, reading a book and applauding whenever one of the others made a particularly good throw. All was peaceful. Suddenly, there was a scream, and Harry was throwing himself into the bushes that bordered the path, even as the other boys ran in the other direction. Petunia ran towards them.
“S..S...S...Snaaaake!” Dudley was wailing as she drew near them. “It was going to bite me, but Harry saved me!” Petunia gaped at him in horror, but thankfully at that moment Harry emerged from the bushes. Malcolm and Gordon just kept running.
“Aunt Petunia, please may I have an egg from the fridge at home?” he asked. “The snake had a terrible fright, you see, and I tried to tell her we were all very sorry, but she doesn’t think being sorry means very much unless there’s something nice to eat with the apology. I can’t go and catch her a mouse, I don’t know how, and she says she likes eggs very much.” He seemed to register his Aunt’s expression. “Um. The rock went quite near her, and she’s pregnant, due in another few days, so she’s feeling very vulnerable and bad-tempered right now, and it was quite hard to talk her down from biting Dudley and the other two... oh.” He looked even gloomier. “Normal people can’t talk to snakes, can they?”
“No they can not,” she snapped at him, “and that isn’t even the point right now! You are both in serious trouble! The snake had a terrible fright? I had a terrible fright! You are both coming home right now, and you may consider yourselves grounded!” The two of them were sent straight to their rooms, while Petunia commandeered the telephone to shout at everyone who might be responsible for allowing dangerous and bad-tempered snakes to roam about in public parks threatening innocent young boys. Eventually, Harry was summoned to the telephone to give the gentleman from the RSPCA a description, and when he heard about the pretty pattern the snake had, a row of dark brown diamonds along her spine, and light brown sides, he told Harry to write down the words ‘vipera berus’, and look them up in the library next time he was passing. Then, the hapless volunteer began explaining to Petunia Dursley that adders were a native species to Great Britain, and also (under the Wildlife and Countryside Act of 1981), the adder had every right to be in the park, and neither she nor he nor anybody else had the right to kill it, and it would be a criminal matter if they tried to. He unwisely added that they were very beautiful creatures, and her sons should count themselves lucky to have seen one, as they were much less common than they used to be, and very shy besides.
Once the resultant explosion of wrath had subsided, Dudley was permitted to phone Malcolm and Gordon, check that they were all right, and notify them that he and Harry were also unharmed, but grounded. Harry was (grudgingly) given an egg from the fridge, and allowed to go to the park and leave it for the snake (in case she might hold a grudge otherwise) but he was not to make a habit of giving their good food away, and if he wanted to feed strange creatures in the future, he would have to use his own money to do so. And he had better hurry back.
But from then on, Harry added ‘snakes’ to the list of his favourite creatures and topics of interest. It was nice to be able to properly talk to another animal, rather than just communicate with tone of voice and body language, like he did with cats. Of course, the experience had been a bit nerve-wracking, but he couldn’t really blame the snake. He wouldn’t like it if he was just sitting, minding his own business, and was then narrowly missed by a huge rock bigger than he was coming out of nowhere. She had every right to be a bit cross, and he hoped she’d managed to have her babies without any problems.
Chapter Text
Petunia had known, of course, that she was pushing it a little, spending as much money on Harry as she had, over the summer. Between the yoga classes and Roz’s wages and expenses, it was still a fraction of what they spent on Dudley, but it was not insignificant. Vernon was tolerating it, but barely. So she had been careful to make Harry’s birthday present a particularly paltry one, in monetary terms. A single framed photograph, a bar of chocolate, and a file folder with some photocopies in. Less than a pound’s worth, and not looking like much compared to the positive mountain of presents Dudley had received in June, but she knew that to Harry, they would be priceless. Harry had cried. And then he had hugged her, and Dudley (who had given him a packet of cat treats and a roll of polo mints, the thoughtful boy), and smiled sincerely at his Uncle.
The photo (Petunia had reassured Vernon beforehand) was a perfectly normal, ordinary photograph. It showed Petunia’s parents, with an eight-year-old Petunia, and a six-year-old Lily, wearing their best clothes and standing in a garden. (Her paternal grandparents’ garden, to be precise. One of her uncles was very fond of photography, and had insisted on taking everyone’s picture while the extended family was gathered. Petunia’s own parents hadn’t had the money for a camera, even a cheap one, until much later. Petunia’s new dress had itched, and the dress Lily was wearing used to be Petunia’s best dress, and she hadn’t wanted to give it up, even if it was a bit shorter and tighter than it should be.) Harry drank in the sight of his mother’s face hungrily. For a moment, Petunia felt a little guilty, then checked herself. Any orphan would be hungry for more information about his parents, but really, with everything that had happened, it was quite natural that she didn’t like to talk about them. And with the content of some of those letters, war and people dying and those details about what the (ugh) Death Eaters actually believed – well, it only stood to reason she hadn’t given them to him earlier. Even seven was really too young. But he would need to know sooner or later what that world was like, and the better prepared he was, the better chances he had of surviving. She was doing her best. (She truly was. Of course, another person in her situation would have doled out the information about the wizarding world in age-appropriate portions over the course of the next four years, rather than dropping it all on him at once, but that would have required a more thorough mastery of the information than Petunia was capable of undertaking. And she had always been rather an all-or-nothing person, anyway, so it’s hardly surprising the possibility didn’t occur to her.)
So it was not surprising to her that, his grounding over and done with, Harry was noticeably subdued, starting Year Four. She kept an eye on him, to make sure he was still getting enough sleep and taking enough exercise, but he seemed to have learned from his mistakes of the previous academic year. And Dudley was also looking out for him and doing his best to cheer him up, little angel that he was. Her baby was starting Year Three now, robust and cheery as ever. He was such a comfort to her.
At various points throughout the autumn term, Harry would approach her with questions, always and only when it was just the two of them in the house. Sometimes the questions were very general and impersonal. One of the big ones was how exactly the magic mentioned in history books was related to the magic found in fiction, the magic found in myths and legends, the special abilities he himself could use, and the hidden world his parents had lived in, the one with Hogwarts School. She explained as best she could, dredging up memories of things Lily had mentioned in passing years ago. The Statute of Secrecy seemed to be the key factor, in the seventeenth century. Before that, magical people had lived alongside normal people, who had sometimes been quite happy with the arrangement, and sometimes not – and them not being happy sometimes led to witch-hunts. The Catholic Church may have been involved, too. The library would have history books about that, even if it was written from the perspective that magic wasn’t real and the witch-hunters had been deluded, it would still tell him what they did and why. The Statute had meant all magical people had to hide away from normal people in their own world, and the normal governments let them, and normal people started believing there was no such thing as magic, and never had been. They might have had help with that, she added darkly, but refused to go into details. Not before you’re ten, she insisted. Harry nodded, reluctantly, and wrote down a note in the back of his notebook. Apparently he was keeping a page for mentions of things he was too young to know about yet, so he didn’t forget once he was older.
At other times, the questions were more personal. “Mum said we had a cat, when I was a baby. Do you know what happened to it?” (No.) “Did the leader of Mum and Dad’s vigilante organisation really drop me on the doorstep overnight, without a word of warning?” (Yes.) “Is he still the Headmaster of Hogwarts?” (I don’t know.) “Do I really have to go there?” (Yes. We don’t have a choice. When these magical sorts make up their mind, nobody in the normal world gets a choice. But I’m preparing you for it as best I can.)
Eventually, having all of this horrifying knowledge in the back of his mind became Harry’s new normal. A lot of what they were doing at school was stuff he had covered the previous year, in his secret cramming sessions, but it was good to check he still remembered it, and to practice. Sometimes there would be some new stuff. He enjoyed learning about gravity and air resistance, and the difference between mass and volume. (He thought Dudley would have enjoyed dropping things and watching them hit the floor, as an officially sanctioned class activity, no less, and mentioned it to him as something to look forward to for next year.) He still played chess with Alice, and spent a lot of time talking about history and things with Tahmima and Nathan. He was learning so much from them, and he wanted to do nice things for them in return, but the best he could manage was helping them practice for spelling tests, looking up mnemonics to see if they helped, and generally being supportive. Neither of them was as good at spelling as he was, but they were both very clever, and apparently part of the spelling problem was that they knew other languages besides English, which made everything a bit more complicated. Nathan spoke French – his Mum was English, and his Maman was French, and Harry hadn’t even known it was possible to have two mothers, or to grow up speaking two languages. Tahmima had three languages to worry about, English, Hindi, and Bengali, and they used different writing systems, though she couldn’t really write either language yet, she just spoke them. For the first half of the autumn term, Tahmima went to yoga with Harry; she didn’t really have a choice in the matter, as her mother was a work colleague of the instructor’s, and thought it was a wonderful opportunity for her daughter. Unlike Harry, though, she clearly didn’t enjoy it at all, and eventually managed to convince her mother to let her drop it, and take dance classes instead. Harry was very happy for her.
He wasn’t as close to Tahmima and Nathan as they were to each other, of course. They’d known each other since they started school, whereas he’d only known them since the previous year. And they were round each other’s houses (plus Tahmima’s grandmother’s place), all the time, whereas Harry felt awkward accepting invitations from them, since he couldn’t reciprocate. It was pretty obvious Uncle Vernon wouldn’t want Harry to have friends round, but Aunt Petunia had made it clear to him he wasn’t even to ask. She added that if Harry’s Uncle even knew he had close friends, he might decide it was his responsibility to evaluate them, to decide whether they were suitably normal and respectable to be associated with his family, and if he thought they weren’t, he might forbid Harry from seeing them. And she was sure Harry didn’t want that. Harry was puzzled.
“So, erm, if you don’t mind me asking,” he eventually said, “why are you letting me be friends with them, if you think it’s possible they might not be normal enough for Uncle Vernon’s standards?” Petunia sighed.
“If I thought they’d be a bad influence on you, I wouldn’t,” she said. “But by all accounts, they’re intelligent, hard-working, and well-behaved, apart from disagreeing with the teachers about politics during history lessons, and they’ve toned down a lot from what they used to be like. Now they just pull faces and don’t voice their opinions unless they’re called upon, but they used to argue openly, back before you met them, and disrupt the class. I’m sure if they were ever to have any kind of political discussion with Vernon, they would disagree very strongly with each other. But politics are complicated, and you know better than to discuss politics with your uncle anyway. You just listen and nod respectfully when he talks, like a dutiful child, and you take everything in quietly and think about it later. And the kind of lessons you’re learning from your friends – the politics, and the economics, and ugly truths covered up behind a pretty facade, and the bad things one person can do to another under the wrong circumstances – I have a feeling you’ll need to know them. That other world has its own prejudice and propaganda and megalomaniacs with brainwashed followers, and I want you to see clearer and live longer than Lily did. So you study your history, child, and learn from it. And practice discretion. That’s a good lesson, too.” Harry nodded his head solemnly, and then opened his mouth to ask a question, but she cut him off. “And I’m not going into more detail now about why I have the views I have about that hidden world of theirs. You can add it to your list of things you’re too young to hear more about for the time being.” He seemed even more impressed. It was good that he listened to her. She’d taken a risk, letting him know that she sometimes quietly disagreed with Vernon, but he seemed to understand discretion.
Dudley got a new computer for Christmas, with a colour screen, and a variety of coloured buttons on the keyboard. Dudley’s old computer went into the cupboard under the stairs. It was technically Harry’s now, but Aunt Petunia said he was better off not keeping it in his room. (She later explained that the use of magic was known to short-circuit electronic devices, and since she was sure his room was where he did most of his practicing, he had better not keep a computer in there. He could carry it upstairs and plug it in when he wanted to use it, and take it down again when he was done.) Not having known about the computer, Dudley also gave Harry a yoga mat. Harry had been saving up for one of those for months!
“You’re the best, Dud!” he told his cousin, and hugged him. “Your present from me is in the garden shed.” He’d only actually spent about 50p on his present for Dudley, but it had been a lot of work. The plan had started ages ago, when he’d overheard his yoga teacher talking to the receptionist at the sports centre about the fright everyone in the gym had had when one of the blast straps broke. It turned out they’d just thrown the remnants of it in the bin, and Harry had taken it out again. Obviously the strap was broken, but the handles were fine. Then, also for free, he’d got one small car tyre and one large motorbike tyre from the scrapyard, and he’d rolled them all the way back to Privet Drive one at a time. Roz (whom he admired very much) had helped him choose the bolt, nut and washer fittings (and the carabiner and rope), and had drilled holes in the tyres for him, but he’d put all of it together himself. He bounced on the balls of his feet slightly, as he headed to the back door. He hoped Dudley would like it.
When the shed door opened, for a moment nobody said anything. Dudley and Aunt Petunia just looked puzzled. Uncle Vernon slowly turned redder and redder, and then purple, and then he began to shout.
“Boy! Is this some kind of a joke? You think this is funny, do you? Christmas morning, of all days, on Christmas morning, you fill the shed full of junk, you get Dudders' hopes up, thinking he’s getting a lovely big present, and then you show him a load of rubbish! Well, I’ll show you what I think of your little tricks!” He shook his fist at Harry. “All these years, we took you in out of the goodness of our hearts, and there you were pretending to be normal, but you’re nothing better than a NASTY LITTLE FREAK!” Harry stood rooted to the ground, unable to move or speak. Aunt Petunia was frozen with horror. It was Dudley, the boy who adored his father and imitated him sedulously, the boy who had taken it as his natural right that he should get twice as much pudding as Harry, more presents, more money, and the best of everything; it was Dudley who moved to stand in between his angry father and his scrawny, speccy, swot of a cousin.
“Harry wouldn’t, Dad,” he said firmly. “Harry wouldn’t play a nasty trick on me like that, especially not on Christmas Day. I don’t know what it is he’s got me, but I bet it’s something I’m going to like. Harry’s good at choosing presents.” He put an arm round his cousin, who was trembling so much he could barely stand. “Go on, Harry. Show me what it is. I bet it’s great.” Casting an anxious glance at his guardians, Harry drew Dudley closer to the shed.
“I..i..it’s something t-to exercise with,” he faltered. “It’s a t-tyre sled. L-look, the tyres have a metal loop, so you pick which tyre you want to use, and you attach it to the rope, and the rope has handles, so you can drag it behind you when you run, or do all kinds of other exercises with it. You see people at the sports centre using them sometimes, mostly the big, muscular men that do lots of weights training. It’s good for your muscles, and your posture when running, and your endurance, and it makes running less boring. You can put extra weight in the tyres, if you like, using a plank of wood, or you can fasten the tyres together, or you can ask a little kid to sit on one of the tyres... You can use it on pavement, or grass, or tarmac, and some surfaces are easier, and some are harder, so it depends on what kind of training you want to do...” Dudley grinned, slapped Harry on the back, and gave him a thumbs-up. It was only at this point that Aunt Petunia intervened.
“Very nice, Harry, very thoughtful. I’m sure Dudley will get a lot of use out of that. In fact, why don’t you two go and try it out now? Get your coats and shoes on, hurry up. Do you need to go to the park or will a few times round the block do? I’ll come and find you when it’s time for Christmas dinner. Work up an appetite, that’s it.” And she bundled them out of the door, shoving the tyres and rope after them. The two boys looked at each other, then, as the muffled sound of shouting became audible, shuffled further down the road.
“I wanted to try out my new computer,” said Dudley. “It’s a bit cold to be spending all morning outside.”
“I didn’t even get to see my present from them,” said Harry, “and you haven’t had yours from Aunt Marge, either, have you?” Dudley shook his head, and they stared at each other in silence.
“Tell you what,” Harry eventually came out with, “let’s run round the block to warm up, and then you can have a go with your new sled. Probably start with the small wheel first, then move up to the big one.”
“Like with the weight training in boxing,” Dudley agreed, and they were off. Some of the neighbours stared out of the window at them, but they just waved back. They got even more stares when they passed by again, with Dudley dragging the motorbike wheel. When they’d only passed two houses, he started saying how easy it was, but by the time they’d finished the second circuit, he was panting. Then the Nicholson kids came out, Janet and John and the baby, Nicky, who was two now. Rather than switching to the big tyre, Dudley gave Nicky a ride on the little tyre for about half the block, and then let Janet and John take turns pulling Nicky while Harry and Dudley walked alongside them. The twins’ admiring looks when Dudley told them that his tyre sled had been a Christmas present from Harry helped soothe Harry’s hurt feelings a bit, but he was still rather upset. Even after they were let back into the house, the feeling didn’t quite go away, not even when he opened his presents and discovered a mysterious envelope as well as his new pair of trainers and his prescription swim goggles with the correct prescription for him. (He saved the envelope for later, in case it was something to do with magic.) The Christmas Dinner that Aunt Petunia had cooked should have been delicious, he knew, and he should have been hungrier after his morning’s exertions, but he just wasn’t. As soon as he could, he slipped off to his room, and opened the envelope. It turned out to be completely unmagical and nothing to do with his parents, just a Christmas card with a ten pound note in. Ten pounds was more money than he’d ever had before, previously unimaginable wealth, but he couldn’t really bring himself to feel joy over it, only a hollow sensation. Still, into his teddy-bear-shaped piggy bank it went, to join his yoga-mat money that he now needed to find another use for. (The piggy bank had been Dudley’s, before he was given one shaped like a racing car, and decided teddy bears were childish.)
He had known, of course, that his uncle didn’t particularly love him, that he became nervous and grumpy at the faintest hint of weirdness, and that he was never likely to think very well of Harry no matter what Harry did. But that level of anger and hatred, and the threat of violence – that had come as a shock.
Notes:
Soo, to the people who thought Petunia was doing a good job keeping Vernon reined in: yeah, this is what was coming. Sorry not sorry, I suppose? She _has_ been trying (up to a point), but Vernon is still Vernon.
Chapter 9: very complicated and a lot of hard work
Chapter Text
The consequences stemming from that awful Christmas were many and varied. After accidentally setting the Christmas card on fire by glowering at it, Harry worked hard to get some kind of conscious control over his new ability, without using so much anger to power it. He didn’t like being angry. Secondly, he came to a realisation that his family was like a Venn diagram. There was one circle, the Dursleys, with Vernon and Aunt Petunia and Dudley. And then, there was another circle, the descendents of Darren and Heather Evans, with Harry and Dudley and Aunt Petunia. So Aunt Petunia and Dudley were in the overlap, but Harry and Vernon weren’t really part of each other’s families at all, and didn’t like each other, and had very little in common beyond the other two people, but they had to live in the same house and keep up an appearance of a nice and normal family relationship, for the sake of the people they had in common, and for the household’s reputation with the rest of the world.
In truth, it had been building for a while, but that was when Harry consciously decided he wasn’t going to look up to ‘Uncle’ Vernon, or respect him, or take anything he said seriously – he would only pretend to. (Once, when Harry was much younger, he had longed fiercely for his Uncle Vernon’s approval, for Uncle Vernon to say ‘atta boy’ to him like he did to Dudley, but never again, he promised himself. Never again.) But if he respected his ‘Uncle’ less for the incident, he respected and loved his Aunt and his cousin more for it, and tried even harder to do things for them that they would like. He helped Aunt Petunia with cooking as well as gardening; he read books about dogs and sports science and copied out the interesting bits for Dudley; and he was even more polite and deferential to Uncle Vernon, especially in public, and increasingly avoided him in private as much as he could without being rude.
But apart from the small exercise book in which Harry compared and contrasted his Uncle’s socio-political opinions with those of his friends Nathan and Tahmima, and the reported opinions of their various family members, the little ember of bitterness and rebelliousness in Harry’s heart manifested itself another way – in Harry’s hair. It was the Easter holidays when Aunt Petunia finally confronted him about it.
“You haven’t stopped brushing your hair, have you, Harry?” she asked him out of the blue, one day when Dudley was getting riding lessons with a friend of Aunt Marge’s, and Vernon was at work. He assured her he brushed it every morning and evening, and he ran a comb through it after he’d been doing exercise. She fetched out the previous year’s school photo of him from a drawer in her desk, and then took him up to the bathroom and pointed at the mirror. His hair was a mess. It wasn’t quite curly, but it wasn’t neat and straight either, and it seemed to point in every direction all at once. In the photo, it was quite tidy, short at the back and sides, and longer on top with a small wave to it, but lying flat and orderly.
“I didn’t do anything to it!” he yelped. “It just happened!”
“Well, quite,” she snapped, “but I want you to do something to it now. Look at the photo, and have a think about how nice and tidy your hair looks in it, and how much you prefer it that way. Then close your eyes and imagine your hair being nice and tidy, and once you’ve been concentrating for a while, open your eyes and look in the mirror, and see whether it’s changed. Take breaks if you need them, but by the time Vernon and Dudley get back, I want your hair to be neat and tidy. And no experimenting with other looks until you can reliably keep the nice tidy one. Oh, and if you want to try different kinds of shampoo and conditioner, you may, as long as you leave the bathroom spotless afterwards.”
She stomped off downstairs, and Harry heard the hoover start up. It wasn’t normally her day for hoovering the living room. She must be quite stressed; he supposed she really didn’t like talking or thinking about magic, and here she was, giving him instructions on how to do it. It took him an hour to make any kind of difference, and another hour to make it go straight from messy to neat in a blink. Even after that, it took him the best part of a week before he could reliably turn it neat and have it stay that way until he told it otherwise, or until it was dishevelled by something normal, like exercise or sleep.
He gave it another few days to be on the safe side, but his hair remained perfectly well-behaved. He was all ready to start experimenting, when he remembered there was only one bathroom in the house, and the others wouldn’t like him hogging the bathroom – and what if he got stuck, and had to cede the bathroom to Uncle Vernon while his hair was still a funny colour? That wouldn’t end well. So he didn’t do anything else for the time being; by the end of the first week back at school, his Aunt had given him plenty of other things to think about.
Petunia Dursley had managed to arrange a chat with the Deputy Head of Stonewall High, to talk about their policy as regards early entry. Would they accept Harry starting Stonewall a year early, rather than with his original cohort? What if he wanted to skip ahead another year? She presented herself as someone wanting only the best, but not being entirely sure what was for the best, and being reliant on the good advice of the teachers of Stonewall, their experience with children who had been pushed up a year, and children who hadn’t, but perhaps should have been. (It wasn’t that much of a leap, really, apart from the faux-naïveté and the deference. She did have genuine concerns.)
The Deputy Head was quite emollient. It was only natural for her to be anxious. Stonewall was a large school, with several feeder primaries, and they had someone who had skipped a year or two ahead practically every year. It was nothing too unusual. Why, they themselves sometimes allowed pupils to skip from Year Seven to Year Nine, albeit very rarely. She shouldn’t worry. It sounded like she was doing the right thing, careful monitoring, letting her child – ah, sorry, nephew – find his own level. Stonewall would be delighted to take him whenever she and his primary school teachers – St Gregory’s, very sound, wonderful woman, Headmistress Rommele – felt he was ready. So that was that.
She fetched out Harry’s old notes on the primary school curricula, and went over them with him. It turned out that, despite his no longer planning his studies around the upper years’ syllabi, there was very little covered in Year Five he didn’t already know, although he felt his knowledge of the water cycle was a little scanty, and could do with brushing up on. Still, that could be done in a few hours in the local library. Year Six introduced several new things, and was also a time when the teachers were specifically focused on getting their pupils ready for secondary school, so that would not be a good year to miss. Two meetings with the headmistress (inbetween which she spoke to the various teachers) and it was decided. Harry would be going into Year Six that September – and starting at Stonewall High the year after that.
Petunia took Dudley out for cream tea at a fancy hotel, as a special mother-and-son-bonding treat, to make sure he was all right with Harry starting secondary school two years before Dudley himself did, even though Dudley was the oldest. She had been so worried he might get jealous, or start feeling inadequate, or overlooked, but her concerns had been completely unfounded. Dudley was confident and comfortable with himself to the point of being self-satisfied, and saw no reason to be jealous of Harry.
“It’s great that Harry gets bumped up two years,” he confided in his mother, “definitely something impressive, something to boast about, don’t get me wrong, and I’m happy for him, but I honestly think he’s bonkers for wanting it. Ever since he went into Year Three he’s had loads more homework than I have, and in secondary school, they get hours of it every night, and the classwork’s much harder, too. I’m not daft enough to work any harder than I have to to get decent marks, and I wouldn’t want to have to do extra work any earlier than I needed to. I’m quite happy staying at St Gregory’s until it’s time for me to go to Smeltings.” Most of the rest of the meal was taken up with Dudley enthusing about all the sports he would be able to do at Smeltings, including real rugby, as an actual contact sport. “Besides,” he added, “I like being in the same class as Malcolm and Gordon, and I don’t want to give that up any earlier than I have to.”
Harry was also somewhat regretful about the prospect of not being in the same class as Nathan, Tahmima and Alice any more, but his solution to the boarding school problem was rather different from Dudley’s. “We won’t be in the same class next year, but we’ll still be in the same school, so we can hang out during break time,” he explained to his aunt and cousin one afternoon. “Then, next year, we’ll be at different schools but still living in the same town, so we can see each other sometimes after school, or at weekends, maybe go to the library together, or the park. When I’m in Year Eight they’ll be in Year Seven, so we’ll be at the same school again, and then when I’m at Hogwarts, we’ll already have had practice at keeping in touch, so we can maybe write letters, and see each other when I come home for the holidays. And I’ll get practice with making new friends as well, so that’ll be helpful for when I start Hogwarts, too.” Dudley thought that all sounded very complicated and a lot of hard work – in other words, very Harry-like. Petunia thought it was a good plan, but rather optimistic. And at least it would be less upsetting for Harry’s friends when he disappeared into that other world if there was already some distance there, not that she was going to tell him that.
It was a sunny Saturday afternoon, and Harry was strolling home from the local library, his backpack full of books about geography and physics and meterology, and his head stuffed with new words like ‘oxbow lake’ and ‘delta’ and ‘watershed’, that something in the window of the Oxfam shop caught his eye. It was a mirror, but not just any mirror: a big mirror, taller than he was, with a wooden frame, and a stand of its own that it pivoted from. He trotted into the shop, and (after a bit of trouble convincing the elderly volunteer that he did indeed have two pounds fifty of his very own money at home, left over from his Christmas money), she shook his hand solemnly and put a label on the mirror that said ‘Reserved,’ and he ran home to fetch his money (and drop off his library books). He also ran into Dudley, who, after being curious about what Harry was in such a rush for, insisted on coming with him, and helping to carry it back. (“I’m bigger and stronger than you are, of course I should help. We can take turns if you really want to.”)
The mirror seemed to grow heavier and heavier the further they went with it, but at last they were home. Dudley made his way to the kitchen for a restorative ice cream, and Aunt Petunia grudgingly helped Harry get the mirror up the stairs. She felt it looked far too wizardly a piece of furniture, though it did have the name of a perfectly normal department store inked on the base when she checked, and once Harry explained about not wanting to hog the bathroom to use the mirror there, she conceded it was not an unreasonable purchase, “And I suppose it’s another item of furniture, like the bed, that will last you until you’re grown up. You can check your appearance in it in the mornings, make sure your tie’s not crooked and all that. You’ll have no excuse now for going around looking slovenly.” Harry nodded obediently. He certainly had no wish to look slovenly; he wanted to look smart and respectable.
Over the summer, Harry learned a great many things. He moved out of the children’s yoga classes for beginners, and into the intermediate-level classes, where the children tended to be older and more focused, and they did much more difficult poses. He also studied a great deal of political history and theory, and discovered that Uncle Vernon’s views were right-wing, conservative with a small c, reactionary and racist, whereas Nathan’s views were very left-wing, possibly anarchist or nearly so, and Tahmina’s were more moderately left-wing. (And he learned never to ask any of them their views on Margaret Thatcher unless he wanted to listen to a very long diatribe.) He learned to make his hair longer and shorter, and to change the colour, though so far, he could only make it slightly darker or lighter, to levels that might have been achieved by spending more or less time in the sun. He could keep it neat and wavy, or make it messy, and he experimented a bit by making it very messy, but he didn’t like the look of that, so he didn’t do it often. He got a lot better at controlling fire, though of course he couldn’t do those experiments in his bedroom, and he could play around a bit with water, too. He made the acquaintance of several snakes, in the park and in the bit of rough ground by the railway line, and had some pleasant conversations. Both the adders and the grass-snakes liked him to skritch them gently when they were near the point of shedding their skins and feeling itchy, and they enjoyed compliments, and gladly told him about their preferred prey and habitats. (Mostly it just confirmed what was in the books, but it was good to hear things straight from the source.)
Harry had been a bit anxious about starting Year Six, but he needn’t have been. Yes, everyone was much bigger and older than him, and some of them called him ‘pipsqueak’, but it wasn’t in a particularly unkind way, so he didn’t mind. A couple of his new classmates were actually better at maths than he was, particularly mental arithmetic, so Harry had to really work to keep up with them, and he learned quite a bit about percentages and ratios that wasn’t actually on the syllabus for his year, and developed an amicable rivalry, with the three of them vying for the best marks on every maths test and homework assignment. In English, his handwriting and his reading speed were still good, but now they were nothing special, though he did have an excellent vocabulary. He also hit a snag where if he wrote as neatly as he could, it wasn’t very fast, and if he wrote as fast as he could, it wasn’t very neat, but he took his teacher’s advice and worked to increase the speed of his neat handwriting. The handwriting issue got even more complicated when his aunt gave him a fountain pen for Christmas, one where you opened it up and changed the cartridge when it ran out of ink, instead of just throwing the biro in the bin and getting another one. But he worked hard at it, and consulted some books about calligraphy, and by Easter he felt his handwriting was neater and faster than it had been at the beginning of the year. Being two years behind, rather than one, had done bad things to his marks for Art and P.E., but honesty Harry didn’t really care about those. He was looking forward to Woodwork and Food Technology at Stonewall, but actual drawing and painting he was less fond of.
Harry was still spending much of his breaktime with his old friends (who were now in Year Five), so it wasn’t until the Summer Term that he really made a new friend, as opposed to some rivals he was on cordial terms with. He had stopped by the charity shop on his way home from school, and was looking through the bric-a-brac section. He was staring, thrilled, at the pair of brass cobras, coiled to strike, when someone tapped him on the shoulder. He turned round to see a girl whom he vaguely remembered as being one of his new classmates, who promptly began chattering away to him nineteen to the dozen. It turned out he was the first of her classmates she’d ever seen in the charity shop, to the point where she had wondered whether they even knew it existed, and she herself was in there looking for clothes that ‘might do as raw materials’ for her to make her own clothes from. He was very impressed. He had watch Roz measure and cut and pin and tack the curtains and stuff for his bed, before taking them away to finish them with a sewing machine, but he hadn’t really thought again about that process until now, and it had certainly never occurred to him that he might try to make his own clothes. Before he knew where he was, he had an appointment to meet up with her on Saturday after his yoga class, so she could show him some of her work and some basic techniques. He had hesitantly informed her he wasn’t allowed to have friends round at home, and he hoped she wouldn’t be offended; at which point she had called him a dingbat and told him he was invited to hers, and she had no interest in any reciprocal invitations, because she was damned if she was going to lug her sewing machine and multiple boxes of craft supplies halfway across Little Whinging. Oh, and she was Laura, by the way, in case he hadn’t learned her name yet. And with that, she swept off. He purchased his nice snakes (only three blank finials still to fill!) and headed home.
Over the course of that term, Harry learned three basic sewing stitches (though he couldn’t yet make them small and regular enough for the seams of a garment that would hold up to regular wear), the beginnings of crochet, and some of the uses for fabric paint and fabric glue. He also won a chess match against Alice for the first time without her giving him any pieces, and (by dint of checking and re-checking his work) got full marks on every single maths test that term, as did his rivals. He finally learned how to turn his hair different colours (red and blonde, though he still couldn’t manage blue or green or anything else like that), he baked some biscuits that were good enough to take into school for the last day, and he managed to sit through the mandatory sex education class without whimpering and fleeing from the ickyness.
He also graduated from primary school at only eight years old, but that was entirely normal and had been planned for a while. He didn’t need his school tie any more, so he let Dudley have it for a spare. It was the first time any of Harry’s clothing was passed down to Dudley, rather than the other way around.
Chapter 10: Stonewall High
Notes:
Warning for minor-to-medium child-on-child violence, for mentions of horrifying topics in real-world history, and for Marge being an unethical dog breeder.
Chapter Text
Harry’s first day at Stonewall High had gone very well. He was issued with a huge stack of textbooks on a wide array of subjects, and a homework planner with a space in the front for his timetable; while Stonewall had eight classes for every year group, from five different primary schools, he was still in the same class as his friend Laura, and he wasn’t even the youngest or smallest in the class, that honour falling to a girl called Lucy who was six months younger than him and one inch shorter; the tour of the Tech wing had been amazing, getting to see all the cool facilities they had for learning so many useful skills. Apparently, for that side of the curriculum, they would spend Year Seven switching between different technical subjects (woodwork, metalwork, graphic design, computing with spreadsheets, computer programming, word processing, sewing, Food Technology, Health and First Aid, and Harry was sure he’d forgotten a few in there somewhere), and then at the end of the year, they would list the different options in the order of their preference, and they would be allowed to continue four of them on to Year Eight. Oh, and for Year Seven, they would do Maths with the rest of their class, but for Year Eight, there would be a rough streaming system, and Harry had every intention of being in one of the top sets. Above all, every subject, from Maths to metalwork, would be taught by a specialist in that subject, so he’d get to learn from a genuine expert in every single class, rather than have to deal with his Year Four teacher’s History lessons, where she clearly didn’t know any more about the subject than what was in the textbook, or his Year Six teacher’s Maths, when it was pretty obvious the man couldn’t actually do mental arithmetic himself, even as he was trying to encourage them to grow proficient in it. Of course, he’d liked St Gregory’s, and he’d been very happy there; it just had its flaws. This, on the other hand, was going to be so much better.
His second day at Stonewall was utterly horrible. Not so much for the subjects. English, P.E., Geography: not his favourites, but not dreadful. No, it was what happened at lunchtime that did it. Harry was queuing up for the canteen, lunch money in his pocket, when a group of older students dragged him away and threatened to flush his head down the toilet if he didn’t hand the money over, and when he protested they just kept dragging him, and they had actually herded him into the boy’s toilets and were opening a stall, when the sense of clawing panic snapped something within Harry, and the bullies’ hair started smoking. Of course they let go at him to clutch at it, and one of them actually did stick his own head in a toilet, and – were those flames? – Harry legged it for the door, with a rising sense of I can’t be here, this isn’t happening, of needing to be somewhere, anywhere else – and suddenly, he was. He was on the roof of the Tech wing, he still had no lunch, he felt sick and dizzy, and he had never in his life caused involuntary weirdness of this level before. He had set other students’ hair on fire and then teleported. He was in so much trouble – and his Aunt would be so disappointed.
And then once he did manage to drop down from the roof to the fire escape, and from there to the ground, and find his way to the class he was supposed to be in, Chemistry, it turned out he’d missed something really brilliant. The teacher had told them about alkali metals, and he’d been dropping samples of them in beakers of water and having them explode, and Harry had missed it. And since he’d been marked down as late for Chemistry, a notification was already in the system for his form teacher, and he’d have to go to the staff room after school and explain himself, or he’d be in even worse trouble. Thankfully, his explanation of being cornered by bullies and having got lost fleeing from them passed muster, and nobody quizzed him about the fire. He did make a point of mentioning that they had been planning to flush his head down the toilet and steal his lunch money, though, but when he said he didn’t know their names and wasn’t sure whether or not he’d recognise them if he saw them again, the teacher lost all interest and told him to shoo. No detention, no harm, no foul, do make sure to learn your way around soon.
Dudley was horrified when he heard what had happened, and offered to go over to Stonewall and beat Harry’s assailants up himself – which of course was totally impractical, but it was kindly meant and Harry appreciated it. Aunt Petunia’s outrage was a thing of beauty, and her tirade against the Deputy Head on the phone was a rhetorical masterpiece. (Harry ended up writing out several new words Dudley wanted to learn how to spell, like ‘obfuscation’ and ‘unconscionable’.) Even Uncle Vernon felt that flushing people’s heads down toilets was unhygienic and rather low class, compared to just hitting each other with Smeltings sticks.
Harry decided, then and there, that he would just keep his head down. He was good at that. If people were going to try to take his lunch money from him, he just wouldn’t bring lunch money to school. For the rest of the week, he could manage adequately on sandwiches made from whatever they had in the house. After that, he would devote part of his weekends to planning meals and doing some food shopping, and he would make his own packed lunches. It would be cheaper than the canteen, too, so he’d save his guardians some money – which they would like – and there might even be some money to spare for him, too. Aunt Petunia also approved of this plan (although she was still extremely cross that it was necessary), and told him that cooking for oneself was a very good life skill to have, and he could have three quarters of the lunch money; they both knew he could manage perfectly well on half of it, but he was a good boy and deserved a few treats, although he wasn’t to spend it on junk. She also told him that it was high time he learned some kind of physical self-defence. Obviously it wasn’t going to be boxing, but there would be plenty of other options, and she wanted him signed up to do something by Christmas. (They had a school assembly a few days later about the dangers of bullying, but it didn’t seem to change much.)
Harry was very busy that first term, but on the whole he was happy. He had all his new subjects, lots of homework, Dudley’s tutoring, buying ingredients for his packed lunches and preparing them; he was still going to yoga once a week, and swimming with Dudley, and he managed to meet up with Nathan and Tahmima perhaps every other weekend. He still needed to practice his magic regularly, and go running with Dudley, and help his aunt in the garden. He didn’t want to neglect Mrs Figg, either, or miss out on time with the cats, so he managed to make a brief visit most weeks, generally bringing some baked goods he had made himself for his lunchbox. (He had tried her chocolate cake once, and it was awful.) He tended to spend break and lunchtime at school doing homework, though he’d spend a couple of lunchtimes a week with Laura, working on craft projects. The lessons themselves were almost all fun, with a minority (like P. E.) being dull-but-not-horrible, and he was staying out of the way of the bullies. By half term, things had gradually stopped feeling quite so hectic; by Christmas, he had his routine sorted out and was thriving on it. He had a good idea of the martial art he wanted to try by now: aikido. When he mentioned it to his aunt, it turns out she had been thinking the exact same thing.
Partly, it was convenience. The Greater Whinging sports centre management, since the yoga classes had attracted such great interest and so little backlash from the xenophobic, had decided to offer some other foreign-sounding physical activities, starting off with two martial arts. So it made sense to pick one of them, and Muay Thai sounded a lot like boxing, only you were allowed and encouraged to kick your opponent as well as punching them. That left Aikido.
The other reason was that Harry had heard of the philosophical distinction between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ fighting techniques, and he loved the idea of being ‘soft’: that rather than meeting force with force, directly, such that you had to be as strong as your opponent, you could redirect your opponent with cunning, and use their own strength against them. Dudley could be hard; Harry would be soft. (The philosophy of martial arts is actually a fair bit more complicated than that, but Harry was still only nine.)
And so, after a pleasant and thankfully uneventful Christmas, Harry added martial arts training to his weekly routine, and found himself rather enjoying it. They didn’t do actual sparring, which for Dudley was the highlight of his boxing training, but Harry had always rather disliked the sound of it. Instead, they had simulated fights, where one person acted out things they might do if they were genuinely attacked, and the other, the uke, acted as a living training dummy. Both sides of the equation were rather fun in different ways, and you always knew exactly what you were supposed to be doing: no uncertainty, no panic, and there was a deliberate, meditative quality to it that meshed nicely with Harry’s yoga.
Once things quietened down enough that he felt he could take up some serious research projects again, he was tempted to dash off to the library and start looking things up willy-nilly, but he was older now, he told himself, mature enough to plan and then act. Besides, he only had a year and a half left before he would have to leave for the other world. He needed to make the most of it. Aunt Petunia was a little surprised and flattered to be asked, he could tell, as well as uncomfortable with her designated role as the family expert on That Other World, but she controlled herself admirably. If Harry hadn’t known her as well as he did, and if he hadn’t been paying close attention, he might have thought it was a perfectly ordinary discussion they were having, of no greater import (or strangeness) than the decision as to whether the living room ceiling should be repainted in eggshell white or Chantilly lace.
“Inbreeding,” she finally said. “genetics, animal breeding, and what happened to dynasties like the Hapsburgs. You remember in your mother’s letters, the other side being terribly keen on purity of blood, and about how all ‘pure-bloods’ are related somehow. Here in the normal world, everyone knows that marrying your cousin is a bad idea, but that other lot doesn’t seem to have caught on yet. And if you know why and how it’s a bad idea, you’ll get all kinds of insights into how their society works and what’s wrong with it. And they have all kinds of weird animals we don’t, too. Anatomy, physiology, evolution – it’s all Biology. Learn whatever interests you, but be sure you understand enough of the basics that you can apply it to that world. You’ll be coming to it as an outsider, but that doesn’t have to mean ignorant. You’ll have a different perspective, and you should use it. A proper scientific perspective, that’s the thing.”
“What about History?” Harry asked hopefully.
“Oh yes, that too,” she conceded. “There’s the Middle Ages, and the times before it, and you can look at how the authorities felt about witches and wizards, and what they did about them. You already did the Tudors and Stuarts in primary school, though there’s no harm in going back over the material if you want to get a better sense of how people lived, and what their government was like. But what I really think you should focus on is the difference between then and now. How things have changed since that Statute of Secrecy was introduced. Things are much more civilised now. I think you should look at how we got so civilised, the history of science and technology, and how we got the system of government that we have. You’ve already been reading political history; I’ve seen you, though you managed to hide the books from Vernon. Keep it up. When you go into that other world, I want you to have a good strong sense of what our world is like, so you can compare and contrast, and really understand it properly.” She paused. “And things like propaganda, how governments can do horrible things to their citizens, some of the ugly things that can happen in wartime and peacetime both, the good sides and bad sides of political movements... that too. Read about any place or time you like where that sort of thing happened, as long as you can recognise it when you see it.” She sighed. “The head of the Death Eaters, the one whose name they don’t speak, he sounded like a genocidal madman. But he had followers, lots of them. And that’s not so strange. There are parallels in our world, like Hitler. But the other side of the war, your parents’ side. You aren’t to repeat this to anyone in that other world, anyone at all – but I suspect there were things going on there that weren’t as they should have been, and I don’t trust that Albus Dumbledore as far as I could throw him, especially not with how much power he seems to have, and how much everyone seems to trust and admire him.”
“Power corrupts,” Harry agreed, “and absolute power corrupts absolutely. We know that in the normal world, and that’s why we have checks and balances on power. And I wouldn’t trust somebody who left a baby on a doorstep overnight, and didn’t see fit to do next-of-kin death notifications in person, either. I do hope he isn’t still Headmaster. But I know about discretion, Aunt Petunia, don’t worry.” He paused. “And I won’t ask you for details now. Is there anything else you think I should study, that might give me an advantage at the other school?” She sat in silence for a moment.
“Latin,” she said. “Lily said a lot of the words they used to do their funny business were Latin, or coming from Latin, and she was annoyed they didn’t actually teach it. And I think she mentioned Runes a lot, as one of her favourite subjects, and I think there used to be some languages in the real world that were written in runes, too, only I don’t know which ones, and how long ago. Somewhere in the North, maybe? You can look it up.”
And that was how Harry was introduced to Tolkien. He adored The Hobbit, and ended up buying his own copy of it, as well as The Lord of the Rings and Farmer Giles of Ham. He managed to restrain himself from spending all his study time reading nothing but fiction, though. It turned out that Stonewall taught only French, German and Spanish. Nowhere was he able to find a tutor for Anglo-Saxon, Old Norse, Modern Icelandic, Danish or Swedish. However, it transpired that Nathan’s maman took private pupils in Latin as well as French, and Nathan was happy to ask her for details, such as whether there were any groups he could join or whether she only provided one-on-one tutoring, and what her fees were like. And at least, now Harry knew what cultural traditions runes were from, he could read about them. He started off with versions of the Norse Myths and of Beowulf aimed at children, but (thanks to a clear-out of books at the university where Nathan’s Mum taught PPE) he was eventually able to obtain a bilingual edition of Beowulf, and of the Poetic and Prose Eddas. They had loose pages, damaged spines, coffee stains, and his Prose Edda was missing its back and front covers entirely, but they were deeply precious to him. He wrapped them in cloth and kept them in cardboard boxes he had adjusted to be exactly the right size. ‘All the witches spring from Witolf,’ he recited to himself gleefully, and wondered to what extent that was true, and how he might find out, and who Witolf really was anyway. Reading about Norse, Anglo-Saxon and Germanic culture and religion led into the history of how and when and why it had been stamped out by the Church (with the co-operation of secular rulers) over hundreds of years. The famous witch-hunts had been the seventeenth-century ones, but apparently the Church had been at it for much longer than that.
Harry did get a bit sidetracked into theology, history of the Christian Church, and comparative religion. Of course, they’d covered the basics of Christianity in Primary School, though he’d noticed, even then, that they’d been glossing over a lot of the uglier bits. Some of the Bible was really gruesome! Now, in Stonewall, they were learning the basics about all the major world religions, but that seemed to be more a checklist of major festivals, significant points of doctrine and where they might clash, and a general course in how not to offend people and show sensitivity. Naturally, Harry was a wholehearted believer in not offending people, but what he really put the effort into reading about was the points where people had offended each other, badly. Wars of religion. Genocide and torture. The Inquisition. The Conquistadores and the end of the Aztec civilisation. The death of Johann Hus, who had been given a safe-conduct to come to Konstanz, and burnt at the stake regardless, on the grounds that it was not necessary to keep faith with heretics. (But promises were important!) When Harry got a bit overwhelmed by reading about all these horrible things, Nathan listened, and patted him on the back.
“My mum says it’s called ‘dehumanisation’, he offered. “When you think other people aren’t really people, it makes it easier to do horrible things to them and not feel bad afterwards. And then she told me not to think about it too much, and that the world was full of wonderful things as well as horrible ones, and I should just do my best to be the best person I could be. And if I paid attention to what was around me, and worked together with other people in solidarity, I could help to make the world a little bit better, but I couldn’t fix everything, and I shouldn’t even think of trying.”
“Most of the people I can think of who tried to fix everything, and make everyone do things their way, ended up doing really horrible things and making everything worse,” Harry offered. He shivered. It seemed so easy to start with good intentions, and then go horribly wrong. Nathan nodded sagely. They chatted some more about the dangers of authoritarianism, and the role of healthy dissent, and the difference between grass-roots and top-down organisations. Harry shared some of his new historical knowledge with Nathan, and Nathan told Harry some of his Maman’s experiences as a teenager in 1968 Paris. (Nathan’s parents were so cool. Perhaps not wholly respectable, going by the ideals upheld by the residents of Privet Drive and its environs, but very cool.) Harry went home from the library that day feeling a lot better.
With all that excitement over runes and the associated culture and history, Harry had rather let his extracurricular science studies slip, so he tried to make up for that over the summer. He was still working through the library’s collection of science books ‘for children’, aimed more at his age group than his year group, but he was gradually beginning to mix in a few textbooks aimed at older years. He had thought he’d have an advantage when learning about animal breeding, since he knew two people who did it professionally, but Mrs Figg was curiously vague when applied to, and Aunt Marge still didn’t like him much, and didn’t want to spend much time talking to him, even when he was treating her as a fount of wisdom on a subject she enjoyed (which most adults liked). A lot of what he did learn from her was rather upsetting. It seemed she didn’t like to do more outcrossing than she could help, and routinely drowned or otherwise did away with puppies that were deemed unsuitable. Harry dropped his questioning at that point, since he could see it was upsetting Dudley rather a lot. Not surprising: Dudley loved dogs. Harry should have known better, and apologised to Dudley later.
Chapter 11: old enough
Chapter Text
August of 1990 was not a particularly fun month. Dudley was away for a lot of it, at a Rugby Club with Piers and Gordon, finally being permitted to play proper Rugby with actual rugby-tackles. Harry was happy for him, but the house was very quiet without him, and running in the park was much duller. But the main reason August was not fun was that Harry was ten now, and it was time to go over the various things his Aunt had felt he was too young for earlier. (And considering she had felt he was old enough to be told when he was four that his parents had been part of a vigilante crime-fighting organisation and had got killed as a result; old enough to be told when he was six that once he turned eleven, he would have to go away and live with weird people; and old enough when he was eight and nine to read about a number of gruesome wars, atrocities, and instances of injustice and persecution... well... it was never going to be easy to hear.) Some of it, of course, he’d pieced together from the hints she’d dropped and the reading she had him do. Namely, that while a significant proportion of the Wizarding World had been in thrall to this mysterious He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, another significant proportion of it had been and probably still was in similar thrall to Albus Dumbledore, and he might not be that much better than his opponent – only his personality cult seemed to be alive and thriving.
The new information was twofold. Firstly, the existence of spells and potions and wards that could twist people’s mind, make them forget and remember, love and hate, believe and disbelieve, at the discretion of the one controlling the magic; and how very casual the people of that world seemed to be about the use of such powers against the non-magical. “Muggles,” she said. “that’s what they call us. We’re not real people to them, you see,” and Harry shivered. The second piece of new information was Dumbledore’s letter. She gave him a photocopy of it for his own, but she wouldn’t let him see or touch the original. It had given her a headache, she said, and she never knew whether it was just the garish ink or something else, and she didn’t want to. She couldn’t keep him safe from much, she added bitterly, but she could at least keep that gaudy thing locked away safely. After he’d had time to read over it and digest it, they went over it, scrupulously, line by line. Petunia was sure to point out to Harry the deductions she had made from it, all those years ago, of what might have happened if she’d followed the instructions more carefully, and what that suggested about what Dumbledore might want from Harry.
“Thank you for not telling me earlier about that bit, Auntie,” Harry eventually said, grey in the face. “I’m terrified now, and I don’t think I would have been able to cope when I was younger.”
“You’re welcome, dear,” she said. “I wish I could have left it even later, but I think we’ll want the year to get all our preparations in place.” She smiled at him, viciously. “I think this Dumbledore is arrogant and over-confident, used to having things go his way. And you know what happens to people like that?” Harry’s eyes lit up.
“They make mistakes!” he chirped, and then grinned even wider. “They make mistakes, but they don’t notice it straight away, because they’re not used to making mistakes and don’t think to check, and by the time they do notice, it might be too late!”
“Precisely.” She sobered slightly. “Of course, this is all according to the most likely scenario – that he’s still in power, still in control, and everything is as it was nine years ago. I don’t actually know that. I haven’t heard a single word from anyone connected to that lot since you were dropped off. It might be he’s retired, and you’ll have to deal with his successors, who would be following in his footsteps, but adding their own variations to the schemes, and possibly squabbling with each other. It might be he got egg on his face for something else dodgy that he did, and somebody who didn’t like him much has taken power. So it won’t be until we get the notification next summer about your school attendance that we know which scenario we’re dealing with, and we should put a bit of thought into dealing with all of them.”
“We can’t just find out earlier?” Harry asked.
“No,” she said. “There is nobody that I know I could get in touch with without risking alerting Dumbledore, and nobody who I could be confident they wouldn’t go round and tell Dumbledore I’d been in touch with them. I know where the secret entrance to their main shopping street was twenty years ago, but I don’t know if it’s still there, and I’m not willing to gamble our lives and sanity on me being able to get in and out without him being alerted. Or you, for that matter. Discretion is the better part of valour, and I don’t want to give Albus Dumbledore any more warning than I can help that his plan has failed. There’ll be some time between when the school lets us know you have a place, and when you actually start school. That’s supposed to be for the child’s guardians to get them ready for school, and that’s exactly what we’ll do.”
“So when the school representative contacts us, we act naive and keep our eyes open?”
“Yes, dear. That’s exactly right.” She had trained him well. Lily’s boy he might be, but there wasn’t much of Lily in him these days, and even less resemblance to his tiresome father.
September of 1990 was quite a relief, when it came. Harry got to worry about Maths and Geography and English Literature, instead of complicated schemes with benevolent-seeming probable megalomaniacs. He heard back about his Tech options, and he’d been given his top four: Woodwork, Textile Design, Food Technology (with Nutrition), and First Aid (with Health Studies). Best of all, he got to be in the same school as Nathan and Tahmima again. Plus, Nathan’s maman, Mme LeGoff, was running an after-school Beginners’ Latin Club on Tuesdays, and while it was really meant for older students who had specific plans for their university careers and thought Latin might give them a bit of an edge (medicine, biology, French, etc), she had said there was no reason Harry couldn’t come, too. So he got an extra textbook, the Cambridge Latin Course, which sounded very impressive as a title, but was filled with cheerful stories about a Roman family, including a naughty dog called Cerberus. All in all, Harry was very happy that autumn, even if he was also very much aware of the passing of time.
One small fly in the ointment was the school’s continuing bullying problem. The three bullies he’d sort-of-mostly-accidentally set on fire last year had been very wary of him after that, and most of the others noticed that they were frightened of Harry, and decided to steer clear of him, too. The one time anyone had tried anything with Tahmima, she’d kicked him in the groin – hard enough that he needed a paramedic. (Apparently those dance classes weren’t just about moving gracefully to the music.) Nathan, on the other hand, had no such offensive skills, and once it became generally known that he had two mothers, he was every bully’s favourite target. They were hesitant to do more than make unpleasant comments when Harry and Tahmima were around, but Nathan’s friends couldn’t always be there.
It was the end of the school day, and Harry was rummaging through his locker, making sure he had all the right books he needed for his homework, without taking anything home he didn’t need to, when he became aware that the girls’ voices he could hear coming from the next bank of lockers were not just engaged in idle chatter – they were jeering at someone, making homophobic remarks, and very specific insinuations at that. Harry couldn’t actually hear Nathan’s voice, but he felt sure that was who the comments were aimed at – who else in the school was the son of two mothers? He longed to march around the corner and tell those girls exactly how unpleasant and stupid they were, to think and say such dreadful things, but something held him back. He knew what his Aunt would say.
In the aftermath of the Great Adder Incident of 1987, Petunia had sat Harry down and had a little talk with him about courage and recklessness. Rushing into the bushes like that, towards a creature that was loudly proclaiming its desire to bite Dudley, had been brave and kind, but not clever. Endangering yourself should never be a habit, only an absolute last resort, when there was no other way whatsoever to prevent serious harm coming to someone you cared about. Always assess the situation before acting. Making good judgements is a skill that comes with practice.
So he inched forward, slowly and quietly, and peeked around the corner. Nathan was sitting cross-legged on the floor, his locker closed and locked, his arms folded and his eyes closed. He was waiting for them to get bored and go away, the idealist. But the four girls weren’t going away. They were older, maybe Year Nine or Year Ten, and, having ramped up their rhetoric to the limits of their (rather disgusting) imaginations, had begun poking him, jabbing him in the face with their fingers. One of them, having had enough of bending down, started prodding at him with her toes, and then drew her foot back, more forcefully.
‘Oh no you don’t,’ thought Harry. He visualised the diagram of the bones of the foot in one of his science books, pictured those bones inside her ugly shoe with its stupid glitter laces as her foot swung forward, pictured the pressure as the swing of her foot met an immovable object and whichever of those thin, fragile little phalanges and metatarsals was the weakest would snap and shatter. Breakable foot, immovable object. Her foot hit Nathan’s shin and she screamed. Harry ducked back and listened. She was swearing and crying, complaining about the pain. Feet shuffled around, and he could hear murmurs of ‘no, not like that, over here’, ‘bend down more, that’s it,’ and ‘owwww’.
Then they were leaving, walking away down the hall, presumably to seek medical assistance, or at least get her a chair to sit on while they fetched someone. One of them hissed to Nathan, ‘this is all your fault, you horrible little faggot freak’ as they left, and then Harry heard the doors at the end of the corridor swinging. They were gone. Harry waited. He heard Nathan’s locker open, heard Nathan shuffle his books around, and then the locker closed again. Harry ducked around so Nathan couldn’t see him, and listened to him leave. He had wanted to go to Nathan once the girls had gone, let him know he wasn’t alone and they were horrible people, but that wouldn’t have been wise. Discretion.
(If the thing with the feet hadn’t worked, he would have resorted to the old sparks-in-the-hair trick, or perhaps some levitation, but this had been subtler. He didn’t want to leave a trail of obvious weirdness; but he wasn’t going to let anyone hurt people he cared about, either.) Slowly, feeling weak and dizzy, and guilty about not feeling more guilty than he did, Harry made his way home from school. He spent most of the rest of the afternoon sitting next to Dudley on the sofa, helping Dudley during the ad breaks as normal, but dozing while Dudley’s programmes were on. Dudley let him, and only teased him a tiny bit, afterwards.
Harry had made it into the top set for maths, and they were breezing through the syllabus quite fast. He got to see his Year Six Maths rivals again, Robert and Ben, and watch their faces fall once they realised they couldn’t quite compete with Lucy (who was probably going to skip Year Nine). Still, they got to compete with him, and he with them and with the rest of the class, and the teacher was making encouraging noises about having the whole of the top set take their Maths GCSEs in Year Ten, rather than Year Eleven, which would give them more time to spend on the really fun and exciting kind of maths they’d start seeing at A-level standard. Why, some of his top sets got to do Maths and Further Maths A-levels in one timetable slot, he boasted, and he had a feeling, though it was a bit early for that, that they might be another such group. Harry felt sad that he wasn’t going to be with them, learning all this stuff, but he told himself there was nothing to be done about it. And besides, he could still pick up the material later, and getting this far ahead now would make it easier for him.
He would miss the Maths gang, though. Robert, having watched an apparently very exciting film about card-counting at a casino, managed to persuade a good handful of the class to have a go at blackjack. At first the general consensus had been that nobody wanted to risk the wrath of their parents by gambling for money, and it was Harry who hit upon a solution. Every week, when he did his food shopping, he would buy a bag of sweets. Then, everybody who was playing that week would pay him a fraction of the cost of the bag, and receive that proportion of the sweets. Those sweets would then be the currency they used to gamble with. Harry still felt that gambling wasn’t very respectable, but it was fun, and good calculation and memory practice, and it became even more of an educational tool once they started varying the games, and played poker, too. That was really good, both for bluffing, and for learning to spot other people’s tells. They managed to keep up playing in empty classrooms during Break right up until May, when one of the teachers caught them. At first he was going to put them in serious trouble, but once they explained about the sweets, and that it was a carefully designed system so they wouldn’t escalate and end up spending more money than they could afford, he relented a little. Nobody contacted the boys’ guardians, and they didn’t get detention, but all the teachers were alerted that some students had been caught gambling, and any further offenders would be punished more severely. The boys joined the chess club, but it wasn’t quite the same, and Ben vowed to look up fun games of bluffing that didn’t involve gambling over the summer, so they'd have something else to play next year. (Another thing Harry wouldn’t be there to see...)
Joining the Chess Club did mean Harry got to catch up with Alice, at least. She was absolutely in her element there, having actual opponents whom she had to work to defeat, and even the relative beginners were fairly keen. It was nice to see her, but she was still the least close of his friends, and he doubted they’d keep in touch once he left – which was very soon now. Before Harry knew where he was, it was the last week of school – the last he’d see of normal secondary school for a while. He felt he’d done OK, considering. He ran through a long list of subjects and competencies. Yes, it was an impressive-sounding list. And then there was his research, and the yoga, aikido, and gardening. And he had picked up a bit of magic, and there was the snake thing, although Aunt Petunia had warned him he should keep very quiet about both.
“If people know you can do it, it’s much less useful as a potential weapon,” she had advised. “And if they don’t, they might not even know it’s you doing it. Discretion, that’s the thing.” She sighed. “It is funny, you liking snakes. Lily hated them. Said they whispered horrible things. And then when I teased her about it, years later, she turned on me and denied any such thing had ever happened, and made me promise not to make such dreadful accusations in front of any of her fancy friends. Or the less fancy ones for that matter.” She sneered. Harry raised his eyebrows at her.
Petunia finally agreed – not happily, but she knew she should do it, even if it was deeply distasteful – to give Harry some names of people who had been his parents’ friends. She didn’t know how trustworthy they were; she didn’t know whether they were dead or alive; she hadn’t met many of them, and hadn’t liked most of the ones she’d met; but the information was his, and he could make of it what he would. Sirius Black, Remus Lupin, and Peter Pettigrew. They and Harry’s father had been a gang of four, like Dudley and his friends but even closer, and instead of focusing all their attention on suitably manly sports, Harry’s father’s gang were obsessed with practical jokes. Severus Snape, the ‘less fancy friend’ of Lily’s she’d been thinking of. He’d lived in the same town the sisters had grown up in, Cokeworth, but a much less salubrious area than the respectable street where the Evans family lived. He’d been the one to tell Lily she was a witch, and the start of Lily and Petunia growing apart. He and Petunia had rather looked down on each other, he for her lack of fancy abilities, and she because he lived in a dodgy part of town, dressed funny, and didn’t wash as often as he should.
He’d gone off to Hogwarts with Lily, but they’d been put into different groups there; his friends and her friends had hated each other, and they’d stopped speaking after Lily’s fifth year. From the things Lily said and didn’t say, the Snape boy might well have ended up on the other side of the war, and she couldn’t say she was altogether surprised. Though it was only a guess, of course, and it was based off her impressions of him as a small child; he might well have grown up into a better person. All Lily’s other friends that Petunia knew of were mentioned in Lily’s letters as having died in the war, apart from her friend Alice, the one with the son the same age as Harry. Though Petunia didn’t know whether either of them had actually survived. Oh, and Lily’s favourite teacher was a Professor Flitlip or Fletwock, something like that, who taught Charms, whatever they were. Apparently a kind of spell, rather than charms like a finishing school, but Petunia had no idea beyond that. He’d been thinking of taking Lily as an apprentice, but she’d gone and got involved in the war instead, and got pregnant, and then got killed. At twenty-one. Harry hugged her.
“I’m so sorry for you, Aunt Petunia. It must have been horrible. Hearing about all those deaths, and knowing she was on the front line, and there was nothing you could do.”
“I put it out of my mind, and that’s the truth,” she told him. “I didn’t think about it. I wrote her curt little notes, and I sent her Christmas and birthday presents, but I didn’t really think of her. We were living in different worlds.” She then started interrogating him on what, exactly, his current aikido kyuu-grade meant in terms of competency, and what degree of improvement he might reasonably expect to make before September. Harry could take a hint.
For Dudley’s birthday, Harry customised a T-shirt for him. On the front, there was an appliqué bee and butterfly to accompany the famous boxing quotation (in gold fabric paint) of ‘float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.’ The back of the t-shirt had Dudley’s surname, and beneath it, a large number 1. He also baked him a batch of chocolate brownies, and purchased a packet of sports-themed notepaper, ‘so you’ll have no excuse not to write to me.’ Dudley wore the shirt proudly on their trip out to the zoo, bringing Malcolm and Gordon as well as Harry. It was a good day. None of the boys was so ill-mannered as to bang on the glass of any animal enclosure, and Harry was very discreet about talking to the creatures in the Reptile House. Dudley decided his favourite animals were the tigers, which were a little more active than the somnolent lions that particular day, pacing and snarling. Malcolm preferred the gorillas, and Gordon the sea-lions. (He was amused by the way one of them sneaked up behind the keeper at feeding time, and ate out of the bucket.) Harry’s favourites were always going to be the snakes, though he did take a liking to the smaller cats, like the ocelots and the servals. He asked Aunt Petunia what her favourites were (‘the flamingos, I think, they’re very elegant,’) and Uncle Vernon for good measure (‘none of your nonsense’). The ice-cream was delicious, and it didn’t rain until they were all safely home.
Dudley had his uniform fitting for Smeltings, and received his Smeltings stick. Harry thought the orange knickerbockers and maroon tailcoat were quite an eye-watering combination, and a straw hat in the autumn would look a bit daft, too, but Vernon and Aunt Petunia were gushing over how smart and grown-up Dudley looked, so he decided not to make trouble.
“Well, everyone will be able to tell you’re going to a proper public school, Dud,” was what he actually said. “I bet there aren’t many places that have the students wear tailcoats. A bit different from Stonewall’s uniform.”
“Yes, well, Smeltings isn’t a former secondary modern,” Vernon had snapped, to which Harry had grinned.
“Yeah, proper public school, dead posh,” he had confirmed, and then started curtseying to Dudley, and making elaborate bows, while Dudley waved his Smeltings stick around with his best attempts at regal gestures. Vernon left the boys to their horseplay, and Petunia only put an end to it once Dudley set the ceiling lamp swaying.
Harry was very much on edge throughout July, and buried himself in his studies in an effort to take his mind off his anxiety. What if the notification came via Dumbledore himself? What if he found out they hadn’t obeyed him, and hurt them all to punish them? What if he altered their memories and personalities, to make they think they had obeyed him, all along? What if Dumbledore was gone, and his former lieutenants were fighting each other for the top spot, and wanting to use Harry as a bargaining chip? What if Dumbledore was gone, and his successor as Headmaster had been on the other side in the war, and the notification was brought by a Death Eater? What if the house was swarmed by hordes of rabid boy-who-lived fans?
(Harry and Petunia agreed that there was something very suspicious about this whole Boy-Who-Lived business. After all, as far as either one of them could make out from what Dumbledore had said, there had been four people in the house when it blew up; three of them were dead, and one too young to remember anything much, and yet there was this whole mythology around Harry, and everyone seemed convinced it was he who had defeated Goodness-Knows-Who.) What if no notification came at all, and Aunt Petunia had to go back and try to persuade Stonewall to reinstate him, since she’d already had to give notice she was withdrawing him? That would be pretty brilliant for him, actually, if a bit embarrassing for her, but he didn’t think it was likely.
After all that, the arrival of the letter was a bit of an anti-climax. Harry went to fetch the post on Wednesday the 25th of July, and there was a letter addressed to him, and sealed with purple sealing wax.
Chapter 12: first contact
Chapter Text
After all that, there it was. A letter with no stamp, and sealed with purple sealing-wax, addressed to a ‘Mr H. Potter, The Smallest Bedroom, 4 Privet Drive, Little Whinging, Surrey.’ Harry scooped it up along with the rest of the post, a postcard and something that was probably a bill, both addressed to Vernon, and took them all into the kitchen.
“These are for you, sir”, he announced, handing the other items over, “and this is for me.” He showed his aunt the envelope and the wax seal. She swallowed and nodded.
“It’s them all right, Vernon,” she said. “Harry’s parents’ old school.”
“You deal with it,” he spat. “I don’t want to hear a word about it. Just as long as nobody expects me to pay for the boy to learn any of that hocus pocus nonsense. No weirdo school fees, no weirdo school supplies – nothing. And I’m not having any of it under my roof.” Harry and Petunia nodded solemnly; Dudley looked bemused. Vernon got himself ready to go for work, and then poked his head around the kitchen door as he was leaving.
“Remember,” he said, “not a penny.” And then the door slammed, the car started up, and he was gone.
“Aren’t you going to open it?” Dudley asked. Harry took a clean butter-knife, and slit the top of the envelope, leaving the purple seal with its four animals intact. He unfolded the envelope.
“Dumbledore’s still Headmaster,” he told his aunt. “The letter itself is from a Minerva McGonagall, the Deputy Headmistress. It’s telling me I have a place at the school, and they ‘await my owl’ by the 31st. And there’s a supply list, but it doesn’t actually tell you where to get the things on it.”
He passed the letter to his Aunt, and then let Dudley look at the weird envelope, with the sealing-wax. He added that to his mental list of Things Wizards Use.
“This is a bit different,” Petunia decided. “When Lily got her letter, it didn’t just come through the door. The school sent a professor to tell us that magic was real, all that kind of thing, told us what a tremendous opportunity it was for Lily, how lucky she was. Nothing about how she’d be a second-class citizen in that world, nothing about the war, and it was brewing then, even if it hadn’t properly started. They told her all that, and then gave her the letter. And they offered to have someone take us round the secret shopping street, too, only we went with the Snape boy and his mother. I think it might have been that same woman who did the visit. Scottish, and stern-looking she was, looked at the house like Cokeworth was beneath her, and turned herself into a cat as a demonstration.” She shuddered. Unnatural, she was clearly thinking, but she did Harry the courtesy of not saying it.
“Will Harry turn into a cat?” Dudley asked hopefully, “or maybe a snake? Ooh, what about a tiger, that’d be cool, having a tiger for a cousin.” Petunia rolled his eyes.
“Not any time soon he won’t,” she said. “And not in the house; you heard your father. Anyway, Harry, they seem to be following a different procedure here. This letter seems to be the kind you would have got if your parents were still with us, and you had grown up in that kind of household, not a normal one. But if we’d raised you the way the other letter said to raise you, you’d be in the same position as a normal, so-called ‘muggle-born’ student: not knowing that the strange things that happened around you were you-know-what. So why this procedure for this letter?”
“Maybe it’s an administrative error,” he offered. “Or maybe it’s based off who your parents are or were, not how you were raised. Which is daft – I bet I’m not the only kid raised by someone other than their parents as a result of the war – but bureaucracy can be silly. The amount of fuss Nathan had with his surname...”
“What about his surname?” asked Dudley. Aunt Petunia clearly didn’t want to waste time talking about Nathan’s surname, so Harry tried to be brief.
“He’s Nathan Moreton-LeGoff. Moreton’s his mum’s name, and LeGoff’s his maman’s. He used to have his father’s surname, but they changed it by deed poll to the other one when he was about five, after his father stopped wanting anything to do with him. Apparently it took St Gregory’s another three or four years to get the new one right.”
“Anyway,” Petunia interjected, “what that business about the owl means is they want you to send them a letter back, using an owl to carry the letter instead of just putting a postage stamp on it like a sensible person. Only because we’re a normal household, we don’t have an owl to send a letter with. Which Dumbledore knowns, but he seems not to have told his minion.” She paused for a moment. “Unless this is a test, and they’re trying to catch us out. So if we did send an owl, they’d know we knew more than they wanted us to, and there’d be trouble.”
“Owls are cool,” Dudley said cheerfully. “They can turn their heads all the way round; it’s dead creepy. But cool.” Silence reigned. Aunt Petunia was getting increasingly close to the end of her tether, Harry could tell. And what he was going to say might make it worse.
“I think we should be able to write to them with a normal stamp,” he said. “I know you don’t like to talk about it, but that time when you were very young, and you wrote to the Headmaster – you didn’t have an owl back then, did you?”
“No we most certainly did not,” she snapped. “The very idea! It was a very normal and respectable household.” A pause. “But I take your point. ‘Hogwarts School, Scotland’ should be enough of an address. They must have some of their own people in the post office who intercept these things.”
Dudley eventually decided nothing else of interest was going to happen, and sloped off upstairs to play computer games. Meanwhile, Harry and Petunia spent the rest of the morning painstakingly drafting a reply letter, after which Petunia made lunch while Harry copied it out onto his good notepaper with his best handwriting.
Dear Deputy Headmistress McGonagall,
Thank you for your letter. I am honoured to hear that I might have a place at your school; however, I know very little about it, or indeed about the world of magic.
“Don’t say wizarding world,” Aunt Petunia insisted. “That’s what they call it, and you don’t want to sound too familiar with things.”
I do not feel I can commit to attending Hogwarts School without learning more about the educational opportunities it provides and the careers one might pursue with such an education. I have been raised wholly in the non-magical world and I daresay I know no more about it than my mother did when she received her own notification.
“That’s quite accurate,” Aunt Petunia observed, “since she had that horrible Snape boy telling her things, and you have me.”
In addition, my education up to this point has been in British State-funded schools, and my aunt and uncle are not in a position to pay additional school fees for me, nor to purchase the equipment on the list. Moreover, even if the money were not an issue, I have never seen any shop that might sell the goods on the list, and my aunt has only the vaguest of recollections, more than fifteen years’ distant, and would not feel comfortable setting out to obtain such supplies without guidance.
“Yes indeed,” Aunt Petunia smiled. “We must play up the idea of the poor, innocent, helpless muggle.”
Therefore I humbly ask that you be so kind as to arrange a representative of Hogwarts school to call upon us, as they would upon any other student raised outside the world of magic, to provide us with more information about the school, and about how attendance is financed; in the event that the financial situation would permit me to attend and should my family choose to send me there, we would also need assistance with the practicalities of obtaining supplies.
With thanks and best wishes,
Harry Potter.
They filed the draft away, and posted the neat copy off after lunch. The long-awaited, much-dreaded first contact was over and done with. Thursday passed without incident. So did Friday. Harry and Petunia were both distinctly twitchy at that point, and Dudley seemed to be compensating by being extra bouncy and enthusiastic. It was on Saturday morning that the school representative finally arrived: one Rubeus Hagrid.
It almost goes without saying at this point that Mr Hagrid did not make a good impression. His enormous size, his wild, hairy and unkempt appearance, the motorbike he drove up on; none of these counted in his favour. In addition to this, he had also been improperly briefed (whether by accident or by design), and so their encounter began with him hammering on the front door, shouting that he was ‘’ere for little ‘Arry’, and ‘wasn’ goin’ ter stand fer those muggles keepin’ ‘im away from a good education.’
And of course, it being a Saturday, Uncle Vernon was still at home, so it took rather longer to smooth down everyone’s ruffled feathers (and there were much more of them) than might otherwise have been the case. Eventually, Uncle Vernon stomped off to the pub, and Aunt Petunia moved the car out of the garage while Harry and Dudley fetched blankets to spread on the garage floor. They couldn’t have their discussion in the house, after all, since Mr Hagrid wouldn’t fit through the front door. She didn’t want him to spend any more time lurking in the front garden (the neighbours would doubtless have quite a bit to say as it was), and her first suggestion of a nice picnic in the park had been rebuffed on grounds of security (‘yeh never know who might overhear summat’), so the garage it was. Petunia made tea for everyone (serving Mr Hagrid’s in the huge beer stein Vernon had been given as a souvenir once and never used), and fetched out the various biscuits and slices that were the product of Harry’s stress baking session earlier in the week.
And since Mr Hagrid hadn’t seen the letter Harry had sent to the deputy head (who should apparently be referred to as ‘Professor McGonagall’), instead having been informed by the Headmaster that there were ‘difficulties that might need smoothin’ over’, Harry had to go over their concerns all over again.
While Hagrid sang the praises of the school and the Headmaster, there was very little useful information in his panegyric. Had Harry’s family had the free choice of schools to send him to, they would not have been persuaded. However, it was made very clear that they did not: ‘'is name’s been down fer Hogwarts since the day ‘e was born’. Besides, since they were ‘Muggles’ and Harry was a wizard, they apparently had very little authority over him in the ‘wizarding world’, though Hagrid didn’t spell it out quite like that. At least the huge man was able to supply the family with a (non-exhaustive) list of possible careers available for Hogwarts graduates: some worked in ‘the Ministry’, some for other institutions like Gringotts Bank, St Mungo’s Hospital, various wildlife reserves, or Hogwarts itself, and there was also some kind of private sector, ‘shops an’ that’, even though it sounded as if the public sector was more than a little bloated in comparison. For a while, Hagrid waxed enthusiastic about a recent graduate, one Charlie Weasley, who had graduated earlier in the summer and had already been fortunate enough to obtain work with a genuine dragon reserve, in Romania: ‘Good bloke, Charlie. Got the right ideas about interesting creatures. Many a nice chat we ‘ad tergether.’ Once they raised the subject of money, and explained that since Harry had been getting a very good education at Stonewall High School for free, his Uncle Vernon was disinclined to pay any money whatsoever towards Harry’s education at Hogwarts, Hagrid’s mouth opened in shock.
“Galloping gargoyles, ‘Arry!” he had exclaimed. “D’yer think yer parents didn’t leave yeh anything?”
“Well, yes, I did, actually,” Harry replied, and the other two nodded. Hagrid went on to explain that Harry’s parents’ money was waiting for him in Gringotts Bank, and explained how safe and secure it was, and how intimidating the Goblins who run it were. And apparently Harry’s tuition fees had been pre-paid anyway, as most of the old families did. (Harry resolved to learn more about how Hogwarts fees worked later.) So that was settled; Harry was definitely going to Hogwarts.
They hit a slight snag when Mr Hagrid announced his intention to take Harry to London immediately to purchase his supplies. Petunia adamantly refused to let Harry ride on that motorbike without any kind of helmet or safety protection. Hagrid seemed on the point of snatching Harry off and taking him away regardless of any objections, when Petunia announced that it was nearly lunchtime, and surely Mr Hagrid would stay for lunch, and he could take Harry shopping in the afternoon. Dudley was then deputed to ‘keep Mr Hagrid company while I make the sandwiches’, and Harry was sent out post-haste with a bank-note in his hand, to buy himself a motorbike helmet from the Little Whinging motor garage.
Thoughtful of the family reputation, he was careful to tell the men at the garage that they were having a visit from an old friend of his parents, who had a very impressive motorbike, but his aunt took her guardianship duties very seriously and absolutely refused to let him ride on the back of it without suitable protection, and he relied very much on their advice. They were happy to sell him not only a helmet but also some knee protection, checked to make sure the sizing was right, and advised him very seriously on what kind of jacket and boots to wear. The older of the two seemed rather excited on his behalf; apparently a lad’s first bike ride was a proper rite of passage. Harry then popped into the shoe shop to buy some boots (since he didn’t actually own any, only trainers and school shoes, and he could always reimburse Aunt Petunia later if necessary), and jogged back home, arriving just in time to hear Dudley quizzing Mr Hagrid about whether ‘Quidditch’ had many fouls, and how serious the players’ injuries were. Good old Dudley. Trust him to ask about sports.
After lunch, Harry fished in the cupboard under the stairs for the leather jacket Dudley had outgrown a few months ago (and which was still much too big for Harry, but needs must), stuffed a notebook and pencil and his supply list into the pockets, donned his new safety gear, and announced he was ready to go. His Aunt admonished him to behave himself for Mr Hagrid, and be good, which was a coded way of reminding him to remember the plan and appear suitably naive and compliant. Dudley told him to have fun, and added gleefully that he was looking forward to seeing what Harry’s school uniform looked like. And they were off.
The bike ride was distinctly hair-raising: this was a wizarding motorbike, and it could fly and turn invisible. Harry clung as tightly to Mr Hagrid’s coat as he could, which was in itself moderately disconcerting, as he seemed to be keeping a variety of live animals in the pockets. Finally, they hit the ground, and before long, the motorbike was parked in a Soho backstreet, Harry’s helmet was in one of Hagrid’s pockets, and the two of them were walking along Charing Cross Road, with Hagrid occasionally making loud and rather indiscreet comments about how amazing Muggles were, managing without magic, and look at that shop there, ‘Arry, what do you think all that’s for, eh? (The window display in question showed a collection of perfectly ordinary household appliances such as vacuum cleaners and washing machines. Harry tried to explain what they were for, but Hagrid still seemed baffled.) Finally, they reached a rather dingy pub that all the other shoppers seemed to be ignoring. Their eyes just slid from the record shop on one side of it to the bookshop on the other side as if there were absolutely nothing in between. This was it: the Leaky Cauldron.
Chapter 13: Diagon Alley
Chapter Text
Harry’s initial impressions of the Wizarding world were decidedly mixed. It had taken very little acting ability for him to seem overwhelmed by the positive horde of well-wishers in the Leaky Cauldron wanting to shake his hand, thank him, or even hug him, pleased and curious to meet one of his new professors (one Quirinius Quirrell), or awestruck at his first sight of Diagon Alley proper, with its medieval-to-Early-Modern-seeming architecture, the people in strange clothing, and the peculiar goods for sale, including a variety of animals. One shop seemed almost entirely devoted to owls, with a few falcons and bats, and he briefly made eye contact with an extremely intelligent-looking snowy owl, before his view was blocked by a large group of younger children, staring at a broomstick displayed in a shop window. Nevertheless, he had questions and reservations aplenty, which he kept to himself.
The goblins, thankfully, seemed to be a very different kind of being from Tolkien’s goblins (or orcs), and they were much better dressed than the goblins of Goblin Market, a poem they had studied in Year Eight, although he resolved not to eat any food they might offer him, just in case. He was genuinely awestruck by the large pile of money, and by the thrilling cart ride through the vast network of underground caverns, and he carefully didn’t ask why it was that Hagrid had had his key in the first place, or what he had meant by including himself in the persons who would keep Harry’s money safe for him. Hagrid didn’t work for Gringotts; he worked for Hogwarts. Still, at least Harry had his own key now. Griphook, the goblin who took them to the vaults, was clearly a person of few words, with a rather dark sense of humour, and Harry wished they could speak more, but Hagrid hustled them out of the bank as soon as they had obtained Harry’s bag of money, and the mysterious parcel that constituted Hagrid’s Very Important Hogwarts Business, entrusted to him by the mighty Headmaster Dumbledore. There had been a queue of adults wearing normal clothing in the foyer, waiting to exchange money, and Harry would have quite liked to exchange some of his own, but he didn’t have time to so much as ask Hagrid before they were blinking in the sunlight outside. It was for the best, anyway, he decided. He was better off waiting until he wasn’t under the eye of such an enthusiastic Dumbledore supporter.
Hagrid immediately left Harry in Madam Malkin’s, the robe shop, where Harry met another wizard child for the first time. The boy was plump and blonde like Dudley, only where Dudley exuded confidence, this boy had hunched shoulders and an inward-turned gaze, and he didn’t look to be anywhere near as muscular as Dudley, either. They had chatted a little awkwardly. Harry’s new acquaintance declared himself to be delighted to be going to Hogwarts like his parents and his other relations (though he sounded more nervous than anything), as his family had thought he was ‘all Muggle’ for ages. His uncle had apparently done a number of horrible things to ‘frighten the magic out of him’, including dropping him off a seaside pier and out of a window! Harry was too taken aback to even begin to verbalise quite how unacceptable that was, and by the time he’d stopped gaping, he was being regaled with tales of the other boy’s new pet toad, which was apparently quite happily settled in the family’s greenhouses, though he was supposed to be a pet for the boy to take to Hogwarts with him. Harry managed to express admiration that his acquaintance’s family owned multiple greenhouses, and the conversation continued to flow, until Madam Malkin announced that the other boy was ‘all done, dear.’
“Right,” he said, clambering down from the stool he had been standing on, losing his balance and falling to the floor. “Oh, bother! Erm, well, I’ll see you at Hogwarts, then. Oh, and, er, my name’s Neville Longbottom. Just in case... er... um, bye.”
“Wait a moment!” Harry said, in what was probably his first unguarded utterance of the day. “Your name’s Neville, and you’re my age. Is your birthday, er, on Monday? And is your mum called Alice?”
“Yes!” Neville dropped his parcels in astonishment, and fumbled around to pick them up. “How did you know?”
“My mum mentioned you in one of her letters to her sister,” Harry explained. “Apparently your mum was one of her best friends. I was hoping I might get to meet you some time, so this is great.” He paused. He wanted to ask about Neville’s mum, who was supposedly his godmother as his own mother had been Neville’s, and whether she was still alive, and if she was, why hadn’t he seen anything of her during his childhood. But he didn’t know how to ask, and Neville saw his hesitancy.
“I’m afraid my mum and dad aren’t, er, aren’t around,” he mumbled. “I was raised by my gran. She’s – eep – waiting for me, I’m running late, I’ll be in trouble! See you soon!” And he stumbled his way to the door.
“I’m Harry, by the way!” Harry called after him. “And Happy Birthday!” He waved through the window, as Neville was collected by a scowling elderly lady dressed in very strange-looking clothing with a stuffed vulture on her hat. Next to her, he could see Hagrid, carrying two ice-cream cones. How kind of him! Harry waved to him, as well, and Hagrid waved back. Then Harry’s school clothes were finished, and Hagrid was already beckoning him out, so he had no time to ask Madam Malkin any of the questions he had thought up about Wizarding fashion and how it worked and what, if anything, the different styles signified (and exactly how odd it was, on a scale of 1-10, to go around with a vulture on one’s head). Discretion, he reminded himself, find out more another time. The ice-cream was rather good, and he thanked Mr Hagrid politely for it. They strolled back along the alley, ticking off items from the list: cauldron, phials, telescope, scales, and potions ingredients. Not before time, they also picked up a second-hand trunk to keep it all in: ‘tenth of the price they charge for new ones, and it makes no ruddy difference that I can see’.
Then there was the bookshop, Flourish & Blotts. It was amazing. Harry had never been in such a place before. He could have spent days just browsing, but Hagrid seemed disinclined to let Harry get much that wasn’t on his list. “Yeh don’t do Ancient Runes until yer Third Year,” he rumbled. He didn’t seem to want Harry to even wander near the section of the bookshop devoted to Etiquette and Genealogy, and only let Harry get a few books from the History section: “No sense buyin’ up half the shop, now, go easy.” Still, Harry supposed that getting Hogwarts: a History, Modern Magical History, and The Statute of Secrecy: Causes and Consequences was at least a good start. He had been tempted by The Rise and Fall of the Dark Arts, but felt he’d better not be seen buying that, or even looking at it in public. That went double for Curses and Counter-curses. Hagrid waved cheerfully at a stern-looking woman in a tartan dress escorting a group of children and adults in normal clothing, and she nodded back at him, but no introductions were made. Harry suspected that must be a professor at the school showing students from normal families around, but didn’t ask. He noticed as the last few of the tartan lady’s charges paid for their books, they were also given a packet from behind the counter, but when he made his purchases, no such item was given by him. He broke his long streak of incuriousness to ask.
“Oh, those were the Introduction to the Wizarding World pamphlets for the muggleborn students,” the man behind the counter, a Mr Flourish, explained cheerfully. “Free with their first purchase! But you don’t need anything like that, Mr Potter, you’re the Boy Who Lived!”
“Erm,” Harry said diffidently, “I’ve been raised in the non-magical world all my life, sir. Mr Hagrid here is the first person from the Wizarding World I ever remember meeting. I might as well be a muggle-born for all the difference it makes; I’m certainly muggle-raised. If the pamphlets are only free to muggle-borns, I’d be quite willing to pay for one, sir, but I really do think I might need one.” Mr Flourish made an admirably quick recovery, and proclaimed that for the Boy-Who-Lived, there was of course no charge, and what a delight it was to see Harry in his shop after all these years. But the whispers and murmurs were spreading outwards: ‘Harry Potter, raised by muggles’, ‘putting the Boy-Who-Lived with muggles’, ‘Harry Potter, practically a muggle-born, he says.’ Hagrid’s face looked clouded. It was clearly time to move on.
“I do appreciate you bringing me here, and showing me all this, Mr Hagrid,” he finally said. “I don’t know how I would have coped on my own. Diagon Alley is wonderful – but rather intimidating.”
“Eh, you just stick by me, lad, and I’ll see you right,” his guide replied, more cheerfully (good). “And jus’ call me Hagrid, no need for ‘mister’. Everyone does.” Harry smiled up at him, inwardly planning to look up modes of address and general etiquette.
“And you just keep calling me Harry, please, Hagrid,” he replied. “It’ll be nice to have people I already know when I get to Hogwarts.” Hagrid laughed.
“’Ere, ‘ere, we aren’t done yet!” he proclaimed. “Can’t go to Hogwarts without the most important thing of all – yer wand.” And Harry found himself being ushered towards a small shopfront with mullioned glass windows, above which was the legend ‘Ollivanders, makers of fine wands since 382 B. C.,’ and waved through the door. Dim and dusty as it was, this place felt magical, perhaps even more so than the bustling alley, the strange-smelling potions emporium, or the bookshop overflowing with potential knowledge. Mr Ollivander, the proprietor, certainly kept up the mystique. Harry drank in the wandmaker’s talk, and resolved to add books about wandlore to his long list of things to buy when he came back. Wand after wand failed to work, or did something undesirable. Perhaps Harry had ruined things by learning to do too much magic without a wand? What if no wand fitted him? Some of the options Mr Ollivander tried seemed completely inert in Harry’s hand; some whipped up the dust a bit; one or two felt like stinging nettles. Then Mr Ollivander disappeared further into the back of his shop, with a murmured ‘I wonder...’, and came back with a single box. As soon as Harry touched it, he knew. It felt warm, but more bracing than comforting. Blue, green and gold sparks shot out the end, and spun around him, banishing the dust from the patch of floor where he stood. It hummed with potential. Harry hardly needed Mr Ollivander to tell him he might one day accomplish great things; the wand itself was telling him so. Although Mr Ollivander’s professing a certain uncomfortable admiration for The-Wizard-Whose-Name-I-Actually-Don’t-Know-What-With-Nobody-Ever-Using-It was definitely something to bear in mind, as was the fact of Mr Ollivander having sold that wizard his wand, once upon a time. So, cedar with phoenix feather, ten and a quarter inches, springy, unvarnished. Not like either of his parents’. Though, Mr Ollivander hadn’t actually said one thing.
“Please, sir,” Harry asked as he handed over his seven galleons and nine sickles, and received a pot of beeswax polish and a silk cloth (essential equipment for unvarnished wands), “what kind of core did my mother’s wand have? I don’t think you said.” Mr Ollivander smiled, perhaps a touch grimly.
“Ah, yes, Lily Evans as was. Yes. I didn’t make that wand, and nor did my father. No, it was one of my late cousin’s more experimental offerings. Nundu whisker, Mr Potter. Willow wood and nundu whisker. Not a material I care to use, but she certainly made it work for her...” Mr Ollivander was even gracious enough to tell Harry how to spell ‘nundu’, and then bid him farewell. Outside the shop, Hagrid was waiting. He held a large birdcage, containing the same magnificent snowy owl who had caught Harry’s eye earlier. Horror and delight warred in Harry’s chest.
“Yer last item, ‘Arry. Every witch and wizard should ‘ave a familiar, and this one’s already taken a liking to yeh. Besides, it’s yer birthday in a coupla days. Call ‘er a birthday present from me – that an’ a ‘welcome back’ ter the Wizarding world. ‘Appy Birthday, ‘Arry – yer a proper wizard now.” Harry was struck dumb. Hagrid patted him on the head and smiled. “Eh, don’t worry about it. I know fine well I didn’t ‘ave ter, but I wanted ter. Knew yer parents, I did, and fine people they were, fine people... knew yeh as a baby... an’ it wouldn’ ‘ave bin fair to this beau’iful lady not to take ‘er, would it now, not when she ‘ad ‘er ‘eart set on yeh.” Harry stared at the owl, and she stared back. No, it was a done deal now. The owl was his – or he was her human, whichever, and he couldn’t give her up, even if he hadn’t been concerned about hurting Hagrid’s feelings or making him cross. But Uncle Vernon was going to be so very angry... no. Rephrase. Uncle Vernon would be angry if he ever found out that Harry owned an owl. Something to think about.
“She’s beautiful, Hagrid. I love her. Thank you so much.” Hagrid clearly seemed ready to leave the Alley now. “Before we go, may I ask a few questions?” This was the tricky bit. Some adults hated questions, and there was always the risk of anything he said to Hagrid being passed on to Dumbledore. But this needed doing. “How do I look after her? Is there anything I need?” He didn’t want his lovely owl harmed or neglected because he didn’t know what he was doing. But Hagrid’s recommendations seemed very straightforward. She just needed somewhere to perch and a supply of prey – and as well as things like mice that she’d be competing with the cats and snakes of Little Whinging for, she could also go after bigger prey. And, Harry thought, no suburban area was ever short of pigeons and grey squirrels these days. Although what if the industrial pollution tainted the meat of her prey to the point it harmed her? And what about the problem of keeping a snowy owl discreetly, hundreds of miles south of where bird-watchers might expect to see one?
But these were all problems about keeping an owl in a Muggle area, and judging from Hagrid’s behaviour earlier, he was the furthest thing possible from an expert on not standing out among Muggles. Oh, of course. The shopkeeper. And Hagrid had said something about owl treats. “Might we go back to the shop, just quickly, so I can get her some owl treats and stuff?” Hagrid, thank goodness, acquiesced, and back they went. He even offered to hold the cage and the parcels while Harry went inside. There, Harry was able to obtain not only owl treats, but an owl stand with attached self-cleaning tray for Harry’s room, and four ‘Stealth Special’ perches, each of which would attach to the side of a building or tree with the tap of a wand, and was imbued with a very powerful notice-me-not charm, guaranteed for ten years, which would ensure any passers-by would not notice a bird sitting on the perch, and it would take the best part of thirty minutes for the ‘unnoticeability’ to wear off the bird after she left the perch. The wand tap, as well as securing the perch in place, would ensure that the witch or wizard placing the perches would be immune to the ‘notice-me-not’ effect. It was just what Harry needed, and he didn’t begrudge the money at all, though each of the five charmed items had cost more than his wand. The shopkeeper was clearly pleased with his sale, since he threw in the bag of owl treats for free, along with some owl tonic that was supposedly ‘sovereign for indigestion’.
And then they were done. It was starting to get dark, which meant it must be very late. Harry used a phone box to call home and reassure his Aunt he was fine and would be home later that evening, and would eat while he was out, and then he insisted on treating Hagrid to dinner (since he still had the change from the purchase of his safety gear in his pocket). Of course, Hagrid couldn’t fit in most restaurants, but they ate takeaway pizza and tiramisù sitting on a park bench, before Hagrid drove them back to Little Whinging, trunk, birdcage and all. At the train station, Harry found a tree overlooking the rough ground that was a good hunting place for snakes, and held one of the perches against the tree-trunk at head height before tapping it with his wand. It worked. He let his owl – still unnamed – out of her cage, and told her she could stay here overnight, where there should be lots of mice for her, and he’d come and see her tomorrow and show her some other places where she could rest, and he’d be sure to spend plenty of time with her, and find her a really good name, one that was just right for her. Under Hagrid’s indulgent gaze, he jammed the empty bird cage into his trunk, fed his owl an owl treat, wished her goodnight and tore himself away.
His arrival home was another anticlimax. Aunt Petunia, clad in dressing-gown and slippers, opened the door to him before he even reached it, and urged him up the stairs. He could hear Vernon snoring, louder than normal. He waved goodbye to Hagrid, hugged his Aunt, and let her help him take the trunk up to his room. The house was dark and quiet. It was clearly past his bedtime, and so he went to bed.
Chapter 14: a high-stakes matter
Chapter Text
Harry spent the following day laying low. Vernon had spent much of the Saturday drinking heavily, so on Sunday, the rest of the household tiptoed around, avoiding loud noises and strong smells. In Harry’s case, it was prudent to avoid letting the man so much as catch sight of him. Nor could he discuss his day out with his aunt, or with Dudley, beyond a few words here and there. Dudley elected to spend the day with Malcolm and Gordon, either training, watching TV or a bit of both. Harry spent the day with his owl. He had already set one of the four perches for her near the train station. He put the second on the wall of the garden shed, where it wouldn’t be visible for the house even were it not magical, and the third on the wall of the house, just below his bedroom window. He would place the fourth later, once he and the owl had a better idea of where the good hunting spots were.
He read the Muggleborn Introductory Pamphlet from cover to cover twice, and skimmed through his History textbook, A History of Magic. Much of what was said tied in very well with his own studies of non-magical history, but he still felt he badly needed some other perspectives for the same period. Madam Bagshot came across as more than a little ideologically driven, at times, and he was extremely sceptical of her portrayal of witch-hunts in particular. It was the implications as much as anything. It wasn’t that he doubted there had been any such person as Wendelin the Weird; rather, he very much doubted that her activities had been in any way representative of witch-hunt targets, and yet such was quite strongly implied. And to have such a work as the sole assigned textbook... well. He’d have to see what the teacher – professor – was like. He skimmed through the textbook again, this time drawing up a shortlist of potential names for his owl. He had five so far. Artemisia, Hedwig and Morgana from the textbook. Bellatrix, Latin for female warrior, could be shortened to Bella, which meant beautiful. And Hyndla was the protagonist of one of the Edda texts which itself contained a fragment of another text, mentioning the origins of witches and wizards.
There was a quiet tap at the window, and he hurried to open it. He’d been planning to go out and find her shortly, but there she was. He petted her gently, praising her intelligence, and broached the topic of choosing a name with her. She liked it – but she was quite adamant she wasn’t a Bellatrix or a Morgana. Artemisia and Hyndla she was hesitant over, but when he said the name Hedwig she hopped up and down enthusiastically. Hedwig it was, then. He fed her another owl treat.
“Here you go, Hedwig,” he whispered.
On Monday, Uncle Vernon went back to work, and Harry was able to rehash his trip to Diagon Alley with his Aunt, in exhaustive detail. She was particularly concerned with Harry’s impressions of Hagrid’s attitude towards everything that had happened, as well as how shopkeepers and the wider public had reacted to Harry; what they had seemed to expect from him, how they looked at him and treated him, and how they way he’d behaved had seemed to mesh with their pre-existing expectations of him. He brought out the Muggleborn Guide, and they had a lot of fun discussing the political ramifications. They also discovered the reason why, as Hagrid had mentioned, new trunks were so much more expensive than the second-hand kind Harry had purchased: after about ten years, the featherweight charms built into new trunks would wear off, and only the very top-end models were constructed such that the charms could be renewed to the same standard. Of course Hagrid hadn’t felt there was much difference – he was so extraordinarily large and strong to start with. Harry felt rather silly; but as mistakes went, it was a minor one, and a good learning opportunity besides. Everyone has blind spots. Remember to make allowances for other people’s, and guard against your own.
Still, Harry had done well, Petunia decided. The loud mention of being muggle-raised in the bookshop had been a bold move, and Dumbledore probably wouldn’t like it, but since he had wanted Harry muggle-raised to the point of total ignorance about the other world, there wasn’t much he could reasonably do about it. And Harry should probably spend some time looking up all the things he (or any other adult wizard) might unreasonably do, should they feel so disposed. And he certainly needed to know more about the legal system, and the financial one, and what had been supposed to happen to his parents’ estate – and to him – when they died.
“Lily could be a bit flighty at times, and far too trusting,” Petunia said, “and your father was too much of a joker for me to take to him, but neither of them was stupid, and they cared about you very much. I find it hard to believe they made no provisions against the event of their deaths, and I doubt they would have wanted you dumped on the doorstep in the middle of the night, with no proper paperwork. I had to send off to Somerset House for your birth certificate, you know,” she told Harry. “And the normal thing that happens, when people write wills and then die, is the wills are executed. There are procedures. And if people are left things, they get notified of it, or if the legatee is a child, their guardians do. And that’s not a modern innovation – it’s part of the law.” Harry nodded. The Romans had had wills. Historians looking at the Dark Ages and the Middle Ages used people’s wills as evidence – sometimes it was the only surviving evidence that someone had ever existed. He doubted the Statute would have changed that. “There’s something dodgy there, but we need to be very careful looking into it. We don’t want to tip off the wrong person. No wild accusations. Normal, innocent-seeming questions, until we know for certain, and even then we watch who we tell.” She fixed Harry with a gimlet expression. “This is a high-stakes matter, and I’m trusting you.”
Harry’s birthday was quiet and peaceful. He had a cake, of course, and his aunt and cousin sang ‘Happy Birthday’ to him. Dudley had apparently made an excursion to a sporting goods shop, giving Harry some blocks and belts suitable for yoga, and two wooden swords, one weighted and one not. He hadn’t just sneaked a few extras in during an expedition (presumably with his father) to obtain more gloves and punching bags and suchlike; he must have consulted beforehand with Harry’s teachers for aikido and yoga, to work out what would be most suitable! Harry was touched, and impressed with his cousin’s sneakiness. Subtlety didn’t come naturally to Dudley, but he’d really put in an effort here. Harry’s present from his aunt (and nominally his uncle) was much bulkier than he was used to, and turned out to be sleepwear: two pairs of new pyjamas in very thin cotton, two pairs of pyjamas in thick brushed cotton, two in synthetic fleece, a fluffy dressing-gown, and six pairs of bedsocks, ranging in materials from something reminiscent of sports socks to synthetic fleece lined with artificial sheepskin, and all equipped with dots of rubber on the underside. Everything was in various shades of blue, green and grey.
“It gets very cold in the Scottish Highlands,” she told him brusquely, “and those people don’t believe in central heating. I won’t have you getting ill. And be sure not to wear ordinary socks to bed, only bedsocks, so you don’t slip and fall over. You’re to take proper care of yourself while you’re away, you hear me? No foolishness.” He smiled happily at her, and Dudley elbowed him.
“Yes, Harry, no foolishness,” he snickered. His mother turned on him.
“And the same goes for you, young man!” She also handed Harry a large bag of nametapes she’d had printed just for him. “Harry, you’re to be sure to sew these into all your clothes. Dudley’s getting the same, but he doesn’t like sewing. It’ll be good practice for you – small stitches.” Harry nodded. “Oh, and one more thing.” She handed him a hooded sweatshirt, bright pink in colour. Dudley laughed.
“It’s for shopping trips to that other place. The Goblins don’t like disguises, your booklet says, but a hood hiding most of your face isn’t a disguise, and if the colour means people in the shopping district make certain assumptions, that’s their own affair. Jeans and trainers are fairly unisex, and your voice hasn’t broken yet. Do you know how to alter your hair?” she suddenly barked, and Harry, rather shell-shocked, nodded. “Good. You can do that before we step foot in this Leaky Cauldron place, and you can change it back to normal just as we head into the bank. Should minimise gawkers.” Harry didn’t really fancy going around Diagon Alley being mistaken for a girl, but he supposed that was better than being surrounded by Boy-Who-Lived fans. And he’d be able to buy what books he liked without worrying what people thought of him. Dudley helped Harry pick a new hairstyle, blonde hair in a bob with a fringe, and Harry practiced alternating between that and his normal hairstyle, gradually improving the speed and learning to dispense with a mirror.
On Wednesday, Dudley and his friends had tickets to see a boxing competition at the student union of one of the London universities; these had been obtained by Malcolm’s grandfather, a retired lecturer, who was accompanying the boys. So there were six of them on the train to London that morning. Aunt Petunia had told Malcolm’s grandfather that Harry didn’t care for fighting, and would rather go round some bookshops, perhaps a nice educational museum trip – at which the other three boys shuddered. Harry’s unfortunate pink garment was tucked away in his bag, along with some sunglasses and a headscarf for his aunt. (“Horribly dowdy,” she had pronounced, “and not my style at all. But that’s rather the point.”) Little more than an hour later, Harry was hunched over in a corner of Foyle’s Bookshop, seemingly inspecting the spines of the dictionaries on a lower shelf, but actually willing his hair to change beneath the hoodie. And twenty minutes after that, he and his aunt were standing outside the great bronze doors of Gringotts itself, she looking as if she was about to be sick, and he reaching inside his hood with one hand, checking his hair had gone back to normal insofar as he could without any kind of reflective surface available. It was when they reached the teller that events began to diverge from their careful plan, limited as it was to discreet fact-finding.
“Greetings, Master Teller,” Harry had opened with. “I wish to talk to somebody about my vault, get some more information about it, and, um, what my parents left me, if,” he tried to remember the guidelines from the booklet, “if there is somebody under whose duties such a thing might fall, and meaning no disrespect by the request.” The goblin’s face darkened. Had Harry mangled the wording too horribly?
“Key, please,” the teller barked. Harry handed the key over to (he squinted at the nameplate) Teller Hodrog, very much hoping he wasn’t about to be spitted on a pike for disrespect. Hodrog ran one long finger along the tiny key, scowling.
“Mister Potter,” he snapped, “the time of Gringotts’ Goblins is precious. You have already seen your account manager and made a withdrawal from your safe, or trust vault as some call it, on Saturday the 28th of July of this year, less than a week ago. If you had further matters to discuss with Account Manager Griphook, you should have sent him an owl to request an appointment. He is not in work today; goblins are every bit as deserving of decent working conditions and days off as wizards are, and you cannot expect your Account Manager to be at your beck and call whenever you snap your fingers. Gringotts is open at all times, yes, but individual Goblins have their own lives to pursue.”
“I’m very sorry, sir,” Harry replied. “Is Mr Griphook my Account Manager, then? I did meet him on Saturday, but we didn’t talk much. Thank you for the advice, sir, I will certainly contact him. Apologies for wasting your-“ Hodrog cut him off with a gesture.
“Wait,” he said. Harry waited. He was aware of Aunt Petunia in his periphery, wringing her hands nervously. This felt like trouble. “Mister Potter, answer me truthfully. Did Griphook not tell you he was your account manager?”
“No, sir.”
“Did Griphook not hold a meeting with you in his office?”
“No, sir.”
“Did Griphook at least notify you he would be holding a meeting with you in the future, and ask you to return for it?”
“No, sir.” Hodrog smiled, an enormous toothy grin, one which did not bode well for somebody.
“Sir is a human title, Mr Potter. You should address me or any other teller as Master Teller, or you may call me Teller Hodrog. I shall now consult Griphook’s superior, whom you should refer to as Senior Manager Nagnok, or Master Senior Manager. If you do not know a goblin’s title, call him Master Goblin, never Mister or Sir. Consider this advice recompense for my unearned rebuke of a moment ago.”
“Yes, Teller Hodrog, thank you, Master Teller,” Harry replied, dazed. He was not in trouble; but apparently Griphook was. Harry exchanged glances with his Aunt as Teller Hodrog hopped down from his counter and disappeared behind it. Harry heard several voices shouting in a foreign language, guttural and glottal, and then Teller Hodrog returned, still smiling his eerie grin.
“Runner Bakflet will show you to Senior Manager Nagnok’s office,” he proclaimed, then shouted “Next!” Harry turned to find a smaller goblin, with a less gnarled face, and dressed in a waistcoat and shirtsleeves with no elaborate jacket over it, standing at his elbow.
“Greetings, Runner Bakflet,” he offered weakly.
“This way,” Bakflet sniffed, and Harry and Petunia hurried along in his wake.
Senior Manager Nagnok, it transpired, was a deeply intimidating being. He made it clear from the start that his time was extremely valuable and he would not normally be interacting with humans at all, relinquishing that duty to his subordinates. The desired outcome of this meeting was for Harry to learn what his Account Manager’s duties towards him were, and for Nagnok to learn to what extent Griphook had failed in those duties. Harry was welcome to ask Nagnok all the questions he liked, but Nagnok would not answer many of them himself, instead preparing a list of topics for Harry to go over with one of the Deputy Account Managers who had been Griphook’s immediate subordinates, after he himself had interviewed them. Or, if Harry had questions that were not so simple as to fall within a Deputy Account Manager’s purview, Nagnok would answer the questions himself, or consult other Gringotts Goblins and possibly Gringotts employees. One thing Harry was not to do was to contact Griphook, by owl or by any other means, nor to instruct anyone else to do so.
“Thank you for your consideration, Master Senior Manager,” Harry said meekly. They went over the events of Saturday’s visit, compiling the nearest they could to a transcript of what was said and done. He then (to Aunt Petunia’s silent horror) talked Harry through the process of withdrawing a memory. He had Harry do his best to adopt a calm frame of mind, focus on Saturday’s Gringotts visit, beginning and ending outside the bronze doors, and stay very still with his eyes closed while he was doing this. During his attempt, Harry felt something brush against his temple, but ignored it. When he opened his eyes, the Senior Manager was stirring a blob of greyish fog in a dish with his finger, then moving his finger to another dish, where an identical-seeming blob appeared. He then picked up the original blob between his fingers and thumb, and returned it to Harry’s head. Harry blinked, and his recollections of Saturday suddenly lost the vagueness they had acquired. The copied memory went in a jar, which Nagnok labelled.
“Cloudy, but not wholly useless,” he pronounced, as if to himself. “Stupid wizards not teaching the Mind Arts. You’ve never studied them, have you?” he barked at Harry. “Not even the bastardised version that wizards call Occlumency?” Harry shook his head. Nagnok made a note.
“Right, that’ll do for what happened on Saturday. Now, what should have happened once you produced your key and the teller handed you over to Griphook, was a meeting. These normally happen in the Account Manager’s office, but that’s a matter of custom, not law. But there are a number of things Griphook should have done before taking you to your vault, starting with introducing himself as your account manager.” Nagnok growled softly. “Then, he should have outlined to you the details about your safe: total monetary content (with a check performed within the last year), presence or absence of anything else besides coins, withdrawal limits and terms, any other limits, conditions or regular transactions (such as investment income) attached to the vault.” He paused.
“Is that something a deputy account manager will tell me, Master Senior Manager?” Harry asked, and Nagnok nodded, looking slightly less discontent for a moment.
“Your account manager should then have acquainted you with the existence of any other vaults in your name (whether wholly or jointly), vaults belonging to you or to which you have a known claim, or other items Gringotts might be holding onto for you, though if such vaults and items have conditions attached such that you do not yet have access to them, your manager need do no more than apprise you of their existence.”
“You mean there might be more?” gasped Harry. “Besides the huge pile of gold in my safe?” Aunt Petunia put her hand on his shoulder. “Erm. Sorry, Senior Manager Nagnok. Griphook never mentioned there being anything but the safe, s- Master Senior Manager. Though one of the things I wanted to ask about was whether there was anything remaining of my parents’ possessions besides gold. Even an old textbook, or a scarf or something, would mean a lot to me. I don’t want to be greedy or anything.”
“Your personal failings and virtues are none of my business,” sniffed Senior Manager Nagnok. “I am your Account Manager’s supervisor, and have no kind of tutelary role over you.”
“No, Master Senior Manager. Sorry, Master Senior Manager.”
“As it happens, there are other vaults in which you do have an interest, although most of them are not, strictly speaking, yours. Which brings us to an unfortunate complication. A legal grey area, if you will.” He sighed. “I am constrained in what I may say and do, even more so with respect to you, Madam-”
“Mrs Dursley,” she interjected grimly. “Petunia Dursley, née Evans. Harry’s aunt, here as his guardian. Lily’s sister.” He nodded, and then winced.
“Mrs Dursley, than I am with respect to you, Mr Potter. And the question of whether or not you are indeed his guardian, Mrs Dursley, is very much part of that grey area.” Harry reached out and grabbed his aunt’s hand; she squeezed back, tightly.
“I’m his closest living relative,” she spoke up, her fear of having her nephew taken from her overpowering her fear of the imposing being in front of her, and of this entire situation. “I’ve had physical custody since November of 1981. I have paperwork from Somerset House showing my relationship to him, and how everyone with a nearer relationship is dead. I’ve been listed as his guardian on the paperwork for his primary school and secondary school entry. I’ve been claiming Child Benefit for him from the government along with my own son, and my husband’s been listing both the boys as dependents on his tax returns. I don’t know how much the so-called Muggle government means to this bank, but as far as they are concerned, I’m his guardian. And I’ve had the raising of him for nearly ten years, and I’ve done my best by him, and that ought to count for something.”
“Muggle paperwork means little to Goblins, Mrs Dursley,” Nagnok replied. “Physical custody and blood kinship means more, as does care and protectiveness.” Harry had the distinct impression the Senior Manager liked his Aunt rather better than him. “Gringotts recognises you as Mr Potter’s physical guardian, and acknowledges you have at least some stake in the overall question of his guardianship.”
“Quite right too,” his aunt muttered, folding her arms, but Harry could tell she was deeply relieved.
“Moving on,” Nagnok said, “the legal grey area encompasses the question of Mr Potter’s guardianship, the status of several of the vaults that concern Mr Potter but do not outright belong to him, and the existence of items that Gringotts is holding for Mr Potter until such time as he is able to claim them. Then there are additional complications, which fall only partly under my purview, and partly under the purview of two other senior managers. One of the actors in the question of Mr Potter’s guardianship – a possible guardianship contender, if you will – is also the subject of some dispute in a similar grey area to that surrounding Mr Potter, but his family Account Manager falls under one of my colleagues’ purview, not mine, so I have only limited knowledge of the matter and limited ability to intervene. The second senior manager who has some involvement in the matter does so because Griphook answers to both him and to me. My subordinates, you see, are Account Managers for Wizarding family accounts, as are those of most Senior Managers. A few Senior Managers oversee different kinds of accounts, and the colleague in question bears overall responsibility for a number of institutional accounts. When a witch or wizard becomes the head of an institution, a temporary connection arises between the institutional account and the personal or family account, with some goblins, generally at the level of Manager or Deputy Manager, serving two roles, and as such answerable to two Senior Managers. Such is the case with Griphook. The matter is further complicated by the fact that the head of the institution in question is also a contender for Mr Potter’s guardianship. I am going to have a very busy month, Mr Potter, very busy indeed.”
“It’s Albus Dumbledore, isn’t it?” Harry blurted. “The one who Griphook also works for, and who runs an institution. Is he one of the ones who is trying to claim my guardianship?” Nagnok raised and lowered a single bushy eyebrow, the rest of his features remaining almost eerily still. Harry thought, briefly, of poker; he didn't know whether goblins ate sweets, but he was sure the Senior Account Manager would fleece him of every last one if they were to play.
“I can neither confirm nor deny that statement, Mr Potter, as Gringotts takes its client confidentiality very seriously.” He paused. “But Albus Dumbledore is on the public record claiming to be your magical guardian, yes, although Gringotts considers the matter unresolved. Again, grey area, tangle, complicated, further meetings with other individuals to be arranged.”
“Does client confidentiality mean you can’t tell Dumbledore what we think about him, or pass what we tell you on to somebody who might tell Dumbledore?”
“It does indeed, Mr Potter, although it is not part of my duties to be a listening ear and source of emotional support for humans. I do not care what you think unless it is related to the financial transactions I oversee.”
“Thank you, Senior Account Manager.” Harry smiled, keeping his teeth carefully covered as per the booklet. “I don’t want Dumbledore as my guardian. I’ve never met him, not as far back as I can remember. He was the one who left me with my aunt – on the doorstep, overnight, with a letter to tell her her sister had died! I don’t trust a man who does that kind of thing, and I don’t want him as my guardian. It’s bad enough I have to have him as my Headmaster.” Nagnok turned to Petunia Dursley, eyebrows raised.
“Yes indeed,” she told him. “Second of November, 1981, I opened the door to take the milk in, first thing in the morning, and there was a baby in a basket on the doorstep, with a letter. I opened the letter, and that’s how I found out my sister was dead. Nobody asked me if I wanted guardianship of my nephew, or checked to make sure I was in a position to look after him properly, let alone bothering to give their condolences in person. The letter was from Dumbledore. I kept it, and I’ve made copies, and could make more if necessary.”
“I’ve read a copy of the letter,” Harry offered, “but Aunt Petunia won’t let me see the original. She says it gives her a headache, and she doesn’t know if it’s the garish ink or some kind of magic imbued in the letter. Is there any way of checking? And maybe getting the person who does the checking to write an official letter confirming what they found, if they do find something?”
“Gringotts employs curse-breakers, and the Wizarding world has lawyers,” Nagnok replied. “Talk to a Deputy Manager about hiring such, once you have acquainted yourself with the basics of the situation.” He sighed. “I think we may actually be nearing the end of this meeting, though it will take several more meetings, hopefully mostly with those other than myself, before you have reached the level of awareness of your finances that most wizarding children have at the end of a single meeting with their account manager, lasting perhaps half an hour. Your situation is tiresomely complicated, Mr Potter. Ordinarily, I would tell you to go now, and I would owl you to set up the first of your Deputy Manager appointments in a few days’ time. However, I have a bad feeling, and one does not reach my age and position by ignoring one’s instincts.”
“Excuse me, Master Senior Manager,” Aunt Petunia broke in, “I would really rather not have owls coming to the house anyway, and my husband would absolutely hate it. Would it be possible to make an appointment now, arranging for us to come to the bank at some point soon – perhaps Friday, or maybe Monday? – and you would decide yourself which Deputy Manager it should be with, after you have your meetings with them?” Nagnok scowled, and flicked through a small folder, and then a second, larger one, before nodding and ringing a bell.
“Very well. Friday morning, 10 a.m., and inform the teller you’re there for an appointment with a deputy manager, organised by Nagnok.” There was a knock at the door, and another goblin in waistcoat and shirtsleeves appeared. “Runner, show these humans out,” he ordered, and the interview was done. Harry pulled his hood back up as they approached the lobby, and started working on his hair as soon as they passed the silver door. There was no time to buy more books or anything like that; they would already be rather later home than they would have liked.
“Let’s tell Malcolm’s granddad we got separated on the tube when the doors closed,” Harry suggested, “and I got horribly lost. I bet we both look shell-shocked enough for it to be believable.”
“If you like,” Aunt Petunia said. “I suppose we were underground.”
Uncle Vernon wasn’t happy, of course. He made several jibes about Harry’s incompetence and carelessness, and although he didn’t say so it was clear he rather wished Harry had got lost and stayed lost. Most of the evening’s conversation, though, was carried by Dudley’s enthusiastic retelling of the boxing tournament, blow-by-blow. Harry sat back and basked in the sheer joy of his cousin’s narration. He would miss evenings like this.
Chapter 15: testamentary dispositions
Chapter Text
They ended up spending an awful lot of time in London that August. Petunia quickly gave up on crossing into that place unless her presence was specifically needed, instead spending time in normal London with Dudley, pager in her handbag. Harry, meanwhile, maintained multiple alternative personae for browsing the Alley, and a few different outfits besides the pink sweatshirt that let him keep his face covered without seeming too odd. Hooded robes were apparently quite normal, for wizards, though less so for children, and Harry was delighted to find that the Wizarding World did, apparently, have second-hand shops – just not on the main thoroughfare of Diagon Alley. It also had a post office (that seemed to be more of an owl hire bureau), where he was able to make enquiries about how the Wizarding postal system was connected to the Muggle one, and how he was best to go about corresponding with his cousin at a Muggle boarding school while he himself was at Hogwarts, without endangering the Statute of Secrecy. It turned out that Hogsmeade Post Office had a reciprocal arrangement with Dufftown Post Office. For the quickest results, Dudley should write ‘c/o Hogwarts, P. O. Box 46492787, Dufftown, Scotland’, and Harry should use the normal postal address for Smeltings and a stamp of the appropriate value for the size of the letter or parcel, and simply instruct the owl to drop it off at the Hogsmeade Owl Post Office.
By the fifteenth of the month, Harry had a much better handle on his financial affairs, and a better sense of the intricacies of Wizard-Goblin politics than most wizard-raised children – or indeed adults. It turned out that much of the tangled, murky political stuff surrounding Harry could be traced back to one problem: his parents’ wills had not been read. Instead, they had been sealed, by order of the Wizengamot; and while Gringotts retained a copy of their own, and the account manager knew what it said, there was only so much Gringotts was allowed to do to act on the wills they held without the active assistance of a wizarding executor, and even less in cases like Harry’s where the will had actually been sealed, meaning there could be no wizarding executor.
Conversely, though, there was only so much the Ministry could do to block the Goblins of Gringotts acting on the instructions of a will when they knew its contents. If a will set aside specific sums of money for specific legatees, the Goblins were allowed to divide the money according to instructions, and set parts of it aside in the correct amounts, opening new temporary vaults when necessary. If a will specified certain items held in the testator’s vault to be given to specific individuals, again, the goblins could remove those items from the vault and set them aside. What they were not allowed to do was notify minor legatees of their legacies, even if those minor legatees happened to be in the bank for other reasons, or if said minor legatees just happened to ask their account manager if anyone had left them anything recently; nor were the goblins permitted to mention in a legatee’s hearing that someone had left them something. The Ministry was not allowed to seize money or items from a Gringotts vault and distribute them other than as the will dictated, where a will existed, even if it was formally sealed. But neither could the goblins act on the contents of a sealed will in any way other than the most basic of book-keeping procedures, with a couple of exceptions.
Firstly, family vaults passed down to the next family member in line. That principle was older than the Ministry, older than Gringotts’ banking monopoly, older than anybody could put a date to, and not something either Gringotts or the Ministry was foolish enough to mess with (although you never quite knew, with the Ministry). As well as Harry’s trust vault (or safe), there was a Potter Family vault, that had been Henry Potter’s, then Fleamont’s, then Charlus’, then James’, and was now Harry’s. Granted, it had less money than Harry’s trust vault, not much in the way of jewelery or other valuables, and in fact contained mostly parchmentwork, shrunken furniture, odd heirlooms of little monetary value, and heaps of assorted bric-a-brac; and granted, he couldn’t actually remove anything from it until he came of age; but still, it was the principle of the thing. That vault passed from James to Harry regardless of what the Wizengamot did to their copy of James’ will, and it was now Harry’s vault even if he couldn’t take anything out of it yet.
Secondly, unlike minor legatees, major heirs of both the blood and the name could ask to view Gringotts copies of sealed wills, and Gringotts could disclose to them the existence of such wills, if the heir came to them. So a child could view a parent’s sealed will, but only that of an uncle, aunt or grandparent if they had the same surname as their deceased relative, and that relative had made them their main heir. And if their benefactor was ‘merely’ a friend, a friend of the family, a lover or a godparent, then the legatee had to wait for the Wizengamot to get its act together. And the heir’s having seen the will conferred no automatic benefits to minor legatees: it was entirely at the heir’s discretion to release legacies or allow them to stay in limbo, and Gringotts was officially disbarred from encouraging or recommending the heir to do any such thing. And that was just if the legacy was a matter of transferring an item or a sum of money from one vault to another. If the legacy was intended to set up a formal trust, of the kind that required Wizarding lawyers, then that part of the will could not be acted on without the Wizengamot releasing the seal; nor could the goblins interfere with money or valuables held outside Gringotts, including land and property. So that was what Nagnok’s cagey mention of ‘other vaults in which you have an interest, though they are not, strictly speaking, yours’ had been about.
James Potter had left a sizeable lump sum of money and the income from one of the less significant Potions patents to one Remus Lupin; a Peter Pettigrew should have received a smaller sum of money, a ‘nymphs and shepherds’ painting he had admired, and a set of red-and-gold dress robes, complete with wide-brimmed hat, that had once belonged to James’ great-great-grandfather, who had been of a similar height and build; and Sirius Black had been given free choice of up to half the Potter Manor furniture in the family vault, ‘so that your home will always have echoes of your family of choice’. All three bequests had been conditional on the legatee’s never having willingly or knowingly served or assisted ‘the Dark Tosser a. k. a. Voldemort.’
Lily’s will, on the other hand, was more than a little complicated. There was only one minor monetary bequest, for Dudley Dursley from his Aunt Lily, to be converted into British Pounds Sterling and deposited in a Post Office Childrens’ Savings Account (or equivalent) in his name (with Petunia as his named adult on the account and Vernon disbarred from such). Then, she directed (in the event of her and her husband’s decease and her son’s survival) that half of the money in her personal vault be transferred to her son’s trust vault, and half be retained. Next, she had an absolutely enormous list of keepsakes she wished to bestow, some with fairly complicated instructions, and all with reversion to Harry if the original legatee was dead. Severus Snape was on there: she had left him a trunk containing all her potions research notes, asking him to work some of them up for publication if possible, giving her co-authorship, but that all royalties from such work should accrue to him. ‘When we were younger, Sev,’ she had written, ‘we used to dream of writing books and papers together, setting the world on fire with our discoveries. I’d like there to be something published with both our names on, even if we don’t both survive the war so we can reconcile in person.’ Aunt Petunia was supposed to get all Lily’s non-magical jewelery, but that had not been kept in Gringotts.
Secondly, Lily wanted to set up a trust with the rest of the vault, ‘to assist muggle-born and muggle-raised students’, and this trust was to be administered by Professors Filius Flitwick and Minerva McGonagall, ‘who may delegate their duties in the matter to any they both deem suitable, as their Hogwarts duties must come first, but Albus Dumbledore or any subsequent Headmaster should be barred from such by virtue of their office.’ There was more paperwork spelling out exactly what the duties of the trust should be; it mostly involved setting up an investment account, the profits for which should provide a retainer for a law firm to assist Hogwarts students who are without family in the magical world and have the Headmaster as their magical guardian, with McGonagall and Flitwick selecting the law firm, facilitating contact between students and lawyers, and making sure the law firm did its job properly, having the power to transfer the trust if it didn’t. There was a particular emphasis on protecting magical children from abusive or neglectful muggle guardians, and on facilitating greater involvement of suitably loving and supportive muggle parents in their magical children’s lives. (This made it sound like Harry’s mother had known Dumbledore wasn’t perfect. But she still joined his Order. Hmm.)
The guardianship provisions for Harry were quite interesting. Lily and James had had mirrored wills, each listing the other, if surviving, as the first choice. The first choice in the event of Harry being totally orphaned would have been joint custody between his sworn godparents, Sirius Black and Alice Longbottom, with Alice’s husband Frank ‘invited and encouraged’ to play a significant role. The second choice, if Harry had one godparent surviving, was for him to go to them; either Sirius or Alice. The third choice was joint custody between Peter Pettigrew and Remus Lupin (yes, we know he’s a werewolf and we don’t care), provided that neither of them had followed Voldemort willingly or knowingly, and on the assumption that both would have the sense to seek support and assistance from experienced parents among the Order and associated families. If only one Marauder survived, that man was to have joint custody together with one of a list of couples: Ted and Andromeda Tonks, Xenophilius and Pandora Lovegood, Arthur and Molly Weasley, and nine other couples (several of whom Harry knew from his mother’s letters were dead).
If neither Alice, Frank, Sirius, Remus or Peter survived, then the listed couples were to be considered individually. Then, Harry’s parents listed seven individuals, predominantly Hogwarts professors (not including Dumbledore or Hagrid, Harry noticed, though they weren’t excluded by name) whom James and Lily would trust enough, if at least two of them were acting in concert, to choose a good wizarding family for Harry, and act as his new godparents; in the event that Petunia Dursley née Evans had divorced her husband Vernon, or if he had died, the professors could also consider her as a candidate for Harry’s guardianship (with them as active and involved godparents) alongside the wizarding families they knew, but under no circumstances was Harry to be left with Vernon Dursley. Further provisions were made for if everyone James and Lily knew and liked in Britain was dead, involving a long list of foreign countries in a clear order, and committees similar to the arrangement with the professors mentioned above, composed of Potions and Charms researchers and Aurors that the couple had only known by reputation. Harry’s parents really hadn’t wanted him to be a ward of the Ministry, it seemed, and they had formally forbidden any guardianship arrangement that would have Harry living in the same household as anyone bearing the Dark Mark, even were that person acquitted of all involvement with Voldemort.
The wills had been drawn up with the assistance of the law firm of Marchbanks, Doge, and Diggle; witnessed by Elphias Doge and Frank Longbottom; and dated 15 March 1981. That same firm was the official executor, though each will also named an account manager (who was not Griphook) as being the one to whom much of the practical work of the executor would fall. James’ will had directed that, in appreciation of this service, a set of goblin-forged platters, serving tongs and hotplates from the Potter vault should be ‘returned to the Goblin Nation.’
Gringotts, and the goblins of Gringotts, were not allowed to supply Harry with a copy of either will. However, the Ministry had no business dictating what the human employees of Gringotts did on their tea breaks, including social visits to the offices of goblin Managers, and since Gringotts employees were not disbarred from taking on additional work provided that said work was done in their free time and did not compromise in any way their duties for Gringotts... that was what happened. The employee in question, one Cursebreaker Andromeda Tonks, was not permitted to read the wills, naturally, being a minor legatee of Lily’s and one of the many guardianship possibilities listed in both (not that the goblins could tell her such); however, the six Sickles that Harry solemnly handed over gave her leeway to cast the Geminio curse on each will, providing duplicates for Harry’s use. And once that was done, it was entirely Harry’s choice to inform her (in confidence) that his mother had left her a rune-powered drinks coaster that would keep any beverage placed on it at the drinker’s preferred temperature, ‘with thanks for reminding me that Slytherin can encompass many fine qualities’, and had wished to entrust her with something for her then minor daughter (now apparently an Auror trainee), who had ‘brightened the lives of so many Order members, and reminded us what we were fighting for.’ Harry’s mother had apparently dabbled in spellcrafting, and had created or adapted a selection of low-power, easy-to-cast jinxes for use against school bullies. The manuscript was ready for publication, but the war had meant publication was inadvisable, and so Lily entrusted it to Andromeda; all profits from royalties were to go to Nymphadora, and Lily hoped it would be useful to her during her first years at Hogwarts. Andromeda blinked away tears, and cast the Geminio curse again.
“No need for you to wait until it’s published,” she said briskly. “Thank you, Mr Potter, and best of luck for Hogwarts. Good business to you, Deputy Account Manager.” And she swept out. That was not the last Harry saw of Cursebreaker Tonks. While Harry was not allowed to designate a new Potter Family Lawyer until he was of age (or until he had an undisputed guardian who could do so on his behalf), he could put a lawyer on retainer for himself as an individual, should he so wish; and thanks to a patented process of his mother’s invention that was used by half the dressmakers of Diagon Alley, along with something his great-grandmother Euphemia had done that meant he received a tiny bit of income from every Auror Training Manual published, he had enough money coming into his safe that he could afford the retainer. And after speaking (very cautiously, under Gringotts’ confidentiality rules, with Aunt Petunia glowering over his shoulder) to several of the lawyers his Deputy Manager had mentioned Gringotts regularly sub-contracted work to, it was Andromeda’s husband’s firm that he decided to retain, Scrimshanks & Associates. Most of their junior partners and staff were apparently muggle-born, and some of them even had law degrees in the non-magical world, though Ted Tonks himself did not: that alone gained Aunt Petunia’s glowing approval. It was a bit ridiculous, him having a Potter Family Lawyer and a personal lawyer when the Potter family consisted of one person, him, but he did need a lawyer he knew he could trust.
The main reason Harry actively distrusted his family lawyers (rather than regarding them with the same vague mistrust he did all unknown magical beings until he learned something good about them) was the existence of a third vault that actually belonged to Harry, though he had no access to it, his ‘Boy-Who-Lived’ vault. It had been set up by Griphook and Albus Dumbledore, in their positions as his account manager and wizard-acclaimed magical guardian respectively, assisted by Elphias Doge of Marchbanks, Doge, and Diggle – who had been a witness to the wills and knew Harry’s parents hadn’t wanted Dumbledore as Harry’s guardian, had trusted American aurors and Spanish potioneers they’d never actually met over him, knew Lily Potter had strongly disapproved of the statute under which Dumbledore was claiming technical guardianship of Harry with the wills sealed, but who still co-operated with Dumbledore regardless. Into this vault went all money, items, patents, and title deeds to property, that had been left to Harry as ‘the Boy-Who-Lived’ in the aftermath of the war. Apparently he had played a similar role in other people’s wills to that traditionally enjoyed by St Mungo’s hospital, as a last-ditch legatee in the absence of other friends and family. That, and many people had seemingly felt very grateful to him for ‘ending the war’. There were doubtless very many people alive today who had included him in their wills, even if they had never met him.
Dumbledore would have been quite within his rights as guardian (had he been Harry’s uncontested guardian) to declare Harry’s persona as the Boy-Who-Lived a semi-separate entity from the small boy Harry James Potter, and it was also within a guardian’s right to restrict a child’s access to vaults other than their safe until the child came of age (though it was customary to grant a child supervised or semi-supervised access earlier, once they were considered old enough to understand and make good decisions with minimal guidance). It was likewise entirely Griphook’s prerogative as Harry’s then account manager to decide how co-operative or un-cooperative he wished to be with regards to the supposed guardian’s endeavours. Doge’s actions, on the other hand, according to Ted Tonks, had been ‘not illegal but distinctly improper – not the kind of thing that gets you sent to Azkaban, but definitely the kind of thing that puts your licence to practice law in jeopardy.’
Another place Griphook had slipped up, besides not holding that initial briefing with Harry, was with regards to another legacy Harry’s parents had left him. They had packed their old school trunks full of things they didn’t see themselves needing in the next few years, and added directions that the trunks be transferred to ‘Harry’s vault’ in the event of their deaths, so he would be able to use some of his parents’ things. Griphook had left James’ trunk in the family vault, and transferred Lily’s trunk to the Boy-Who-Lived vault: both were technically Harry’s vault, but in neither case would he be able to remove the trunks or use the contents. Senior Manager Nagnok had had the trunks transferred to Harry’s safe, where they should have been all along, and had made dire comments about ‘rectifying the situation.’
Chapter 16: libraries liberate
Chapter Text
Day after day, Harry came home with a bulging rucksack and carrier bags full of his parents’ things. He had been overjoyed to discover that his father’s trunk was exactly the kind of high-end trunk that could have the featherlight charms renewed: indeed, it had originally been his Grandfather Charlus’, and a small stamp on the inside of the lid revealed that the charms had been replaced and recertified in August of 1971, by Trimble’s Trunk Emporium. The shop was still in business, and Harry grudgingly went there using his normal appearance. The trunk was duly re-lightened, and an extra stamp added (guaranteed featherweight until 2011). For an additional galleon, they offered to replace the existing nameplate, reading ‘JHFP’ for James Hercules Fleamont Potter, with one saying ‘HJP’, and for two galleons, they would reset the passwords on all the compartments to the manufacturer’s standard, and provide Harry with a copy of the owner’s manual for this specific model of trunk.
Harry hadn’t even known there were multiple compartments. He’d thought the contents he’d already seen were treasure enough: a brass cauldron, a red flag with a lion on it, a capacious leather shoulder bag, also with a lion on it, a dark red wand holster, a gold seal ring, and a set of lumpy marbles he’d been informed were gobstones. But no; that was the general compartment. There was also a library compartment, ‘barely at one-fifth capacity’, according to Mr Trimble, a wardrobe compartment containing only school uniforms (sized to fit an adult, and with Gryffindor trim, but Harry was still glad to have them), a compartment for potions ingredients and a secret compartment which would only open for Harry once he attuned the key to himself, ‘not that I could give you any advice on that front, all that kind of thing’s very illegal now, but pre-existing artefacts are grandfathered in, you know, though they are officially non-tradeable.’
James Potter had apparently forgotten about the existence of both the Potions compartment and the secret compartment. The Potions compartment was just a matter of paying Slugg & Jigger for decontamination services, something apparently fairly routine; it was the secret compartment that shocked Harry. It contained dozens of magazines showing scantily-clad and possibly naked women, worse than the Soho payphones, along with several empty bottles containing the dregs of something alcoholic (‘firewhisky’), and (worst of all) three pairs of women’s underwear. Mr Trimble was kind enough to vanish the underwear and the bottles, but declined to do the same to the magazines, on the grounds that they were ‘worth a natty Knut to the right bookseller’. He even gave Harry the name of a suitable bookseller, a personal friend of his, and refused to take monetary payment for his services in the matter, or for his discretion which he gladly promised: ‘most teenage boys are silly like that, Mr Potter, don’t take it to heart, and your father was a hero, I wouldn’t dream of tarnishing his reputation.’ Harry did, however, let Mr Trimble take a photograph of him with his refurbished trunk (and its shiny new nameplate) in a recognisable corner of the shop, since Mr Trimble felt it would do his business good to have the Boy-Who-Lived known to be a customer of his, without (of course) going into any kind of indiscreet detail. Harry still thought the whole Boy-Who-Lived thing was a load of nonsense, but it seemed to make Mr Trimble happy.
When a small, hooded figure carried a trunk into Blishwick’s Books and asked for a word with the proprietor, Mr Blishwick was quite sure he was about to be negotiating the purchase of somebody’s Dark Arts collection, and kept his wand to hand, running through diagnostics in his head. He didn’t mind keeping some stock that was a bit frowned upon by the Ministry, but he wasn’t having anything in his shop that radiated Dark Magic, or went around biting people who tried to read it, and he told his mysterious customer so. This wasn’t Knockturn. Nor was he in the habit of blabbing about who bought and sold what – he wouldn’t get much of a business that way, no, indeed, and if the gentleman was indeed acquainted with Mr Trimble, he should know better than to think someone recommended by Mr Trimble would behave so unprofessionally.
Mr Blishwick was surprised, then, to discover that his customer, far from being a dark wizard, was an eleven-year-old celebrity wishing to dispose of his late father’s pornography collection. Quite a collection it was, too. Young James Potter had had taste and deep pockets, and quite apart from the cachet of a magazine being ‘vintage’, work of this level of salaciousness was much harder to come by these days, with the Ministry cracking down on imports and British productions both. Mr Blishwick calculated he might be able to sell the magazines for the best part of a hundred galleons, all told, and with that in mind, he offered the child a choice of twenty-five galleons in cash or thirty-five as store credit. Harry took the latter option – Mr Blishwick had guessed he would, from the way his eyes had shone as he looked around the shop. He showed Harry his big ledger for recording purchases, and the tiny wax tablets he used for individual customers’ store credit.
“I don’t keep records of individual titles that my customers purchase, Mr Potter, no point in encouraging Ministry nosiness.” He picked up a blank pair of tablets, scratched ‘Harry Potter – Blishwick’s Books’ onto the side, and then snapped the connecting twine, handing the tablet with ‘Blishwick’s Books’ on it to Harry. “Yours is receiving only, naturally,” he said, and, with a flourish, wrote ‘Credit, 35g 0s 0k’ on his tablet along with the date, and Harry gasped in amazement as the words appeared on his. Mr Blishwick was mildly surprised that Mr Potter didn’t start browsing straight away, but was quite confident, from the longing glances he cast at the shelves, that he would be back soon.
By the twentieth of August, Harry had sorted through all the books he now possessed (so many!), arranged them in piles by subject as Hedwig watched approvingly, and worked out where the most pressing gaps in his library were. He had plenty of duplicates, of course. His parents had both included all their first-year books, and it seemed the reading list hadn’t changed much in the intervening twenty years (interesting). The really odd thing was that the duplicates, ostensibly the same books, were not all the same size. He had three copies of The Standard Book of Spells (Grade One), three copies of A History of Magic, and in both cases, the copy he had bought in Flourish and Blott’s was the smallest, his father’s was somewhat thicker, and his mother’s noticeably larger than either. Examining them, he realised his father’s copies had been new in 1971, but his mother had bought hers second-hand. The books were becoming increasingly expurgated over time. This was not good. He focused on his breathing for a while, trying to attain a sense of calm and detachment. He already knew Wizarding society had problems. This was just him getting a better sense of them; they were already there before he noticed. His mother had annotated her copy, matching page numbers to the then current edition, noting which bits had been removed. He’d have to see if he could spot any patterns in terms of what it was that had been taken out from this and other history books. Hmm. He amended his list of gaps in his library to include a few very old copies of textbooks, if he could obtain them, and also underlined his resolution to read more twentieth-century history, political and economic, ‘and legal’, he added.
On the 21st, Harry finally got to return to Blishwick’s Books. Sadly, Mr Blishwick was unable to sell him any books that might help him to learn Occlumency, as that subject was only legally permitted for Aurors, lawyers, Unspeakables, Healers specialising in Mind Healing, and the human employees of Gringotts. He did, however, have a very nice copy of A History of the Mind Arts, which while not any kind of practical guide, should at least give an overview of the subject. The acquisition of Ancient Runes Made Easy, 1930 and 1985 editions, was unproblematic, as was that of Spellman’s Syllabary. The book Harry had seen in Flourish and Blotts, Rise and Fall of the Dark Arts, was available in the 1955 edition (and Harry resolved to double-check it later against a more modern edition). Mindful of Aunt Petunia’s insistence he look into genetics, Harry picked up a copy of Kneazle Breeding for Fun and Profit, another called Behind the Ban on Experimental Breeding, and two more that seemed to be about human magic running in families, The Inheritance of Magic and Bonds of Blood and Magic. Moving on to genealogy, he acquired The Pure-blood Directory along with a study of contemporary reactions to it, and Nature’s Nobility: a Wizarding Genealogy.
For etiquette, he acquired five different books, all written within thirty years of each other, and all seeming to argue radically different positions. He managed to limit himself to four books about the magic of the Norsewomen, two about Roman magic and religion, one history of the Celtic wizards, and one on the magical history of the Iberian peninsula, plus Beasts and Beings: a History of the Politics, but it took a great deal of willpower. He finished up with An Appraisal of Magical Education in Europe and Powers You Never Knew You Had And What To Do With Them Now You’ve Wised Up. Pretty much the only book on modern history he could find, though, was Great Wizarding Events of the Twentieth Century, and in the end he had to appeal to Mr Blishwick, who found him a couple of law textbooks, as well as An Appraisal of Political Constitutions in Europe and Dark and Light: A Theoretical Reader. At this point, Harry’s 35 galleon credit was down to sickles and knuts. He went to pack his books away, but Mr Blishwick stopped him.
“One moment,” he said, and divided the books into two teetering piles, with three more books left over. “A word of advice, young man. These books,” he gestured at the smaller pile, “are relatively unobjectionable. Even the staunchest, most light-sided Gryffindor would not mind your reading those, nor the stuffiest Ministry official, although even then, you shouldn’t make it known that you feel older editions are better than newer ones; frugality is a more suitable explanation.” Then he turned to the larger pile. “These books, while not technically illegal to own or to read, may gain you funny looks, a more intense level of scrutiny and suspicion than you might prefer, or, especially in the case of the genealogy, may make people associate you with the followers of You-Know-Who, which would of course be quite the scandal, you being who you are. You’ll have a better understanding once you’ve read most of them, but in the meantime, I’d not like to see my bookshop caught up in a scandal, or to see a potentially long-term customer – ahem – impeded in his intellectual development.”
He paused, and reached for Beasts and Beings and Political Constitutions. “These two are not banned as such, but they contain views highly critical of the Ministry, and were an Auror to see you reading them, they could legally destroy them, or even impound them and use them as evidence against you in a sedition case, though they’d need more than just the possession of the books to get a conviction. So be careful. This one, now,” he held up Bonds of Blood and Magic, “well, it’s not incontestably illegal insofar as it’s not a primer, just a historical overview, and you couldn’t actually learn how to do any blood magic from it, however it does contain some of the theory, and blood magic, Mr Potter, has been very stringently banned from the early 1800s onwards. Out of all your new purchases, this book is the most dangerous to be found with.” He smiled, reminding Harry for a moment of the Senior Manager. “Selling books that are... frowned upon is penalised more strictly than merely owning them, so be at ease. Most of my customers only come here for second-hand textbooks and cookbooks, wishing to save money, and it does not occur to them that I might supply a wider range of books. I do so regardless, Mr Potter, because like Professor Basil Fronsac of Hogwarts, I believe that libraries liberate. Among other reasons.”
Strolling back into Diagon Alley, Harry considered that he was almost done with his Hogwarts preparations. Perhaps a little more attention paid to the subject of potions wouldn’t go amiss. He popped into Slug & Jigger’s to get some recommendations for extra potions reading for beginners, coming out with Potions Opuscule, by the same author as the official textbook, A Guide to Ingredient Preparation and Storage, and Safety Precautions When Brewing, with an Appendix of Cautionary Tales. Apparently the last one could be somewhat queasiness-inducing, but it did explain exactly why certain things were a bad idea, and had a number of very useful shield spells. Enough, he decided resolutely. He had plenty of books for now, and could always get more at Christmas if it came to it. There was no need to be greedy. He did stop at Gringotts, to exchange ten galleons for pounds, and that was it. The rest of the month was for normal things in the normal world. They suck you in, he remembered his aunt saying. Over a week of normality would be just the ticket.
He returned home to find a letter addressed to him on the hall table. A letter from a wizard, for all that it looked perfectly normal, with a perfectly ordinary stamp. Mr Ted Tonks, of Scrimshanks & Associates, was requesting a meeting with his client, Mr Harry Potter, and his client’s physical guardian, Mrs Petunia Dursley. A telephone number was enclosed, so they could phone the office and set up a time and place. Harry thrust the letter into his aunt’s hands and ran. He was going to be late for aikido!
Chapter 17: we can handle it
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
Petunia ended up taking Harry and Dudley to an ice-cream cafe in Greater Whinging that was over the road from a games arcade. She wouldn’t normally condone Dudley gambling, but magic made her anxious, and the more anxious she got, the more she wanted to keep Dudley close – and the less she wanted him exposed to magic. Mr Tonks arrived promptly, bought himself an ice-cream, and greeted them all politely. Dudley shook his hand with the firm, manly grip he had been practising, careful to look him in the eye as you were supposed to, and excused himself, sauntering off to the arcade with a big grin. Mr Tonks did something with his hand under the table, “just so nobody overhears; I promise it won’t hurt anyone,” and then got down to business.
Before Harry went to Hogwarts, he announced, they needed to get a restraining order out against Albus Dumbledore. Dumbledore would still be Harry’s headmaster, but they could restrict what he was and wasn’t allowed to do with respect to Harry, and to the rest of the family for that matter. Ted had one drafted already; but he hadn’t filed it yet for two reasons. Firstly, he wanted to wait until the 1st of September, so that Dumbledore would be busy with the start of the new term, and wouldn’t have time to block it until it was in place. Secondly, if the three of them finalised certain plans now, they could include them in the restraining order as topics the Headmaster was not allowed to discuss with Harry. Petunia and Harry nodded with conviction, and Ted laughed.
“I really must be too used to the Wizarding world,” he said, “this still feels so incongruous. Part of me was expecting to have to persuade you that it was OK to do this, even though Dumbledore’s such a great wizard.” Petunia shot him a disparaging look. “Fine, fine, no levity. I can do serious. Right. The guardianship issue. Think of it as three different worlds. There’s the mundane world, where you, Mrs Dursley, are unambiguously Harry’s guardian. My colleague looked over the paperwork, and it’s solid. You did a good job getting it all together with no access to your sister’s estate; she was impressed. There’s the world of the goblins, where Harry’s guardianship is officially considered a matter of dispute, but they’ve gone from considering Dumbledore as the lead contender to considering you, Mrs Dursley, as at least one of the lead contenders, and Dumbledore as a rank pretender. Impressive, especially since you weren’t trying to accomplish that from the get-go. Also, compared to the other two worlds, Gringotts treats Harry more as an actor in his own right, and treats with him directly, as a person whose word carries weight, unless there are specific rules saying he’s too young to do particular things. It's a cultural difference. Then, there’s the world of witches and wizards, where everyone thinks – insofar as they think about it at all – that Dumbledore is Harry’s guardian. And they do have grounds for it. The law says every magical child should have a magical guardian. Harry doesn’t have any magical relations closer than second cousin, and probably a fair bit more distant than that, so there’s no ‘natural’ magical guardian with an automatic claim from that route. The only others who would have a natural claim that wouldn’t need the will unsealing would be his godparents, and – sorry to put it so bluntly – you can’t take custody of a child from inside prison, or from the permanent care ward of the hospital. So no ‘natural’ magical guardians. And since a child has to have one, all children without one whose names appear in the Hogwarts Book are deemed to be wards of the Hogwarts Headmaster, until they either come of age or have another witch or wizard claim and win guardianship.”
“But the only reason I don’t have one is because of Dumbledore in the first place,” said Harry, with a distinct note of irritation in his voice. “He sealed the wills. There were dozens of witches and wizards in there who could have been my guardian, or could have helped choose a guardian and then been my new godparent. Dumbledore wasn’t one of them.”
“Technically, the Wizengamot sealed the wills,” Ted corrected gently. “But since he was Chief Warlock at the time, and he was the one who proposed the motion to seal them, it’s a moot point. That vote is interesting, though. Albus Dumbledore made the proposal. Dedalus Diggle seconded it. And among the many people who voted for it was Elphias Doge.”
“The same one who witnessed the wills, and knew Dumbledore wasn’t in them, apart from my mother not wanting him anywhere near the educational trust she was trying to set up? The same one who was a partner in the law firm that was being paid a retainer to represent the Potter family and their interests?” Harry asked bitterly. “Please don’t tell me that Dedalus Diggle is the same Diggle who’s a partner in the firm.”
“All right, I won’t tell you!” carolled Ted. “Fine, fine, he is the same person. The two of them are and were the sole partners in the firm, in fact. Old Troilus Marchbanks is long dead. The Griselda Marchbanks who’s named in the will, the examiner for OWLs and NEWTs, is his younger sister, and has no interest in the firm. Lets them use the name as a courtesy. But moving on,-”
“You’re going after the law firm first – well, second after Griphook – because they’ve broken the rules in ways that are obvious and proveable,” Petunia said. “And I assume neither Mr Doge nor Mr Diggle has anything like Dumbledore’s prestige or influence.”
“Pleasure working with you, madam,” smiled Ted. “That’s quite right. There’s several things we can definitely point out they’ve done wrong, and we’re looking into a few more right now. Well, the interns are doing the research. Can’t have them spending all day making us coffee, you know.”
“Do you really think Dumbledore won’t notice anything until September?” Harry asked. “Senior Manager Nagnok was very angry about Griphook, and he’s running a pretty big investigation. What if Dumbledore gets word of it? And I strongly suspect – obviously nobody told me, they aren’t allowed – but I suspect Griphook was Dumbledore’s personal account manager as well as mine, and was also one of the goblins who work on the Hogwarts accounts.” Ted raised his eyebrows.
“That actually makes me more confident,” he said. “If Nagnok dangled enough information in front of you that you were able to put those pieces together, he must be very angry with Dumbledore, seriously gunning for him. And if Nagnok’s running an investigation, nobody in Gringotts will be leaking information from it. If they try, it’ll be more evidence for him. That goblin has a reputation. He’s been a Senior Manager for more years than Dumbledore’s been alive. Plus, your aunt asked me to ask my wife to have a look at the house wards on her next day off, and she did it yesterday, when you were in London. They’re very good. Even though it was Dumbledore who raised them, if he comes near you with ill intent, he won’t get as far as the garden, never mind the front door. And you’d have more than enough time to phone my office, or the Aurors, or anyone else you like, to make him go away.”
“Okay,” Harry acquiesced. “Will you owl Senior Manager Nagnok, to make sure you don’t accidentally get in each other’s way? Or should I owl him to let him know you’re acting for me and I’m fine with him talking to you about any of my financial matters, if he wants to? Somebody should at least warn him that you’ll be filing a restraining order against Dumbledore, and that that will tip him off something’s not right. Even if he’s already predicted it, it’s polite.”
“I suppose,” Ted said. “No, good call, manners are important. You owl him, and then he can owl me if and when he wants to, and if I don’t hear from him, I’ll just keep doing my own thing.”
They then moved on to the results of Harry’s medical check at St Mungo’s, where he had been taken by one of the aforementioned interns (Benjamin Littleton, soon-to-be seventh-year Hufflepuff, muggle-born). Harry's overall health had been fine: he’d needed top-ups on a few wizarding vaccinations, though his non-magical ones were up-to-date. His eyesight was horrible but his current glasses were adequate, and he’d confirmed that he was of course getting check-ups every year. He had a large amount of very Dark magic in the scar on his head, but it hadn’t been giving him any trouble, so he was to wait and consult a healer if it did; his magical core seemed healthy enough, although the healer was having trouble getting accurate readings on it, partly because there seemed to be a complex separate working attached to it. He mentioned the house wards, and the Healer agreed that sounded plausible, but she would recommend he had a proper curse-breaker and ward expert, perhaps working in concert with a specialist healer, have a look at that working, as it seemed to have a lot of things all tied together.
Even so, if it had been like that from his infancy, it shouldn’t do him much harm between now and the winter holidays, though he should be aware of the possibility that not all his post might get through to him. He still bore the remnants of some magic restrictions applied when he was an infant, and he seemed to have broken through most of them with his own power, rather than actually having them removed, so the remnants lingered. She couldn’t dispel them without risking damaging the other working, so that would have to wait, too. He’d reported enough accidental and purposeful wandless magic that there shouldn’t be a problem with first-year Hogwarts material, even if it was likely that having the remnants dispelled would see a slight improvement. Legal Intern Littleton had had the healer (with Harry’s permission) sign a paper to attest that it would have been a (slight) risk to Harry’s health for him to attend Hogwarts without up-to-date vaccinations, so that Mr Tonks could set it alongside the general policy statement from St Mungo’s that they advised all muggle-born and muggle-raised children to get proper check-ups and vaccinations before going away to school; and the wizard-raised should, too, if there was any doubt as to their having missed a dose. Neither Dumbledore nor Hagrid had told Harry about St Mungo’s, and had he not asked about the Muggleborn Introductory Booklet, he wouldn’t even know that the hospital existed, or that the Wizarding world had its own illnesses.
They spent a while longer discussing Harry’s Boy-Who-Lived vault, and making sure Ted had Petunia’s perspective on the events of October-November 1981 absolutely correct. Apparently a couple of Ted and Andromeda’s colleagues would be coming round at a mutually agreeable point over the next few days ‘to formally examine and certify that letter’, details to be sorted out over the phone. Which, Harry thought, pretty much confirmed it hadn’t just been the ink. Abruptly, he felt very angry, and excused himself from the table. He fetched Dudley from the arcade (‘quit while you’re winning,’ his cousin had proclaimed happily), and they ran laps around the park, Harry pushing himself harder than he had in a while. Harry cooled down with some simple yoga postures, and Dudley with some of the stretches he’d learnt for boxing, and they collapsed on the grass, panting.
“So what was that all about?” Dudley finally asked.
“It’s the Headmaster of my school,” Harry replies. “Pretty much everything we ever worried about was true. He’s a horrible person, and he’s done horrible things to me and probably loads of other people, too, and he keeps his hands clean and lets other people take the fall for him, and everyone thinks he’s wonderful! And I don’t, and I’m going to be so alone.” Dudley lay there for a moment, just breathing, just being.
“You’re not that alone,” he finally said. “You’re not going to be alone. You’ll always have us.” He paused again. “And it’s school. A whole other school, in a whole other world, with a massive library and tons of books and new stuff to learn. You’re a swotty little nerd, and you’re going to love it.” Harry smiled.
“Yeah,” he said. “And you get to go to a school with tons and tons of sports, and sticks to hit each other with, and it’s all very manly and traditional and posh. And you’re not a swot, but you aren’t thick, either, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. You work hard to do just as well as you need to at the desk subjects – you’re goal-oriented. And you’re all charismatic. You’ll make tons of new friends, and you can write to me and Malcolm and Gordon. You’re a great big unsubtle blokey sports-fiend, and you’re going to love it.” Dudley pretended to punch him.
“Smart-arse,” he said. “So you think we can handle it?”
“You remember that dinner?” Harry asked. “The one at the posh restaurant, when we were tiny?”
“Vaguely.”
“They said they wouldn’t send us away until we were ready.”
“Yeah.”
“I think we’re nearly ready, Dud. We will be.”
Hedwig swooped down as they walked up the drive, squabbling amicably about who got first dibs on the shower, and Harry stayed in the garden for a while to pet her and admire her, while Dudley stampeded upstairs and a grass-snake lurking next door made disgruntled comments about the big white competitor, and he thought for a moment: yes, we will be.
Notes:
It's been quite the ride! Thank you for sticking with me this long, and I'm sorry the sequel will be quite a wait; I'd ideally like to finish at least one of either Daisy and Dahlia or same dirt before I let yet another Harry loose at Hogwarts, and while I do have part of Harry's first year drafted, it'll want fairly extensive redrafting before I post any of it. So I apologise in advance for the very long wait. Thanks again for reading! :D
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