Introductions
Armed with a single letter and the supportive, if somewhat unsettlingly alien hand of his supposed godfather on his shoulder, Harry guided everyone back into the kitchen. Well, everyone except for Dudley, who had been sent to his room by Aunt Petunia.
He half expected them all to be overrun by letters, but just as the man claimed, the envelopes had ceased their erratic movements and laid harmlessly on the floor now that Harry had finally gotten a hold of his mail. How did that work exactly, well he had no time to ask as they sat stiffly around the table for what appeared to be the start of a serious conversation.
“Well? Petunia?” The man spat the name out as one would a curse.
His aunt bristled at the tone and his uncle didn’t care for it either. “Now don’t you go talking to my wife like that-” he started gruffly, but that was about as far as he got.
“Silencio,” the man incanted in an almost bored tone.
From then on Uncle Vernon’s lips would move, but no sound would come out. Aunt Petunia gasped in shock and stood to be closer to the mute man, her spindly hands coming to hold his wide shoulders as if readying herself to protect him.
“You undo that, this instant!” she demanded. “ You-”
“Petunia,” the man rudely cut her off, now holding a stick aloft in his hand. “Sit down.”
For some reason, Aunt Petunia was shaking as she pulled her chair as close to his uncle’s as she could, not caring for the way the legs scratched against her precious wood floor. The man lowered the stick, carefully setting it on the table before placing his clasped hands over it.
Harry absently noted the actions, but his eyes were more focused on his uncle, who had just lost his voice. The man had never done that before. It was new and strange, all the things the Dursleys hated. Harry, though, found he quite liked that silence. ‘Silencio.’
“Now, let’s talk like adults shall we?” the man continued, tone not any less severe. “Why doesn’t Harry know me?”
Uncle Vernon scowled at the man in silence as he could do nothing but, while his Aunt Petunia shifted in place for a moment before composing herself. “I’m not raising a freak. You wanted me to bring the boy up and I did, but I wasn’t going to mar my life with that nonsense more than I have to. It’s what was best.”
The man’s eyes narrowed at her words, and Harry didn’t really see how that answered the question.
“That wasn’t the deal, Petunia. It isn’t up to you to decide what is best for him.”
“To hell with the bloody deal! He’s weird enough without knowing what he is! He’s a needle in a haystack, did you want a string tied to him for your kind to find? He’s certainly had enough bloody incidents for a trail to form...” she said indignantly, speaking of him as though he wasn’t sitting almost directly across from her.
“Incidents..” the man muttered before shaking his head in frustration. “The world is full of strange happenings, Petunia, what’s there to take note of here? And those bursts of accidental power wouldn’t be so frequent if he knew he could do such things. How does one turn off a faucet they don’t even know is on?”
“And what guarantee do I have that he’ll turn it off and not crank it up? He’s a child. Mischief is what they dedicate themselves to.” His aunt huffed, arms crossed in front of herself. Meanwhile, Uncle Vernon was fervently nodding his head in agreement.
“Yeah, and what’s he done so far? Blow out a light bulb?” the man snorted humorlessly.
And goodness knows how much Aunt Petunia disliked humor of any kind. “Try causing a blackout. Disappearing objects. Changing people’s bloody appearances or, I don’t know, sending himself to a rooftop!”
The man paused at this and Harry thought back to those incidents. They were strange too. Mysteries he gave up on because they simply didn’t make sense. But as it seemed, there was an explanation for them, a cause for all the weird things that happened to Harry! His aunt liked to blame him, but just what about him was to blame?
The man turned to him again, watchful in a way that almost felt invasive. “Seems you certainly are your parent’s son..” he muttered, then turned back to his aunt. “What did you do with the letter, Petunia?”
His aunt had a frown deeply etched in her features as she replied. “...I stored it away.”
“Go fetch it then. I will speak with Harry and then we’ll go from there.” The man said, not leaving any room for arguments with his tone.
Uncle Vernon seemed to have more to say, but of course he couldn’t utter a word. Still, it was sort of impressive how his face began almost purpling when the man waved the couple away. Which actually, didn’t feel entirely ideal in Harry’s situation.
He watched the door close behind his aunt’s figure and immediately his eyes darted to the stranger. Green met grey in an instant. A silence fell around the two as the sound of the Dursleys’ footsteps retreated down the hall.
It felt dramatic to think, but Harry couldn’t remember anyone else having ever made him feel so exposed or seen. It sort of reminded him of the cats Mrs. Figg kept in the way that the man was absolutely judging him at the moment. But then there was a primal violence swirling in those eyes that reminded him more of the dogs his aunt Marge bred.
Harry broke eye contact first, looking down at the man’s clasped hands. “So, um, what’s with the stick?” he asked lamely.
“Wand. It’s a wand, Harry. Best you don’t call them that again, most people would take offense to...” The man trailed off as Harry blinked up at him incredulously, then he deflated in his seat with a sigh. “Merlin… where do I even start here?...” he asked no one in particular.
Taking mercy on him, Harry raised a hand towards the man. “My name is Harry Potter, sir. And you are..?”
“...Sirius. Sirius Black. I am.. Well, I’m your godfather.” The man said, shaking his hand firmly as he finally introduced himself.
“Right…. So what brings you here today, Mr. Black?” Harry asked, retracting his hand to instead play with the ends of his large shirt. In the back of his head, he couldn’t help feeling a little self-conscious about his shabby appearance compared to the finely dressed man beside him.
“Just Sirius is fine. And according to my schedule, I was supposed to take you shopping for the upcoming semester. But those plans have been thoroughly derailed until the foreseeable future.” Sirius said, rubbing his temple with his index.
“You… came to take me shopping?..” Harry asked, trying hard to hold the judgement from seeping into his tone.
“Yeah, I know it doesn’t sound great, but do consider that I also didn’t expect you to know nothing here,” the man said defensively, because apparently Harry hadn’t succeeded there.
“Of course not,” Harry said, his tone changing to an agreeable one as was second nature to him now. “What is it that I am supposed to know exactly?”
“What do you know?” Sirius asked back, straightening himself in his seat again. “What have the Dursleys told you? About yourself and your family, about how you came to be here.”
Harry simply shrugged. “Nothing much. My parents died in a car crash when I was a baby and as Aunt Petunia is the only blood relation I have, she took me in after the accident.”
It took Sirius some time to take that all in. So long actually, that his aunt came back before he managed to do anything other than stare at Harry in appalled disbelief.
Then, for the second time that day, the room fell into chaos. The lights flickered violently and the letters were launched from the floor straight into the walls, sticking out of them like darts on a board.
“What in Merlin’s name is wrong with you, Petunia!” Sirius yelled, scowling as he stood from his chair and addressed his aunt with a fury not even his uncle could match. “A car crash? A fucking car crash?! Your sister gets murdered and you tell her son that she died in some car crash!?”
His aunt had frozen in place, as one would he supposed, when the wooden door frame around you gets stabbed through by mere paper. At his words though, she snapped out of her trance and met him with some indignant anger of her own.
“Oh,don’t you go judging me for that! Lily died at the hands of a crazed freak? Have you ever thought about what that bloody sounds like?!You sent him to me to raise among normal people. Normal kids don’t have their mothers brutally murdered, they aren’t abandoned by their fathers-!”
“James didn’t abandon him! This- this.. is what was best, it was the safest course of action,” Sirius said through clenched teeth.
“What was best… tsk.” his aunt spat, stomping forward to slam a letter onto the table. “Justify it all you want. I did what I had to, just like you.”
At this, Sirius grabbed her wrist and pointed his wand at her, his knuckles white from his tight grasp on it. “He doesn’t know a thing about his mother. Not.one.thing. about your sister. Did you think so little of her that her own son didn’t need to know about what she managed to do in her short life? Or is it that your heart is so rotten that it couldn’t even spare him the kindness of getting to know her through you? No, maybe it was-”
“Kindness? You think it is a kindness to know someone you will never meet again?” his aunt scowled, nostrils flaring in anger. “It was me who raised that child. What point was there to paint him pretty pictures of a woman who would never come for him? What consolation could the simple memory of the dead possibly bring?”
“Well, what about James then? He isn’t-”
His aunt cut him off with a snort. It was a cruel sound, much like what Harry had always imagined her real laughter would be like.
“He might as well be though. And so could you have been, for that matter,” she said, turning her nose up at him.
His aunt’s frame was shaking, but there was a stubbornness in her gaze that didn’t seem to allow her to back down despite how clearly afraid she was of the wand being pointed at her. Harry was fascinated by the sight of her standing up to anyone so fervently. After watching her bend to Dudley’s whims for so long, Harry was almost sure she had no spine, but as it turned out, he was wrong.
“You don’t even know the half of it all, Petunia.” Sirius replied, glaring at her with nearly murderous eyes. “Don’t you start judging me, or James for that matter, when you couldn’t even imagine the shit that’s happened over this past decade in our world.”
“You dare insinuate that I am ignorant?” She asked, trying to back away. “This world, my world, is dozens of times bigger than yours, but what do you know about it? What do your freakish people know of us normal folk, huh? Coming into my house, pointing a wand at me like the madman who killed Lily-”
Sirius let her go after that, pushing her away even, while his wand lowered to his side. “You don’t know what you are talking about,” he said, but his voice was shaky.
“As if I don’t.” She huffed, straightening herself as she backed away towards the door. “All of you freaks are a danger to people like us.”
Then Aunt Petunia turned on her heel and left, the door slamming closed behind her.
All the while, Harry sat quietly in his chair, watching the lights ultimately flicker off as the clanking of his aunt’s heels faded away. The room was illuminated by the sun now, and it wasn’t so silent as the birds chirped outside without a care as to what had transpired in Number 4 Privet Drive.
Dozens of new questions were forming in Harry’s mind as he absorbed the information which the interaction had laid before him. It was probably the most he’d ever learned of his past. But whilst he was dying to get some answers, he didn’t think the shaken man beside him would be much help at the moment.
So he turned to the next best thing. His gaze lowered to the letter on his lap and his nimble fingers were quick to open it. Reading its contents, Harry felt as though the world had been flipped upside down.
“School of Witchcraft and Wizardry?...” He muttered, his head tilting in utter confusion.
“..Yes,” Sirius said, having apparently composed himself at some point.
Again they looked at each other; Harry in the hopes of divining some explanation from Sirius’ eyes, while the other only took note of the child before him with a sad smile.
“You are a wizard, Harry.”