Basic Necessities
He needed a plan. And even before that, he needed some food. He cast a Tempus. He had killed Vernon and apparated here mid afternoon, and now it was 2 o’clock at night. The mediation had helped him rest, so he wasn’t in any immediate need of sleep. But he didn’t think there would be much that was open even in London, and a small child out by himself in the middle of the night was something most people would find suspicious. So instead of exploring the above ground of Golders Green, he decided to apparate to the one place where he knew there was food, and there wouldn’t be any people around. Sainsbury’s supermarket in Greater Whinging, 3 miles down the road from Little Whinging. Petunia took him there once a week to help carry her shopping. At this time of night it was closed and empty. He disillusioned himself first, and then apparated straight into the bread aisle.
He knew from both Harry's and Tom’s experience that when you are starved and malnourished, eating a lot all at once, or very rich foods, was a recipe for disaster. So he took a loaf of plain white bread and started eating a slice while walking over to the non-grocery items section. It was very limited, but you could get one basic version of most things. He took some time figuring out his clothing sizes and took three complete and very unremarkable outfits, putting one on immediately. He found a plain black backpack, and with a permanent marker from the school supplies aisle inscribed runes on it to give it permanent undetectable extension and featherweight charms. He dumped all the clothes in, as well as an extra pair of shoes, and then vanished the rags he had been wearing, complete with the dried on Vernon-shrapnel. He would have preferred to ritually burn them, but that might leave traces. No time to deal with that.
He picked up a mug and a bowl from the household aisle, as well as a spoon, knife, and fork. And a sharp kitchen knife, for which he had to open the locked display cabinet with a wandless “Alohomora”. The cabinet was clearly marked as forbidden for under 16-year-olds in accordance with the law, but Harry was already stealing, so he might as well steal forbidden items. Besides, he had just killed someone, possession of a knife seemed harmless in comparison. But he did put a Notice-Me-Not on the knife. Just in case.
He went back to the food aisles and started putting stuff in his bag. Including a few tinned ready meals such as baked beans, various soups and ravioli. He’d never had ravioli, but Dudley loved them. He took more bread, and several types of cheese, as well as milk and sugar and salt. A bag of apples, some bananas, and a good supply of biscuits and chocolate. He finished by taking a large packet of tea bags. The fancy brand that Petunia kept for special occasions. Had it been summer, he would have taken juice or the like, but it was November the first. Huh. He had killed Vernon and liberated himself on the anniversary of his parent’s deaths. How poetic. He hoped they would approve, or at least not judge him.
After checking the tills (empty and open), he apparated back to the bomb shelter. He hadn’t left a mess in any way at the supermarket and he himself wouldn’t be visible on any security cameras, so he didn’t think anyone would notice anything until their next inventory. And then it would just be among many other missing items.
Harry washed out his new cup and bowl with “tergeo”, then filled the cup with “aguamenti”, cast an overpowered heating charm to make the water boil briefly and added a tea bag, milk and two sugars. He opened a tin of ravioli (Alohomora works on tins! Tom had learned this during World War 2, in a quiet corner of this very bomb shelter), and poured the contents into his bowl.
A quick heating charm, and he had a very proper meal. Certainly better than any Harry could remember from his own memories. Tom’s memories contained a lot of much nicer meals, but not at his current age. Those meals started with Hogwarts.
He ate about half the bowl and knew more would be dangerous. He drank his tea and was… really quite happy and content.
Harry was aware that that was probably not normal. He should be scared, terrified, really, and he also should have a bad conscience both because of Vernon and because of the theft of goods from Sainsbury’s. But he didn’t. Tom would have been proud of those deeds. Harry wasn’t. But he had taken on enough of Tom’s mindset to think that his own survival had value, and killing Vernon had been self defence. Stealing from Sainsbury’s was “Mundraub”, a concept in German law that Tom had learned about during his travels. Literally “theft for the mouth”, or theft of basic necessities for immediate survival. Still illegal, but not usually punishable by law (depending on quantities taken and the good will of the judge). A concept Tom had been impressed with, poor orphan that he was. Harry as well was currently a poor orphan without reliable adults in his life. Never mind that he probably had some money at Gringotts. That money was not safely accessible to him. So it might as well not exist. So yes, Harry, too, could get behind “Mundraub”. It didn’t exist as a concept in British law, but he had magic and could get away with it. It was just a question of whether or not he should or would feel bad about it. He decided that on balance, no, he wouldn’t. And really, he wouldn’t feel that bad about stealing non-essential items either. As long as he didn’t leave anyone destitute. Harry had had a hard life so far. Not a life that bred huge amounts of sympathy for people who were better off than he was. Because none of them had ever cared about him and tried to help him, so why should he care about them?
He got up from the conjured armchair he had been sitting on and looked around. He might as well stay here. It was forgotten by the world and hence, safe enough. The fact that it was physically walled off and hence only accessible by apparition, only added to its security. Voldemort, should he be around, wouldn’t want to come back here, too many bad memories. The terror of the nights in the bomb shelter had been a major motivating factor in his search for immortality. The shelter wasn’t a safe place for Tom, despite the fact that he had apparated here for that during the flashback. It had just been the safest unsafe place in a city on fire and full of monsters such as Father John.
But for now it could become home, at least for the time being. He started off by conjuring lots of floating candles for light, just like in the Great Hall at Hogwarts. Then he went about inscribing runes on the walls for air renewal, as there didn’t seem to be a ventilation shaft. The air quality markedly improved almost immediately.
He ended up shrinking and putting aside a lot of the beds, keeping the blankets in a neat pile for later use and transfiguring the rest into other furniture. He inscribed the necessary runes to make the transfigurations permanent. It was a pain when transfigurations returned to their original not just emotionally also physically if you happened to be on the transfigured item. He had learned that the hard way.
He cast cleaning charms all around and cast a spell for a fresh coat of a rich green paint on the naked brick walls. He created a fireplace and conjured wood. He could have just cast a heating charm, but he liked fireplaces. Both Harry and Tom liked fireplaces. He levitated an armchair-made-from-a-bunk-bed in front of it, and a low table next to it. On the wall opposite stood his brand new four poster bed, complete with curtains. Green velvet curtains, just like in the Slytherin dorms. Obviously.
Harry was just wondering whether to first make a bathroom or a kitchen, when he realized he really needed the loo. Tom remembered the makeshift latrines there used to be, but… no. Just no! So he transfigured some walls and a simple plain white bathroom with a bathtub, a toilet and sink. He inscribed runes for aguamenti and the water temperature, as well as for vanishing the waste.
As he was using his brand new toilet, he noticed that he was exhausted. This shouldn’t have come as a surprise, given the amount of magic he had been using in the last 24 hours, and with an untrained core at that. He decided his kitchen would wait, and went to bed.
Harry slept exceedingly well, between the most comfortable bed he had ever been in, his exhaustion and the underlying knowledge of SAFETY.
When he woke up, he cast Tempus again. 6 p.m. - oh, well, he was going to have breakfast anyway. And he resolved to figure out how to cast illusions of windows that showed the outside to help him not get lost in time. Tom knew they existed and probably had enough spells in his arsenal to figure it out. He’d just never done it. Harry was very grateful that Tom had been so diligent in learning both wandless magic and household charms when he was at Hogwarts. The wandless magic was to escape the trace over the summer. The household charms he had learned entirely in secret and Tom had made sure to never be seen using them, but he had known he wouldn’t have enough money to buy things, let alone a house elf for years to come. So anything he could do with magic, he did. He had very much learned to appreciate comfort while at Hogwarts, and he wasn’t going to revert to living without it afterwards. Harry was now profiting from that. He wondered how the spells came so easily to him. As if he had integrated not only Tom’s memories, but his actual knowledge and muscle memories. Very useful. He may only be 7, but for all intents and purposes, he was a fully functioning adult wizard. And a very good one at that. Harry's memories had been useful in understanding the muggle store layout and what was what. He would have to figure out his magical limits with time, or rather, the limits of his magical core.
He really needed to get a handle on who he was. It was getting confusing. Was he Harry? Was he Tom? Was he Harry/Tom? Some memories were obviously Tom's and a much smaller amount were Harry's but a lot from age 5, 6, and 7 were harder to distinguish who's memory was whose. Did it really matter who thought what? When they merged, was he now all Harry with Tom & Voldemort’s memories or was he Tom with Harry and Voldemort's memories OR was he some combination?
Maybe he was some combination of the two.
It was easy for him to process things when they were obviously remembered from his time as Harry or his time as Tom. Maybe if he created a third identity one that represented his merging of identities he wouldn't get so confused. Back as a kid, Billy used to tease Tom saying he was not special and would never be anything more than a “common, everyday Tom, Dick, and Harry”.
Back then he wanted to be special, noticed, leave an impact, so Billy’s comment stung even if he never let Billy, that bully, know it. Now though common an unremarkable was a good goal for his survival. Harry Potter was an enemy to Dark Wizards and loved by Light Wizards Tom was his inverse loved by the dark despised by the light. He wanted to be neither. Harry had always wanted to be normal. Tom could see that was partially due to the abuse of the Dursley's and their insistence he was a freak, but Tom in his hidden orphan heart couldn't help but agree with Harry that normal did have its own charm.
Dick was a nickname for Richard. Both parts of his past could get behind that as a name for his new merged identity. His last name would obviously be potter. Tom liked that it was a good pureblood name and Harry felt it was one of the few things that was truly his growing up.
While he was eating his toast (lightly toasted on the open fire) with cheese and a cup of tea, he was musing about his new life situation.
Intellectually, Richard recognized that he probably had some deficits in his emotional development. Tom had been emotionally stunted and knew it, and Harry had been just as desperate until yesterday. Harry hadn’t had time to learn about emotions in a healthy way, he only knew fear, pain, longing, sadness and the like. He knew that he would have great difficulty finding either adults or children, muggle or magical, who would not find him weird now, given his new knowledge. But he was kind of lonely.
Tom had been lonely at times and usually filled the gap by having snakes around. Maybe Richard could do that, too. Decision made, Richard apparated onto nearby Hampstead Heath. Tom’s old memories from the forties weren’t good enough to apparate into built up areas, as he hadn’t been back to North London since he turned 16. And there had been a lot of changes in London between 1942 and 1987… Who knew if he might accidentally apparate into a wall that previously hadn’t been there. It really wasn’t worth the risk. Hampstead Heath with its open meadows and wooded areas was much safer. He had disillusioned himself first, but even so, he was lucky to land in an empty area between some trees. He walked in the direction of the nearest exit. Tom knew Heath well, just like he knew most of North London well. At the time there had been quite a few serpents on the Heath. Harry kept an eye open, but he didn’t see or hear any. At the exit, he found what he was looking for, a red telephone booth which had London telephone books, including the yellow pages. He went in, and turned up the thick volume. Looking for “animals and animal supplies”, he found “Reptiles of Camden”. Should be about a half to three quarters of an hour’s walk according to Tom’s knowledge of the streets. Richard walked. It was Sunday, and the early evening. There was hardly anyone about. Drizzle was falling, but he had cast “impervious,” and warming charms on himself, so he was OK. He cast a cushioning charm on the inside of his new shoes after a while to prevent himself from getting blisters. The shoes weren’t very good, but they were better than any he had ever had, and they had been the most comfortable ones he could find in the very limited selection at Sainsbury’s. One day he would have dragon hide boots…