Truth and Trauma

There was a wizard on Privet Drive. An adult wizard.

The Quidditch World Cup and then the graveyard had taught him what Apparation sounded like, and that morning it had ripped through Privet Drive’s petty quiet like a knife through butter.

Harry, who had been taking advantage of the relative coolness of the early hours and his own fraught relationship with sleep to put a dent in the long list of garden work, immediately flattened himself to the ground at the loud cracking noise. It might have sounded like a car backfiring, but at this time on a weekend and with no accompanying motor noises Harry knew better.

There was an adult wizard. Here. On Privet Drive, where the wizarding world most certainly Did Not Belong.

Heart pounding, he crawled his way over to the hedge to peer along the road. It was deserted, as expected of a pre-dawn Sunday, but that was no comfort.

In fact, Harry might have been less tense had there been a squad of Death Eaters marching down the road in full regalia. At least then he would know, instead of this ominous emptiness where anything could be happening at all.

That was always by far the worst part of being stuck here. The not knowing, being completely cut off. Now Harry felt more alone than ever, with an unknown wizard lurking somewhere around and no way of signalling for help – even if Harry could convince himself to stand from his meagre shelter and sneak back inside, Hedwig was away, both for her own safety and to try and pester Ron and Hermione out of ignoring him.

As fucking always, Harry was on his own. And despite his hatred of the muggle-ness of Privet Drive, this sudden incursion of wizarding oddness was terrifying.

There were, after all, only two options. There was no way it was a coincidence – Privet Drive would be more accurately named ‘Muggle Hell,’ and any sensible wizard would not be found within ten miles of the place. If someone was apparating in the vicinity, it was certainly to do with him.

Either unfriendly wizards had found his address and had come to scout the area, or Dumbledore’s apparent trust in the Blood Wards was less absolute than the old wizard would like him to believe and he had been assigned a guard.

The latter would have been much appreciated, if only Harry had been told about it rather than left in the dark as with everything else. His own trust in the blood wards was dubious at best; according to Dumbledore, they were based on Petunia’s ‘love.’ For Harry. Anyone who spent more than five minutes around the relatives would know that, like meals, toys and clothes, Harry’s portion of anything even vaguely resembling affection had always belonged unequivocally to Dudley.

Even if they were based on something stronger than love, the name had Harry doubting that they would be at all effective after what had happened in the graveyard. Harry’s blood now ran through Voldemort’s veins, rendering a “blood ward” less than useless.

If someone was watching him, though… even if it was on Dumbledore’s behalf, fury formed a counterpart to the terror in his racing heartbeat at the thought that unknown witches and wizards could have been spying on him all summer. Privet Drive was hard enough to live through, but the idea of someone watching him do so – of watching and seeing nothing wrong with his life here… it made Harry wish for his wand and some of the darker books he had taken to distracting himself with during his time as a pariah before the First Task.

Harry took several deep breath, forcing himself to be calm and rational about this. Merlin knew that he had a temper, but now was not the time for Gryffindor rashness. He was at Privet Drive, and Slytherin subtlety had always served him better here.

Whilst assigning a guard would be what he would have done (well, if he had the manpower to spare – which was less than a surety, with the nonsense the paper’s had been writing about Dumbledore – and if he had not done the obvious thing which was to move his prize Boy Who Lived somewhere behind better defences than blood wards), Dumbledore was no fourteen-year-old boy. Harry honestly had no idea what went on in the old man’s head sometimes – the gauntlet in first year? Giving a third year a time machine to attend classes? Hosting a magically-binding tournament that had been discontinued due to a literal death toll? Making a guess on what he would do was far too risky.

He had to think.

There had been no noise at all since the deafening crack. He was still sure that it had been apparation, but it was the first noise of its kind that he had heard all summer. That made it less likely that a guard had been put on him at all – and if it was, the empty road meant that in all likelihood whoever it was had been drawn away somehow. And if it had been an enemy…

Whatever had caused someone to apparate into or out of Privet Drive, Harry was vulnerable.

Gritting his teeth against the itch under his skin that came with making himself a visible target, Harry made himself stand up fully. No longer concealed behind the hedge, he slunk as quickly as he dared around the back of the house, relaxing marginally when the generic red bricks cut off most sightlines.

Having long since greased the hinges, he eased his way inside Number 4 without a sound. Then he spent at least a minute a ghost in the back of the kitchen, straining his ears for any hint of movement.

His relatives might not know what apparition was, let alone what it sounded like, but it had still been a loud noise that was more than capable of waking most of the street. But for once the universe seemed to have decided to give Harry a break, since the only noise beyond the creaking of the house itself came from Vernon’s loud, rumbling snores. Those snores, and the earplugs Petunia wore to deal with them – alongside Dudley’s chronic laziness – had apparently been Harry’s saving grace.

It said quite something about his screaming awakenings from his nightmares that they managed to wake his relatives when the snoring and a ‘car backfiring’ could not.

Still, Harry had learned in the cupboard to count his blessings where he could at Privet Drive. He made his way up to his room as quickly as he was able whilst still avoiding the creaking second step and any squealing hinges. Shutting his door as an extra precaution, he dropped to his knees beside the rickety bed and quickly dug up the loose floorboard.

There, gleaming oddly in the midst of such unmagical surroundings, was an underage wizard’s saving grace. The one magical defence Harry had that would not set off the Trace.

The relief upon draping the invisibility cloak over his head was immediate. He imagined he could almost feel its magic brushing over his own, cool and quiet and full of solemn, ancient peace.

The only artefact anything like it he had felt before was the Stone from his first year. Probably not an actual Philosopher’s Stone, for he could not imagine the Flamel’s ever letting the real one out of their sight, but something alchemical and powerful nonetheless. Unfortunately, he had been a little too focused on survival to truly marvel at a complex magical working.

The cloak was an instant comfort, but it was not enough all on its own. Harry knew that he could not stay here – not only might his relatives come looking for him (he shuddered at the thought of them finding him ‘slacking,’ let alone if they discovered him in the process of using something so distinctly magical. There was already going to be hell to pay when he made no progress on Petunias five-page chore list. But Harry could survive his relatives; he was not nearly so sure that he could survive whatever crazy trial the wizarding world had in store for him), but if a wizard did break through the blood wards then they would definitely check the rooms.

Better to be out, away, with room to manoeuvre and hide. The Cloak might prevent them seeing him, but it did not protect him from touch, and he had never tested it against revealing spells. Anonymity was his greatest defence; better to be wandering somewhere random than trusting the dubious protection of so-called ‘blood wards’.

After all, if Harry himself did not know where he was going, how could a stranger possibly hope to predict him?

He felt more like a ghost than ever as he drifted back down the stairs, timing his steps to the beat of Vernon’s snorts. The day was dawning as he locked the back door behind him – no need to give Petunia extra ammunition – but any colour it brought to the sky was locked behind thick grey clouds.

Maybe it would rain. Despite how miserable it would make avoiding the house, Harry found himself hoping it would. Surrey had been suffering a heatwave for weeks now, and a break in the weather sounded glorious. The sun had barely risen but he was still more than comfortable in a thin t-shirt riddled with holes.

Dudley’s hand-me-down, of course. Buying better clothing would only alert his relatives that he had money that could be converted into pounds and given to them to pay them back for whatever crime they decided he committed every day. Breathing, maybe. Tainting their perfectly normal air with his icky wizard-ness.

He twisted the copious extra fabric between his fingers as he wandered, feet taking turn after turn without much thought. Getting lost was sort of the point. Not that it would be

No matter how idly he wandered, however, he made sure to keep at least one eye and ear trained on the world around him. He found no hint of anyone, wizard or otherwise, sensibly asleep at 6am on a Sunday. Tucked up in comfortable beds and comforting dreams.

Harry sighed. He envied them their easy nights, their easy lives. Envied them as much as he knew he would have hated to be them, would chafe at the ordinariness of a life lived through gossip and conformation.

He had always wanted to explore, wanted to be far away from cookie-cutter Privet Drive, even before he had learned that the restlessness under his skin was born of magic.

Yet year after year he found himself back here, even with a whole new world supposedly at his fingertips. Year after year, and with each one he sometimes thought that less and less of himself came back.

Wondered, sometimes, what Aunt Petunia thought when she looked at him. Wondered what she saw.

What Lily had been like – if she had drawn away too, if it was the cause of Petunia’s scorn and distaste. That her sister had gone somewhere she could not follow, and died for it.

Or perhaps his aunt had simply been born bitter and hateful.

It was a naïve hope, he thought. That there might be a reason for his aunt’s detestation of all that he was. That there was a reason more deep than her simply hating magic and hating Harry. That there could be a reason for any of it, all the senseless reactions people had to him. Lauding him for his blood protection – his parent’s murder, Quirrel’s, the basilisk’s. Hating him for his heritage – his mother, his father. For a talent – magic, parseltongue.

Wrenching his thoughts away from that particular spiral, Harry sank down onto someone’s low garden wall, legs shaking a little. Too many thoughts, too little food, too little sleep. Too much adrenaline so early in the morning – but he was safe here, on this insignificant street somewhere in Greater Whinging, invisible and alone.

As safe as he could ever be on Privet Drive, anyway. Safer than he felt at Number 4.

The summer had been predictably awful so far, comprised almost entirely of efforts to dodge his relatives explosive tempers and not give in to the sweltering heat whilst completing Petunia’s unending list of chores.

(He honestly wondered how she coped whilst he was away at Hogwarts. She had had years of only lifting a finger in the house to shove it in his direction and order him to get on with whatever needed doing, and when he returned home after summer it always took weeks to bring the house back to her demanding standards.)

Nights were filled with flashes of green light, as Cedric died over and over behind Harry’s closed eyes. When it was not Cedric it was his mother, the Killing Curse having brought the memories unearthed by the dementors his third year back to the fore, and when it was neither it was usually because Harry forced himself to lay awake.

Dark circles had gouged themselves deep beneath his eyes, but it was still better than the other marks that would adorn his body when the pillow stuffed in his mouth failed and his screams woke his relatives. Harry Potter’s presence at Privet Drive was a daily accounting of costs occurred, and whilst an excessive chore-list usually sufficed for the ‘generosity’ of a ramshackle cot and their leftover scraps, the price for Vernon’s lack of beauty sleep was usually totalled in blood.

At least, the boy thought somewhat morbidly, the Blood Wards should have plenty to work with. If they actually exist. And aren’t rendered inert by sharing blood with a madman.

The previous year, invoking Sirius’s name had been enough to drive off the worst of his relatives. Ron and Hermione would likely be horrified at the decidedly Slytherin tactic of threatening muggles with a mass-murderer godfather (conveniently forgetting to mention his innocence), but as far as Harry was concerned if it took threats to make someone treat a child as a human being then that person deserved them.

Unfortunately, the Order’s threats at the train station this year had been decidedly less astute; their only affect had been to enrage Vernon and Petunia enough that they had thrown caution of Sirius to the wind that night, and when no repercussions had gone had proceeded to get steadily more awful. The nightmares had merely been the final straw, with Vernon clearly deciding that if Harry was going to scream then he should have something to scream about.

Lovely people, weren’t they, the Dursleys? Sometimes Harry thought that Dumbledore must have had been out of his mind when he had had Harry placed here. He already had several similarities to Tom Riddle – both parselmouths, both half-bloods, both orphans, with brother wands and looks that were not completely dissimilar. Harry might not believe that muggles deserved to die, but the Dursley’s had certainly tried their damnedest to convince him otherwise.

Sighing deeply, Harry stood up once more, the brief break having reinvigorated him somewhat. Dawn had fully broken overhead, and whilst the sudden onslaught of clouds was a welcome shield from the relentless sun that had scorched Surrey for the past two weeks, it was still uncomfortably hot under the Cloak.

In fact, the clouds were somewhat unnerving. There had been nothing but clear skies and blistering heat for nearly a fortnight, and from what he had overhead, crouched outside the living room window so Vernon could not come down on him for ‘slacking’ or breathing wrong in his vicinity, the forecasters were not expecting the trend to break for another week at least.

Alongside the apparition this morning and the general uneasiness that had driven him from sleep early this morning – for once not a nightmare, just the pervading sense of wrongness that normally came on around Halloween – the strange change in the weather sent a shiver down Harry’s spine, no matter how hot he was. Just sitting here like a waiting target was not helping, for all that there was nothing actually useful that Harry was allowed to do, so instead he started wandering again. Maybe the exercise and rare opportunity to get away from Number 4, so rarely worth the consequences, might help.

***

It did not. In fact if anything it made it worse, Harry all too aware of every minute ticking away where he was not hard at work on Petunia’s List.

In the very best case scenario, his relatives could enjoy the break from Harry’s presence and let him get away with only a little yelling. Unfortunately, that relied on his horribly capricious luck, which had already let him get away that morning without trouble. He doubted it could remain so good.

Worse than his expectations of what awaited him at the house was that Surrey was quiet. Not even the kind of quiet that heralded wrongness – there were still the murmurings of housewives ‘hard at work’ gossiping, the occasional car buzzing along the street, the occasional splash of someone breaking the hosepipe ban. Mundane sounds. Normal sounds.

Things were peaceful enough that he was even beginning to doubt what he had heard that morning. Perhaps it really had been a car backfiring – perhaps his paranoia was starting to run away with him.

It was not enough to make him take the Cloak off, but after several hours it was enough to draw him back towards Privet Drive.

And here, at last, was the herald of something truly being wrong. There was a lingering chill to the air the closer you drew to Number 4, a coldness in the bones that antithetically provided no relief from the heat of the day. The ordinary sounds that Harry had found so comforting elsewhere in Little Whinging also cut off as he caught sight of the house, leaving an eerie silence.

Had Harry not been on high alert, he might have missed it. The house looked normal, after all. The door was firmly closed, the windows half-open in an attempt to coax a breeze inside but not broken. Vernon’s prized SUV, painstakingly polished by Harry, shone in the driveway. There was no blood, no sign of forced entry.

Nothing but the silence. An utter lack of life.

One hand clutching the cloak tighter around him, Harry grasped his wand in his other hand. Underage or not, magic could be used in defence of his own life.

Part of him screamed to go. To run. He was safe outside, under the cloak. Whatever had happened here, he did not have to face it. Certainly the Dursleys would never have faced any kind of danger for him.

Yet Harry was a Gryffindor. Had been sorted into the House of the Brave. Turning would be cowardly, but also sensible. Understandable. He was only fourteen years old. Yet Harry did not turn, did not back away.

It was not sentiment driving him. Any duty he might have felt towards his relatives, his blood who had raised him, had cracked away entirely the first time he had been taken into the Burrow, the heart of the Weasley family, and known for the first time what love was. That it did not have to hurt, be all blind obedience on pain of hurt and deprivation.

He owed the Dursleys nothing. Had never received anything from them that they had not made him earn, fingers worked to the bone in exchange for a cupboard. As Dobby had owed the Malfoy’s nothing.

He still approached the door. Not for them, not truly. At the thought that something might have happened to them, even if it was tangentially his fault… it was curious that he did not feel guilt, when he still carried that ache deep in his soul for Cedric Diggory. The only feeling he could muster was a sort of numbness, an alien twin to that cold dread that hung in the air around Number 4.

No, instead he was drawn closer out of a horrific kind of curiosity. He needed to know what had happened, what he had been avoiding all morning, what his hyper-awareness might have saved him from. If he was just making this all up, if the dread and quietness was only due to his personal feelings about Privet Drive, for what his relatives might have planned for him for escaping before they had even awoken.

He had been kept in the dark all summer. Whatever had happened here, at least Harry would know.

Harry hesitated a last time at the back door, his left hand tracing over the inside of the cloak. If his relatives were lying in wait inside, he could not risk having it on him – but could he risk entering without it, if an unknown wizard might be lurking inside?

Indecision paralysed him for the better part of a minute. Logically, he could not get inside without revealing his presence anyway, since he would have to open the door. It was latched tightly enough that even a wizard wouldn’t be logically deficient enough to believe the wind could open it. Emotionally, the Cloak was a solid barrier between Harry and the world and it was currently preventing him from panicking too badly.

Unfortunately, Harry had grown up with muggles and therefore his logic skills were not quite as badly impaired as much of the wizarding world. Magic was the bane of common sense – what was the point of reasoning things out when sheer will could get a wizard ninety percent of their way? But summer always forced Harry to be resourceful, and right now that meant controlling himself. Not something the Gryffindor much liked doing, but a necessary survival skill.

Backing away from the door, Harry knelt down by the wilting roses, clinging to life through virtue of Petunia’s liberal disdain of the hosepipe ban. By which he meant that she had ordered him to do the watering at midnight like a proper little delinquent, as she would never get her manicured nails dirty if there was any other way.

There was a little patch in the corner that no amount of midnight watering had been able to resurrect, however, and it was just about large enough that Harry could scrape a hole to fit the Cloak. He loathed risking staining his father’s heirloom, but at least the flowerbed was more dust than mud and it was better dirty than confiscated entirely or, Merlin forbid, torn to shreds by his uncle.

Uncomfortably visible, Harry once again approached the back door. Just as he had that morning, he took care to slip it open silently in case his paranoia was playing up and there was nothing actually wrong with the house.

The instant he was inside, however, all doubt was gone. That awful prickling feeling of wrongness spread further, like iron under his tongue, at the utter silence leaking through the house.

There were always sounds in the kitchen. When it wasn’t the tromping of his relatives moving around, it was the television always on for ‘background noise’ or to entertain Dudley, and when even that was off then there was the quiet humming of the refrigerator.

A humming that had been silenced. In fact, none of the electricity in the house seemed to be working – the lights were off, the fridge was dead, the digital clocks black and clear.

Knuckles white around his wand, Harry raised it to chest height, no longer concerned about the Dursley’s seeing him with it. Wrong, wrong, wrong. He should go – should leave. But go where? He could potentially summon the Knight Bus, but where would it take him? The Leaky was not safe, Hogwarts was closed to him and what would he say if he turned up at the Burrow? That the electricity had died and he ran off?

No, he needed a real, tangible reason. Something beyond the innate wrongness of a house so devoid of magic that it always felt at least a little wrong.

So he pressed on.

The corridor was equally eerie, empty and tinted with grey. Quiet. So, so quiet. Harry swallowed, unwilling to call out, to break that silence. Instead he pressed on, tentatively peering into the living room where his uncle and cousin spent so much of their time.

Well. He had found his relatives. His aunt and uncle.

What was left of them.

He could not take his eyes off them. Two obscene forms, one fat one thin, slumped over on the couch like puppets with their strings cut. Their eyes stared blankly into the distance. Their arms were positioned oddly, like they had been raised to ward off their attackers before their abrupt collapse. Now they were twisted across their bodies in a way that would have been uncomfortable if there had been a mind left to register discomfort, every muscle slack.

After a moment stood frozen in the doorway, there was a flicker of movement. Vernon blinked, eyelids opening and closing mechanically. His chest, Harry realised, was rising and falling shallowly. Petunia’s too.

Yet there was no light in their eyes, no life. Not a shred of personality, of humanity, of being. No reaction to their hated nephew.

Animate but dead.

There was noise in this room, a tiny, shivering thing, somehow profane. His relatives light, shallow breathing, and Harry’s heavier breaths as he desperately tried not to be sick.

He had hated them and they had hated him. Yet there was something so wrong about seeing them, seeing anyone this way. Dead but breathing. Everything that made them human cut away.

Kissed away, he realised distantly. That was what he was seeing, what the chill in the air had been.

Someway, somehow, dementors had come to Little Whinging. And Harry had not been there, had fled to save his own skin, and left the muggles exposed to all the horrors of the wizarding world.

Staring into their faces, their cold, empty faces, so slack and untwisted by the disgust that he caused in them… they did not look like his aunt and uncle at all.

Harry did not know what he was feeling. What he was meant to feel. They were dead, as good as. Why? How? It seemed utterly senseless – what had dementors been doing here, in muggle suburbia? Voldemort could not have gotten to them yet, it would have been in the Prophet, and he had committed no crime.

Shock, he realised. He was in shock. Despite the strangeness of the morning, the prickling of his instincts, he had not truly been expecting this. His relatives were dead and he only felt numb, staring in horror at these soulless corpses masquerading as living beings.

What did he do now?

What was he even capable of? He finally stumbled backwards, away from that awful sight – he may have hated his relatives, they may have hated him, but there was something perverse about their bodies, soulless and wrong, barely human at all – and sank to his knees in the corridor, trembling.

It was a final, damning confirmation that had begun with Cedric’s death. War was upon them; there was no sanctity, no safety.

Harry was fourteen when he had watched a not-quite-friend die in a wash of green light, senseless, a spare. Barely a month on, he was still fourteen and stumbling across the soulless husks of his relatives.

The muggle world was no safer than the wizarding one, less safe perhaps – at least at Hogwarts he was allowed to defend himself – and he had no way of contacting anyone, nowhere to go. He should be fleeing the scene, should summon the Knight Bus and go to the Burrow, seek sanctuary where he could, but- could he do that to the Weasleys? His very presence was a danger; Voldemort would see him dead, and now with whatever was going on with the Ministry and the dementors…

Ultimately, he could not bring himself to move an inch, shaking and swallowing back bile, his legs unable to hold him. Wand dangling from slack fingers as he struggled desperately to breathe.

Not until he flinched as the front door crashed in, nearly falling, eyes snapping to the people –people, not dementors – suddenly invading Number 4. He barely had time to register blurry red robes – not black, not Death Eaters – before there were wands raised in his direction, and an equally red spell jettisoned him into darkness.

He awoke in Azkaban.