Alchemical

A series of coincidences converge upon Harry Potter the night that the Dark Lord enters his home. Three coincidences, to be exact.

Firstly, his father’s invisibility cloak is still at Godric’s Hollow. James had planned to give it to Albus Dumbledore for use on the battlefield, because they hardly had use of it here, but changed his mind at the last minute. If they have to hide from a madman, he wants to have every tool in his arsenal possible.

The cloak is at its usual spot in the nursery, folded up by the crib. It’s kept there in case of emergency, though James and Lily don’t like to talk about what sort of emergency that would be.

They never talk through much of a plan at all, actually, putting it off because they figure they can trust one of their best friends. Then, in the blink of an eye, it’s too late.

When Lord Voldemort enters their home and kills James, the only thing Lily can think to do is shield Harry with her body and throw the cloak over his mobile, hoping it’ll cover him. It’s too slippery and she’s fumbling with it to stay in place when Voldemort enters the room — she screams and it slinks out of her fingers, she feels so stupid, and then Harry’s sitting up with the cloak in his lap and Voldemort is offering her amnesty because fools don’t understand love.

She dies and leaves behind her whole heart in that crib.

Secondly, Voldemort is wearing the Resurrection Stone on his hand, though he does not know it. He’s taken to wearing the Gaunt family ring lately so that all will bask in the glory of his ancestry. 

This is not at all related to the rumor his spies have heard circulating among the Ministry, a half-baked speculation at his real identity and blood status. The source was unsurprising: Albus Dumbledore had made a comment in a closed Wizengamot hearing and things quickly snowballed from there. The ring is a testament to his lineage, no matter what the senile and elderly say.

Though, of course, he does not let rumors get to him. They are irrelevant, for Lord Voldemort rules the truth; if he does not like it, he will reinvent it. He changed his name and transformed his soul, aspects of a person that many would consider immutable, when they were too common and uninspired — and when a prophecy says someone will have the power to vanquish him, he says I think not and acts to eliminate the threat.

He extends his arm over the crib and points his wand at the child’s forehead. Harry Potter watches him curiously and his hands grip onto a silvery cloak. There will be no gratification in seeing the light leave his eyes, for the loss of a young wizard and their potential is always unfortunate. Still, he is satisfied in the knowledge that no one will stop him from reshaping the world and making it pure (not by blood, but in his image).

Thirdly, the Deathstick is in Voldemort’s hand. A handful of his Death Eaters had a skirmish with Order members in Hogsmeade the month prior, and dear Bella had summoned him to her side. It was a stroke of good fortune that he had Apparated right in front of Dumbledore — literally a matter of luck, for he had taken Felix Felicis that day for no other reason than to see what would happen.

Driven by whimsy for the first time in his adult life, he’d skipped the usual torture and killing curses and, instead of giving Dumbledore a fair duel, summoned a student to his side. A blade had come from his wand, he’d held it at the girl’s throat, and told Dumbledore to drop dead for her to be spared.

The headmaster, weak and soft-hearted, continued to duel but was very clearly distracted as he did so. He saved the girl but left an opening to be Disarmed, and Voldemort had the Elder Wand with ten minutes to go of Snape’s brew. Dumbledore and the student disappeared in a burst of phoenix fire, but Lord Voldemort still tasted victory.

He’d not known what the wand was, at the time, and intended to keep it as a trophy. Igor Karkaroff, pale-faced, had explained the lore to him. The most powerful wand…. How fitting it should be wielded by the most powerful wizard.

He has not taken the luck potion now, and it shows when everything goes wrong.

“Avada Kedavra,” he says without an ounce of regret, but the spell backfires off the boy and in a blinding burst of bright green, he is thrust from his body. He becomes an incorporeal miasma of fear, confusion, rage. The pain is indescribable, even though he has no nerve cells to feel it. 

The cadaver withers and disintegrates into black smoke because he is more dark magic than human by this point, and the vessel cannot last without its host. He is less than a ghost, he is a wraith, he is screaming and yet no one can hear…

The wand that was in his hand and the ring that was on his finger drop into the crib to join the cloak in Harry’s lap. 

The Master of Death is born in that pivotal and impossible moment, but he’s crying too much from the sting in his forehead to appreciate it.

When the sting starts to let up, Harry sniffles and starts teething on the fabled Elder Wand for comfort. He doesn’t know that an incredible and unfathomable amount of power has been left in his pudgy hands that still have yet to fully develop fine motor control. He thinks only of his mummy and papa, and then he sees them, and then he’s wondering why there are two pretty Mums in the room, one laying on the floor and one next to his crib crying.

From the start, Petunia can tell there’s something wrong with her nephew.

When she finds the boy on the doorstep, bundled in blankets and sleeping peacefully, she tries three different times to grab at the letter left next to him, afraid one of the crows will peck her. At least a dozen of them stand sentry, staring her down with their beady black eyes.

As far as she knows, owls are the only magical birds Wizarding Britain uses… 

Lily was murdered, Dumbledore writes, but a blood protection survived her and will protect Harry from the Dark Lord, so long as he lives with her, his last living blood relation aside from Dudley. She’s of half a mind to write a letter back and hand it to one of the crows, informing the headmaster that under no certain terms will she raise one of those kinds of children, until she makes it to the end of the letter:

Lord Voldemort and his servants are very likely to target your family upon his inevitable return. If you do not accept Harry into your home, the protection will terminate and you will be left vulnerable. I can not protect you and yours as well as your sister’s magic if you wish to stay in Little Whinging. I trust you to care for Harry until he is of age and when he is old enough to bear the weight of it, to tell him of his parents’ sacrifice. The Wizarding World will wait patiently for him to rejoin it, but for now, let him be a happy and unburdened child. Let him be loved.

Her bony hands tremble as she re-reads the first part and ignores the second. There will be a great danger to her Dudley if she doesn’t grit her teeth and welcome this child into their home, and really, that means she has no choice at all in the matter. She’ll always protect Dudley; if it ever came to it, she would die for him like Lily had for Harry. She feels a rare bit of empathy for her sister in that.

 The baby wakes up wailing on the stoop and the crows caw out like they’re singing some horrid lullaby, a chorus like nails-on-chalkboard. She cringes and picks the baby up, shutting the door before any of her neighbors can see. The birds go silent at once and she sighs in relief.

Her instincts take over — the boy’s just one, he has to be changed and then fed… But she has to make sure Dudley’s needs are met, see to him first when possible so he knows he’s her precious Duddykins and this will never change, no matter how many orphaned babes they’re cursed with…

She grabs a rattle and sticks it, and the boy, in the cupboard under the stairs. He’s stopped crying, so he can wait to be attended to until Dudley’s set up in his high chair with breakfast. Just as well, because Vernon’s still sleeping in and she’s dreading the conversation she’ll have to have with him.

She starts to head upstairs for the nursery, eager to wake her son up with a kiss and get some normalcy back into her day, when she hears a giggle from below her. “Mama!” Petunia feels a lurch in her stomach and continues to walk. 

When she opens the cupboard door twenty minutes later, the boy is still in a good mood. He’s pulled himself up to stand, holding onto the edge of a shelf, and she sees that he can almost touch the doorknob; they’ll have to take care of that. This seems like a fine place for him to stay, so long as it can be locked from the outside.

She puts him on Dudley’s changing table and decides he’ll fit into Dudley’s nappy size just fine. There’s no reason to go out of their way and buy new baby supplies — and what was that old man thinking, leaving a toddler on the step with no funds or real belongings, nothing but the clothes on his back and blankets he was wrapped in? 

The boy looks up at Petunia and happily squeals, reaching his hand up to her. Her lips twitch and she thinks, well, he’s just any other baby right now, isn’t he? He hasn’t done anything freakish yet, he can still be raised to know better and avoid that behavior.

When she looks up from the baby wipes to give Harry a proper smile for the first time that day, she realizes he’s not reaching his hand up to her. He’s pointing somewhere behind her instead, a big smile on his face as he does so. She turns around, wondering if Vernon’s finally woken, but the boy’s just pointing to the blank wall… or perhaps the space above her shoulder…

“Mama! Mama!”

A chill goes up Petunia’s spine and the space she’s standing in starts to feel cold. She looks back at the boy, who’s now clapping and laughing at thin air. A loud THUMP comes from behind her and Petunia shrieks. 

Her heart racing, she turns around half-expecting to come face-to-face with the apparition of her dead sister, never mind that she’s never believed in something so outlandish as ghosts. Her husband’s standing there instead, utterly befuddled at the sight before him.

As Petunia explains their situation to Vernon, she wonders if they’re letting a greater danger into their home than whatever’s waiting outside for them. This blood protection won’t shield Dudley from the boy’s influence — and she’s convinced already that he’s as abnormal as her sister — so they’ll have to do their best to keep them separated, rear their son right and make sure of his safety no matter what.

By the time the boy is six, she realizes his brand of strangeness is more unusual than Lily’s had been, more frightening than blooming flowers and floating off swings. He’s stopped talking to people that (she hopes) aren’t really there, but she’s caught his eyes drifting and staring at fixed points in the air. He smiles at hidden jokes only him and his delusions are in on, and sometimes, she hears him muttering to himself in the cupboard.

She keeps telling herself that he’s just mad, that there’s nothing more to it and giving the behavior any attention would only encourage it. This will pass, it’s only a phase, like imaginary friends that are standing in for the parents he’ll never properly get to know. She’s told him nothing about them — not that he’s ever asked. He keeps to himself, just as they prefer.

Her breaking point comes when Vernon tries to send him to the cupboard without food for the first time; they’d gotten a call about him acting up to his teacher, and as soon as he gets home from school, he’s ordered gruffly to his room and told dinner’s only for good boys. 

He glares up at them, tears in his eyes. “Dad says I am good!”

They look at each other in dread. “You’ll go without breakfast either if you keep talking like that,” Petunia snaps.

“I hate you!” the boy screams, fully crying by that point but no less angry for it. “Mum hates you too, she says go to hell, Tuney —”

“Where did you learn that name? Who told you that?” Petunia clutches at her chest, a sense of horror taking over and making her feel rather weak. 

“Mum said it!” the boy stomps his foot. “She’s got red hair and green eyes and she’s prettier than you!”

It’s then that Petunia decides this situation has become intolerable. She knows without a doubt that there are no pictures of her sister in the home and there’s no way the boy can remember her from infancy, but his description rings true and Petunia keels over, hands to her mouth, trembling like when she’d reached for that letter and nearly been carrion for the crows. She should’ve trusted her gut from the start…

“Petunia?” Vernon puts a hand on her shoulder in concern. “You’ll pay for this one, boy, your aunt takes too good care of you for you to be this ruddy ungrateful… I’ll stamp it out, I will…”

She remembers that moment at Dudley’s changing table when the air had turned cold, and knows she won’t give Vernon the chance to correct the boy’s behavior. He’s too far gone, too deeply cursed, and she’s worried about how this will affect Dudley, to hear such madness about dead people. What use is a blood protection when this poison runs through her and Dudley’s veins? 

She scrawls out the shortest letter she’s ever written, heads outside, and waves it in the wind. Let the neighbors see this, she can rebuild her reputation once she knows her son is safe. “DUMBLEDORE!”

Fortunately she doesn’t have to make a fool of herself for too long — Arabella Figg is the first and only neighbor to spot her. Petunia’s yelled just once for the Headmaster when Mrs. Figg pops her head out of her window, tabby cat on the ledge underneath her, and calls out. “Did you say Dumbledore?”

Mrs. Figg sends the letter off, and it’s a shock to her that the woman knows anything about this freakishness — she always knew something wasn’t right about her, she’ll tell Vernon later… 

We give up the boy. Take him to another family and leave us alone.

It all goes rather quickly, after that. She’s faced with the scorn of the senile old man, but he’s all too quick to get the boy out of there as soon as he sees the cupboard. She sneers — the man hadn’t even checked if their home had space for the boy before dropping him off, and the second bedroom was always meant to be Dudley’s.

“I am so sorry again, Harry,” Dumbledore says, and the top of his beard is wet with tears. “I will try to make this up to you for the rest of my life... Will you let me take you somewhere safer and happier, far away from here?”

Harry looks up at a space of thin air on his left. He seems to like what he learns from the air because he turns back, smiles at the man, and holds his hand out.

They walk out of Number Four, Privet Drive, never to return.