Privet Drive
Privet Drive was as boring as always.
The confining home of his childhood that used to suffocate him was surprisingly a breath of relief that summer. Harry’s world had been completely destroyed, and even on his best days, grief swallowed him whole. His nights were filled with the memories of every awful moment. Cedric. Sirius. Dumbledore. He was getting sick of being the Boy-Who-Lived. Why did he get to live while everyone else died for him?
There was no Dumbledore to tell the Dursleys to behave over the summer. There was no more Sirius to wield as an empty threat for safety.
There wasn’t even a Mr. Weasley to come to politely goad his relatives into showing even an ounce of care for their nephew this summer.
There would be nobody coming to save him this summer. It would be his last summer in the lonely, suffocation, suburban home on Privet Drive, and it would be as awful as all the last. He was sure of it.
To Harry’s surprise, it had been Professor McGonagall who showed up the day after term ended.
Harry sat on his bed in the empty, lifeless second bedroom of Number 7 Privet Drive. It was startling how his world could change so fundamentally, but somehow he came back here, and it looked exactly as it always had.
He could feel himself regressing every second he spent here. At Hogwarts, Harry was the brave Griffindor. He was the Chosen One, the Boy-Who-Lived. Even in recent years, as public perception of him shifted, Hogwarts never made him feel small. Lonely, sure. Never small, though.
It was something about this house.
Something about being in this stupid house made him feel small. At Privet Drive, Harry was the little boy who didn’t understand why nobody loved him.
He wasn’t afraid of his uncle anymore, and he had long given up on earning the favor of his aunt. As a child, he had tried so hard to be good, as if he could simply act right, and then they would love him. He knew by now that it was a fruitless endeavor.
Harry lied awake in his bed, staring at the wall as the dark shadows turned to pale moonlight and then into soft streams of sunlight. He didn’t move an inch when an assertive knock rang through the house.
The Dursleys could have a hundred visitors over; he didn’t care. Why should he move when Dumbledore was dead? What right did he have to breathe a single breath after standing there and watching as Severus Snape, a man Dumbledore trusted, murdered him?
Harry listened as the visitor was led into the house. He faintly heard talking. He knew they must be standing in the front entryway by the foot of the stairs by the volume of their chatter. It caught him off guard, Harry couldn’t remember any of his aunt’s friends who sounded like that. Aunt Petunia’s friends had high-pitched, nasally voices, and they loved to laugh loudly while drinking tea in the sitting room. He strained his mind to think of who would stay in the entryway nearly this long, but he had no idea who this could be.
Footsteps on the stairs caught his attention. The steps were lighter but still harsh. It wasn’t a stomp like Uncle Vernon or a run like Dudley. He grew up hearing these steps above his head, and they didn’t echo nearly as much now that he wasn’t directly beneath them. Nonetheless, he recognized them.
His aunt’s steps.
The locks on his door twisted and clanked, one by one, against the doorframe as they were unlocked. The door swung open without as much as a knock.
An offended look donned on Aunt Petunia’s face when she spotted him still lying in bed at this time of day, “Get up, boy!” She hissed, “One of your teachers is here.”
One of his teachers? Harry tried to place the voice from downstairs with any of his professors, but there was no reason for them ever to be here. To be associated with him at a time like this was to put a target on their back. He wasn’t worth the risk of death, especially for his teachers.
Despite that, at the bottom of the stairs was Professor McGonagall.
“Professor?” Harry asked, unsure as he stood, stuck on the last few steps from the sight of her. He was acutely aware of his aunt standing behind him.
“Hello, Mister Potter. It’s good to see you.”
“Professor, why…I mean, not that I’m not happy to see you, but…” Harry trailed off.
“We have some things we all need to discuss,” she said simply before gesturing to the sitting room behind her, where Dudley and Uncle Vernon already sat.
And discuss they had.
McGonagall talked for a long time. She explained everything to his relatives. There were some things they already knew, but there were some things that Dumbledore had not explained nearly as well as he had led Professor McGonagall to believe. When Uncle Vernon loudly complained about ‘that crackpot wizard’ at the mention of Dumbledore, his professor looked like she was restraining herself until Uncle Vernon’s rant clued her into how little Dumbledore had felt was necessary to share with them. Then, she only looked furious.
She told them everything in detail. She told them about Voldemort, the death eaters, the killings, his parent’s death, Cedric’s death, Sirius’s death, the fight at the ministry and why they were there, Umbridge, the ministry’s opinions–of Harry and the war, Dumbledore’s death. She told them all of it.
His family refused to look at him after that.
His childhood home slowly filled with boxes that month. Harry felt more alone than ever. He couldn’t write to any of his friends, and they couldn’t write to him. Dumbledore couldn’t protect him from the ministry anymore, and they, along with the death eaters, would surely take any opportunity to read Harry’s correspondences.
Like everything else in his life, it wasn’t worth the risk.
Harry had not left the house once this summer. He barely left his room. The dusty, empty walls were all that filled his vision. He would sleep. Then he would wake and stare at the walls. Then he would sleep. He would sleep, he would wake, he would stare, and he would sleep.
His days on Privet Drive were filled with empty walls and his thoughts. He knew what was coming and that he should start planning. His defense books, as well as the books he had gotten from Dumbledore’s office on horocruxes, sat on his desk, taunting him.
He didn’t stare at that wall often.
He was confining himself to his room of his own accord. If you had told him a year ago that he would willingly spend every second of the summer in his room at Privet Drive, he wouldn’t have believed you, but here he was. The Durselys didn’t care if he stayed or went. If he left, he would surely die. They never cared about that before, and they certainly don’t care about that now. If he stayed: after this summer, he would be gone forever.
Either way, they got to move on with their lives. After fifteen years of misery, they would live a life free of the shackles of Harry Potter.
Harry almost envied them.
At the end of the month, they would leave. The boxes piled high in the living room would fill a moving van, and they would set off for their new lives. They’d get to hide in a new boring house in an equally boring neighborhood and live out their equally boring lives.
Harry wished he could flee from himself like that.
Harry would also leave at the end of the month. The Order would arrive to rush him into hiding as soon as his mother’s protection ended for good. He still had to figure out how to ditch them, along with Ron and Hermione.
McGonagall laughed humorlessly at Harry when he suggested he could make his own way to a safehouse if they told him where it was and that it wasn’t worth the risk to come get him. She looked at him, making him feel like he was being scolded for getting into trouble in her office back at Hogwarts again. She told him that he should let people decide for themselves what was worth the risk of their life.
It didn’t abate the guilt he felt.
He was full of it. Almost everyone he cared about was currently dead or was going to die in the coming days of the war. The war had begun. Although It never truly ended, it only entered a period of brief reprieve. It was coming, though. Harry could feel it.
The fire of anger burned beneath his skin, and anxiety rotted him from the inside out.
He had no plans. He wasn’t even sure where to start with the horocruxes. Harry wished he had more time with Dumbledore to talk about them. He knew so little about them and how to destroy them. Voldemort couldn’t have left a list lying around labeled ‘My Horocruxes and Where to Find Them,’ could he?
Alright, he didn’t have no plans. He knew he needed to find a way to convince Hermione and Ron to stay behind. They wanted to come with him, but he needed them to understand they couldn’t. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust them or thought he could keep them safe; it was quite the opposite. Harry knew he couldn’t keep them safe. The war was in full swing now, and people were going to die.
Harry wasn’t stupid. He knew that most of the people he cared about would be dead by the end of this war. Ron and Hermione needed to understand that he couldn’t lose them too. At this point, that would be entirely too unbearable. If his closest friends died because of him, he would go straight to Voldemort himself.
Harry walked over to his desk. The picture of his parents dancing around in circles smiled up at him. He picked it up carefully before carrying it over to place it in the top of his trunk. He stood with his hands on the edge of the lid and stared at the picture as his parents spun and spun. Hedwig hooted loudly behind him and flapped her wings into her cage.
“Sorry, girl,” he said over his shoulder, looking at her before turning back to his trunk and snapping it shut. The latches clicked shut.
“Two more weeks,” Harry said quietly, running his fingers delicately down Hedwig’s back, “and then we’ll be off. We’ll never have to come back here.”
Hedwig hooted softly and leaned into his hand.
Harry smiled and slid the latch on her cage shut again, “I’ll let you go out and hunt tonight, okay?”
Hedwig hooted in response.
He took one last look around the tiny, empty room he desperately craved to have as a little boy.
Little Harry never could’ve guessed how much better life was going to get when he moved up here. This little room paled compared to his four-poster bed in the dorm at Hogwarts. The sounds of his housemates’ snores and slurred, sleepy words felt like home.
Hogwarts wasn’t home anymore, though. It couldn’t be. Hogwarts had become another thing Voldemort had stolen from him. It was exhausting to keep losing year after year. The ache in his chest intensified with that thought.
As much as some of his professors might disagree, Harry wasn’t stupid. He knew he was most likely going to die. He couldn’t think of a single way in which he could win. Dumbledore had been so sure of Harry’s ability to stop Voldemort. It didn’t matter much what Dumbledore thought anymore, though, did it?
Harry had long accepted at this point that his life was a tragedy.
The trajectory of Harry’s life was decided and put into plan before he was even born. Voldemort had been winning since the very beginning. Harry wasn’t even really the one who stopped him. It was his mother’s love that stopped Voldemort from killing Harry as a baby.
Voldemort hadn’t succeeded in killing Harry as a baby, but he would succeed now. Harry had gotten seventeen years of life. Some people might say he should be grateful for the years he’s gotten since Voldemort’s initial failure. Maybe it made him a bad person, but he wasn’t. What did he have to be grateful for? All he had received was seventeen years of pain, a delay to the inevitable.
At least as a baby, he had only known his parent’s love. It would’ve been a different kind of tragedy–a life cut short. But, ultimately, the end result would be the same. What impact did Harry actually have in his short life? Nothing, as far as he knew.
Harry sighed before flipping off the light switch and leaving the room.
Seeing the living room as it looked now was odd. The ugly, flower-patterned furniture was gone, the space filled with boxes instead. Oh, how he would’ve killed to have such unfettered access to the entirety of the cream-colored carpet when he had to vacuum weekly.
Harry could hear Aunt Petunia humming to herself, water running in the kitchen, and his cousin screaming ‘Die!’ from the back patio. He walked into the kitchen to where his aunt was, hoping to once again be able to snag something from the pantry without complaint. Her back faced him as she ran a sud-soaked, floral ceramic plate back and forth under the water.
It was only another thing to signify how much things had changed: Harry didn’t have a laundry list of chores to break his body completing this summer.
He wandered in and out of the kitchen whenever he wanted, and he ate anything he wanted whenever he wanted–usually hunched over the cabinets in the low lighting of the fridge around four o’clock in the morning. Harry missed the monotony of chores to fill the empty, lonely, longing days of summer in Surrey.
“What do you want, boy” Aunt Petunia snapped, wiping her hands on a dish towel before placing it along the edge of the sink, smoothing out the wrinkles with her delicate fingers.
“Nothing,” Harry said, shaking his head so hard his fringe flopped against his forehead.
“No, of course not. What else could you possibly want?” her eyebrows scrunched together as she sneered, “You’ve already taken up everything we could’ve ever given you. We allow you into our home, we care for you, feed you, clothe you, and you repay us by making us leave our home,” she said, crossing her arms and jutting her chin.
“You have to leave. If the death eaters think you know where I am, they’ll torture you,” Harry scoffed, crossing his own arms.
“I know what they’re capable of!” she snapped, “Lily may have been your mother, but she was my sister. You aren’t the only one to lose people you care for.”
“You’re never going to change, are you?” Harry asked, dropping his arms and leaning back until the table's wood dug into his thighs.
“How dare you,” she spat with vitriol.
“You haven’t looked at me in weeks, and this might be the last conversation we everhave, yet you still blame me,” Harry said.
Petunia’s lips pursed, and her chin wobbled slightly, “I never wanted Dudley to grow up like me,” she breathed in sharply, “I wanted him to have everything. I wanted him to know what it was like to be loved, unconditionally, and always.”
“Why did you have to hate me to do that?” Harry asked.
Petunia looked away from him. She glanced out the window to where Dudley played his video game. She smiled softly as he let out an angry yell at losing once again.
“I didn’t,” she said simply before turning her back to him and picking up the wet rag to drag it up and down the counter.
Dudley’s yelling filled the house as Harry stood frozen in the center of the kitchen, no longer hungry.
Harry sat up sharply in bed, reaching for his glasses and wand on his nightstand as his cousin’s yell filled the house on Privet Drive for the second time that evening. The yell was pleading and filled with voice cracks. He never knew his cousin’s voice could reach an octave that high. Harry slipped his glasses onto his face and pushed his blankets off his lap.
The door to his room flew open. Harry’s back hit the wall, his blankets bunched up at the foot of his bed as he kicked out to put some distance between himself and the masked figure in his doorway. He would recognize the silver, swirled mask anywhere.
A death eater.
Harry threw his wand straight out before him, and the death eater mirrored his stance.
“Expelliarmus!” Harry yelled.
At the same time, the death eater called “Stupefy!”
Harry rolled off his bed and onto the floor as the death eater’s spell left a blast mark on the wall where he had been sitting.
Harry pushed himself to a stand and threw out, “Protego!”
The death eater threw a leg-lock curse at Harry, which his shield charm protected him from. Harry ran over to his desk against the wall and flipped it over to crouch behind. Harry darted above the desk and threw a jelly-legs jinx at the death eater.
The man fell to the ground, his legs no longer able to hold his body up.
Harry jogged over to where the man lay and kicked his wand away from him. His chest heaved as he breathed heavily, his wand pointed at the man as he waited to see if he would attack him again. After a moment, when he was confident that the man would not attack him in the back with wandless magic, Harry reached down for his wand. He picked up the wand and threw it out his bedroom window to the bushes below.
He went back across the room and stunned the death eater wriggling on the floor before stepping across him and into the hallway. Dudley had been screaming, which meant there had to be at least one other death eater there. Although, his aunt and uncle would never sit aside and listen to his cousin scream like that.
They were here much too soon. Harry wasn’t prepared for this, McGonagall had told him the Order wouldn’t arrive for another two weeks, and Harry had no way to contact anyone. The window in his room was still open from when he had let Hedwig out to hunt earlier that evening. He was alone.
He couldn’t let his relatives downstairs die. He couldn’t let anyone else die for him; It wasn’t right.
Harry held his wand out in front of him as he entered the hallway. His breathing echoed loudly in his ears, and he had to readjust his grip on his wand several times. He slowly walked, careful not to step on the parts of the floor he knew to be particularly creaky.
He slowly climbed down the stairs, completely stepping over the stair he knew to groan at the slightest pressure. He crouched low and glanced through the wooden bars of the stair railing to the sitting room below. He couldn’t see any of his family members from his position on the stairs.
He heard his aunt crying and begging for them not to hurt her Dudders. He had never heard his aunt’s voice quiver before. The tremble in her normally assertive voice made his stomach twist.
Harry pressed himself against his cupboard as he crawled slowly along the ground, hoping to make it past the sitting room opening over to the kitchen without being seen. If he could get to the kitchen, he would have more places to hide, and he would have a better vantage point to see into the sitting room.
Unfortunately, the kitchen door was shut. That was going to slow things down. The kitchen door loved to let out an eerie groan, even at the slowest of movements. Harry learned about the door’s habit the hard way at the age of six when he had gotten in trouble for ‘attacking’ Dudley’s friends, and Aunt Petunia had left him without food in his cupboard for longer than usual.
Harry debated trying to cast a silencing spell, but he didn’t know if his whispering would be heard.
He reached out with his left hand, his wand gripped in his right hand pressed against the carpet, and pushed the door open slowly. He stretched his fingertips to keep the slightest pressure on the door as it moved in an effort to quell the booming groan he knew to be building deep within. He crawled forward, pushing the door as he slid through the doorway. His wand clanged lightly against the tile, and his muscles coiled tightly.
He made his way around the corner, and the door swung slowly toward the kitchen wall. He slowly dragged his knee from carpet to tile, attempting to keep his knobbly knees from clacking on the tile too loudly.
He was in the clear. Harry let out a deep sigh, closing his eyes and sliding the door shut behind him, his shoulders dropping as he felt like he could breathe again.
He waited for the soft, tell-tale click of the door meeting its frame. Instead of the quiet, glorious click, he was greeted with a boisterous, echoing creak.
Harry froze. The voices in the sitting room quieted, and he held his breath as if it would turn back the clock and make it so the door never uttered a sound. His left hand remained pressed flat against the closed door behind him.
He was suddenly afraid to move. Every sound felt cacophonous all of a sudden. His heart was beating so hard against his ribs that surely the death eaters in the sitting room could hear it thump. His wand lightly clanged against the tile as his wand hand shook from where it held his hunched body on the kitchen floor. Every traitorous breath in through his nose was as loud as the wind whistling against the windows.
It wasn’t a surprise when a masked figure rounded the corner. It didn’t make it any more enjoyable, though.
Harry’s muscles acted before he could even form a thought. He stuttered out every protective charm he could think of as the death eater threw violent spells at him.
He yelled, “Opungo!” and used the moment of distraction from Aunt Petunia’s favorite cookbook to attack the masked man to crawl quickly under the table. He flattened himself against the ground and shot a leg-locking jinx at the man from his vantage point below the chairs. He gripped the leg of the chair to stabilize himself.
His hands were shaking so hard now he could barely keep a grip on his wand.
Green light flashed as the chair in Harry’s hand suddenly caught fire. He flailed and crawled out from under the table to the other side. He stood up and tossed out a shoddy shield charm as the man yelled a disarming spell.
His wand flew from his hand.
No, this wasn’t how he was going to die. Harry was aware that this thought contradicted his earlier lamenting, but he couldn’t find it in himself to care. He was well aware he was going to die, but that didn’t mean he was ready to die now.
The sentiment of it being much too soon echoed through his thoughts once more. He was well aware of all of these things coming to be. The death eaters would attack. Harry would fight Voldemort. Harry would die.
He didn’t think that would all happen tonight. He thought he would make it to seventeen first. Dumbledore hadn’t even been dead a full month yet. Was Harry really so pathetic he couldn’t even last one full month without Dumbledore’s protection?
Harry’s mind reeled as he looked for a way out of the kitchen. One thing at a time, he thought. Get out of the kitchen. Get his relatives in the sitting room outside. Get them all to safety. Kitchen, sitting room, safety. It was simple.
The death eater chuckled and began to yell out another spell as Harry reached out to grab one of the dishes his aunt left out to dry from her earlier chore.
He chucked a floral-rimmed plate at the man, and the ceramic smashed as it collided with the man’s head. The death eater looked down at the plate and then up at Harry.
Harry wasn’t stopping there, though.
He dove closer to the sink as his right hand wrapped securely around the handle of the frying pan. He charged towards the death eater and swung it with all his might. The pan clanged with the man’s head hard before he could finish speaking, and he fell to the ground in a crumpled heap.
Harry kicked the man’s wand away from him. He glanced around frantically for where his wand landed. He dove under the flaming table and retrieved his wand, coughing heavily as smoke entered his lungs before straightening up.
Wand securely in his right hand and frying pan in his left, he took a deep breath before throwing himself around the back corner to the open view of the sitting room. He let out a guttural yell as he charged into the room, yelling defensive spells and flinging the frying pan at anyone he could hit.
He had been correct earlier–there were far more death eaters than he originally thought.
Harry didn’t let it deter him, though. The frying pan technique must not have been used often in battle because, while Harry couldn’t see their faces, the delayed manner in which they reacted made him think they hadn’t seen the method prior to this moment.
The weapon that had been brandished against him so often in his childhood collided with death eaters left in right. Every green light was deflected with a red spell of his own and a prompt follow-up of a frying pan smack to the nearest limb.
He was thriving on the high of victory now.
The 'crucio' that struck him in the back was as shocking as the first time Aunt Petunia’s frying pan collided with his head at four years old.
He fell over, face first, into the carpet. His eyes scrunched tight with pain. When he opened his eyes again, he was met with a wide-eyed, pale face and mouth agape.
Uncle Vernon lied dead on the carpet ten inches from his face.
Harry was roughly pulled into a kneeling position by his hair, and his arms were twisted tightly at an odd angle behind his back.
Numerous death eaters were scattered all over the room, in varying states of consciousness, courtesy of Harry’s frying pan escapade. He had taken out a fair number of them, which wasn’t too shabby for such an unfair fight. It wasn’t enough, though, not even close.
Against the far wall, under the wide window where the couch used to be, Aunt Petunia and Dudley knelt, sobbing heavily, with wands jammed under their chins.
Harry had heard Dudley’s voice many times throughout their childhood. Harry thought he might be somewhat of an expert, at this point, in Dudley’s various tones and inflections of voice. He thought he had heard every noise his cousin’s throat was capable of making. That being said, Harry had never–in all his sixteen years of life–heard a sound come from Dudley like the sound that tore through him when his mother collapsed against the floor, her scream still bouncing off the sitting room walls.
The death eaters laughed at Dudley’s wails.
He choked on his sobs as one of them harshly kicked at Aunt Petunia’s body until she was over to the side of the room where Uncle Vernon had already been rolled hours earlier.
The laughter intensified as Dudley was drug to the middle of the room.
It struck Harry the sincere emotion that was emanating from Dudley. He didn’t know his cousin was capable of that. The older boy’s body was shaking as he made the most awful, guttural, choking sobs.
“Ha-…Harry,” Dudley choked through his tears.
The sweat made Harry’s thick locks stick to the back of his neck. He was suddenly very aware of how the death eater’s hand twisted in his hair. The twinge in his shoulder began to throb more than it had the first hour. Harry didn’t know how to respond. His tongue was very heavy in his mouth. His gums and teeth ached. He could still taste the metallic blood clinging to the walls of his mouth from when he bit down on his tongue being 'crucio’ed.
“Harry,” Dudley said again, louder, “Harry.”
The death eater nearest to Dudley laughed harder, catching onto his cousin’s pleas. He grabbed Dudley’s hair at the scruff, pulled his head next to his masked face, and began to mock him.
Dudley cringed away, prompting the man to abandon his hair in order to grab his chin roughly and turn it towards him. Dudley’s lip quivered as the man mocked him right in his ear. His shoulders were tense and raised up by his ears. His face was caked with blood and tears.
When the man let go of him in favor of turning to some of the other death eaters to laugh and mock the boy once more, Dudley tried again. “Harry. I need to tell you something,” the boy hissed out.
Harry blinked despondently.
That must have been enough for Dudley because he began to whisper again, “I’m so sorry. I’m sorry. I’ve been a jerk,” He shook his head and turned his head to attempt to wipe his tears on his shoulder, “I should’ve treated you better. I’ve wanted to tell you that since the...demturn...things attacked us two years ago, and I know it’s too late, but I kept telling myself I had time to figure out how to say it properly. But now we don’t. I don’t know what else to say,” he heaved another sob, “Only, I am sorry.”
Harry blinked slowly; he didn’t expect that.
“Aww,” the death eater behind him crooned before barking a laugh, “How sweet.”
“Any other last words for your dear cousin,” the other death eater asked, pressing his face beside his cousin’s once again and jabbing a wand straight into his chin.
Dudley closed his eyes so tightly that his whole face scrunched up.
“Avada-” the death eater began.
The front door hit the wall with a bang as two familiar people walked in. Harry opened and closed his eyes a few times. The shock must’ve made him go mad because he could almost swear that his parents were standing in the empty sitting room of the Dursley’s home.
Maybe he was dead already or dying. Maybe this was what happened when you were about to die. He wasn’t sure–he had never died before.
Flashes of light flew back and forth as they dueled with the death eaters. The hands digging into his hair and back disappeared as the Weasley twins came around from behind him into the middle of the sitting room and began dueling with the death eater beside Dudley.
Harry could only blink slowly in disbelief at the scene unfolding in front of him.
Before he could finish processing what was happening, hands were pressed to his cheeks, and he was staring into his own eyes.
“Harry, my baby boy,” his mom whispered as she held his face delicately as if she were holding something made of glass.
His dad came up behind her and placed one hand on both her shoulder and Harry’s as he, too, stared into Harry’s face. His dad’s thumb began to massage his shoulder as the three of them sat and stared at one another.
The moment was broken as Dudley cried out. Harry fought his instinct to never look away from the bright green eyes that were enrapturing him and turned his gaze to his cousin. Dudley had found his feet at some point in the scatter, standing with his back pressed against the far corner. He had his arm held straight in front of him and was begging the twins to stay back through sobs.
Harry couldn’t figure out why they had their wands out and pointed at his cousin. He didn’t particularly like Dudley, but for Merlin’s sake, his parents were murdered an hour ago. That could surely explain away any rude action on his cousin’s part, couldn’t it?
Harry quickly pulled himself to a stand, shocking his mother. She fell back into his dad as she lost her balance from where she had been leaning forward to hold Harry. He quickly moved to stand in front of Dudley.
Harry had one arm behind him to hold onto his cousin and one arm held straight in front of him, “Stay back!”
“Woah, mate, it’s okay,” George said, readjusting his grip on his wand.
Fred looked at him wide-eyed, “Harry, it’s alright.”
“No,” Harry choked out, feeling a tear slide down his cheek, “Stay back!”
“Alright,” Fred said, slowly slipping his wand into his coat pocket and holding the other hand up in a placating gesture
“Let’s calm down,” George said.
“I am calm. You need to back down,” Harry snapped.
Harry almost lost track of what he was doing when he glanced at his parents. They had stood up too, and his dad looked at him with a pained expression. He looked like he wanted to say something but couldn’t bring himself to speak and instead settled for opening and closing his mouth slightly.
“Okay, Harry, we’ll back up, okay?” Fred assured, tugging on George’s arm until there was more space between Harry and the rest of them.
Harry’s brain was short-circuiting. He couldn’t stop looking at George’s wand. Why did he have it out? Who was he going to hurt? The death eaters were gone, and the Dursleys were dead. He tightened his grip on his cousin and shifted his weight from foot to foot slightly.
Harry risked a small, peripheral glance back at his cousin before whispering, “Are you alright?”
Dudley nodded quickly and adjusted his hand to hold onto Harry’s hand, holding onto his arm equally as tightly as Harry was holding him.
Harry looked back at the other four occupants of the room. They were all huddled together and muttering. Harry’s mother looked angry as she whispered with the twins, but his father kept looking at him every few seconds.
“Who are you?” Harry found himself asking suddenly.
Fred and George exchanged sideways glances.
“Harry, mate,” George began.
“Not you,” Harry said, jutting his chin at his parents–or their lookalikes or whatever they were, “them.”
“These are your parents,” Fred said, walking back towards Harry.
Harry stepped back into Dudley, “My parents are dead.”
His father’s doppelganger looked even more upset at this.
George stepped forward to stand beside his brother, “Well, they aren’t anymore.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” Harry said, shaking his head fast.
It didn’t. There was no way to bring someone back from the dead; that was what Dumbledore had told him--multiple times. His first year, in the mirror of Erised, Dumbledore had uttered those hope-crushing words. Later, in his fifth year, he had dared to speak them again in the ruins of his office in the aftermath of Harry’s grief.
Harry had begged and begged Dumbledore, Professor Lupin, Kingsley, Mad-Eye, anyone who would listen to help him get his godfather back. None of them had any way to help him. Most of them looked at Harry with pity in their eyes and offered him words of condolences, and went on their merry way.
Professor Lupin had tried as much as the man was capable of. He cried with Harry and held him tightly against his chest. He rubbed his hand soothingly along his back as Harry cried into him. Every time Harry woke up in the hospital wing after the battle at the Ministry screaming from nightmares, Professor Lupin had been there. He offered Harry a small chocolate and would sit and hold him while he cried until he fell back asleep. Harry could’ve sworn he heard him reading aloud in the mornings, but he couldn’t be certain.
Harry had begged the man to take him home with him that summer, as Sirius had promised at Christmas someone would soon. He needed it to be then. He told the professor that he wouldn’t be able to handle it if he had to go home and be alone and hated after what happened. Before, he had made it through on the knowledge that Sirius was out there and Sirius wanted him. Sirius was fighting for him. But Sirius was dead.
Those two weeks in the Hospital Wing with Professor Lupin gave Harry a taste of what it felt like to be cared for. Harry had only ever felt that way on late nights chatting with Sirius or in hugs from Mrs. Weasley. Harry knew that if he only had more time with Lupin. that maybe he would truly be able to grieve Sirius. If he had to go to Privet Drive, he would never recover.
Professor Lupin had simply slid him another chocolate and ran his hand through Harry’s hair kindly before promising he would do his best to get Harry with him for even part of the summer.
Harry assumed he had failed, for he remained in the unloveable confines of Privet Drive for the entirety of the summer until Dumbledore retrieved him to recruit Slughorn.
Harry had been disappointed but not surprised.
Fred and George were looking at him with that same sad face everyone looked at Harry with since Sirius fell through the veil.
“I promise, it’s them,” George said.
“No,” Harry shook his head as another tear slid down his face, “you can’t bring people back from the dead.”
“Nobody brought us back,” his dad finally spoke up.
“Then…how?” Harry asked, wiping at his face.
His mother stepped forward around the twins, “It’s a very long story, and I promise to tell you the whole thing. I promise. But first, we need to get somewhere safe. Is there somebody you trust?”
Harry didn’t even hesitate, “Professor Lupin.”
His mother looked taken aback at that, but she quickly switched back to a soft smile, “Alright, do you know how to send messages with a patronus?”
Harry shook his head.
“That’s alright,” she smiled reassuringly at him. She turned back to the twins and asked them if they knew how to cast it. George rubbed the back of his neck and told her that Harry had been the one to teach them the Patronus charm, so they knew what he knew.
She turned back to Harry, eyebrows pulled together and nose scrunched.
“Professor Lupin taught me when I was thirteen, but he didn’t teach me that. I didn’t even know you could send messages with a patronus,” Harry clarified.
She managed to soften her expression once more before nodding, “Alright, I didn’t want one of us to cast it because I didn’t know if Remus would recognize our forms and think it was a trap, but that’s alright. We’ll make do,” she said, slapping her hands against her thighs and looking back to his father.
“Oh,” Harry said, pulling their attention back to him, “Just use yours,” he gestured to his dad, “You can pretend to be me. We have the same one.”
His dad turned to him, eyes wide and jaw dropped, “What?” he asked, so quietly Harry almost didn’t hear it.
He nodded at him, “Yup, mine’s a stag, too.”
His dad shook his head before nodding and pointing to the other room and stuttering out something about going to send the message as Harry.
Harry’s mother turned her attention to the boy behind Harry finally. She smiled a small, close-mouthed, kind smile at Dudley, “Hello, there.”
Harry felt Dudley grab his arm tighter, “Hello,” he managed to mumble out.
“Why don’t we go get your stuff together, hmm?” she asked, holding her hand out for him.
Dudley balked, looking at Harry panicked. Harry wanted to laugh. How had this become his life? Dudley looking at him panicked was something Harry never thought he would see. To be honest, he didn’t know what to do with this reversed role. Dudley was usually cruel to him when Harry looked panicked, but Harry didn’t want to be cruel to Dudley. Now that he knew his cousin wasn’t in immediate danger of being murdered by death eaters or hexed by the Weasley twins, Harry’s adrenaline was gone, and he wanted to pass out.
He shrugged at Dudley, and the older boy swallowed hard before nodding at her. He walked forward and took her hand, and she said kind things to him as she led him to the stairs.
Fred and George approached Harry and tried to goad him into talking, but he was done. He stood there in silence as they continued to fail to elicit a word from him.
Harry’s dad came back in and told them he had sent the message. He noticed the twins exchange a look with his dad as Harry continued not to speak. His knees began to feel incredibly weak.
He needed to get out of this room. He couldn’t go into the kitchen, The table had been on fire. Had anyone put that out? Someone must have at some point, right? The house hadn’t burnt down yet, and he didn’t smell smoke, so it couldn’t still be burning. Also, his dad hadn’t mentioned a flaming table, and he was just in there.
He couldn’t go upstairs either. The death eater was probably still on his bedroom floor. Or maybe he wasn’t. Had Harry stunned him? He couldn’t remember anymore. All of his memories felt hazy and far out of his reach. He walked around them and into the hallway.
He needed to leave, but he didn’t know where to go. The whole house flooded his mind with the death eaters that were there mere hours ago. He had fled from them in every crevice of this house. Nowhere here was safe; his mother was right.
He spun uselessly in the hall. He pressed his back to his cupboard and sank to the floor. He pulled his knees up and laid his head atop them. His shoulder muscles twinged at the movements, but he didn’t care. He heard everyone talking above him. That was fine. They could talk all they wanted.
Eventually, his mother returned downstairs with Dudley and his stuff. Harry hoped she wouldn’t ask him to go upstairs next.
Thankfully, he noticed she was pulling his pre-packed trunk from the foot of his bed behind her, and she had Hedwig’s cage tucked under her arm.
She reached down and rested her hand on top of Harry’s head, running her fingers through his hair carefully, “Are you ready to go, sweetie?”
Harry looked up at her through his fringe and nodded.
It was odd. Harry had always dreamed of his parents showing up and taking him away from the Dursleys, but he couldn’t stop the feeling gnawing at his heart that he had wished it had been Sirius to show up instead.