Shadows of the Past
Severus stared at the child as he slowly limped back into a singularly unremarkable house in a Muggle suburb. This could not be happening ! Lily and Potter never would have allowed Petunia of all people to raise their son. In fact, he knew that Lily had specifically forbade her sister taking custody of her child even before he was born.
Patunia had always been an abrasive, foul tongued child in his opinion. She had never looked kindly on his and Lily‘s friendship, and had often gone out of her way to mock Severus for his family’s circumstances. Her abhorrent reaction to Lily‘s acceptance into Hogwarts had forever made him dislike the horse faced girl. Lily had tried to make amends for years, but after Petunia had outright refused to speak to her after their parents' death at the hands of Death Eaters, she had given up. Petunia had even tried to refuse to give Lily an invitation to their parents' funeral! Saying that Lily was the cause of their death and should never be allowed to mourn with upstanding people like her and her family.
Lily had spoken to him just before the family had gone into hiding. Explaining that she and Potter had rewrote their wills, so that there was a chain of caretakers in place for Harry to protect him from her last living relatives. If something were to happen to them, their will specifically denied Petunia and her husband any rights to their child and ensured he would always have a safe home. Lily had even gone so far as to ask him to be fourth in line to take Harry in, if something were to happen to cause the deaths of herself, and all the Marauders.
How in the name of Merlin had this even been allowed to happen!
He was so lost in his spiraling thoughts that he did not even notice it at first that the memory seen around him had changed.
He was suddenly in the car with Mrs. Figg driving down the road in the same neighborhood. Severus had just enough of his mental faculties left to note that this memory seems slightly older than the last.
Even without his experience, the child he saw running towards them down the sidewalk appeared a year or two younger than the one he had just seen in the previous memory. Mrs. Figg, recognizing Harry’s frantic gaze, began to slow the car down. His wide, terrified eyes shown with tears, making the green so like Lily’s even more striking. As Mrs. Figg was pulling to the side of the road, Harry ducked into the bushes on the other side of the street just in time to avoid being spotted by his cousin and a pack of other much larger boys, all holding thick sticks.
As Severus watched, the boys began running down the sidewalk, laughing loudly and swinging the large sticks above their heads. Mrs. Figg gasped as she watched the boys beat the bushes on either side of the sidewalk as they passed, viciously snapping the branches off as if searching for frightened animals on some sort of medieval hunt. Severus dug his nails into the palm of his hands in an attempt to ground himself and remind him that he was in memory and so unable to affect how this plays out. He watched as Mrs. Figg struggled with her stiff limbs to get out of the car and shuffle across the street, her cane clacking against the stone. The boys were already down several blocks, denting mailboxes and stomping on plants as they went.
Severus followed her over to the bushes, hoping that the child might have been able to squeeze between the loose boards of the white picket fence that bracketed the bushes from the yard behind. Mrs. Figg gently pushed the branches aside and he heard a frightened, panned whimper. He peered over the old woman's shoulder to see the boy huddled in a ball. There were tear tracks on his cheeks and his teeth were sunk down into the flesh of his bald up fist to help stifle any sound he might’ve made. Harry flinched and tried to scramble away before his emerald green eyes caught sight of the old woman. His whole body sagged in relief at the site. Mrs. Figg was just leaning down to help the boy up when the scene suddenly swirled before his eyes again.
Now he was back in Mrs. Figg’s sitting room. Harry was sitting on the pink floral couch, holding a bag of ice to his bleeding temple, while the old woman seemed to be arguing with the four-year-old child. Severus stepped closer so that he could hear. Harry seemed to be arguing with Figg about the bandages she was trying to wrap around the deep bite marks on the child’s hand.
“Hold still, Mr. Potter!” said Figg in an exasperated, grandmotherly voice. “I need to wrap your hand to stop the bleeding.”
“No! You can’t!” cried Harry, in a shrill voice.
“Why ever not?” she huffed, hands on her hips.
“B-because then she’ll know that I told someone…” he whispered.
“By the look of it, somebody needs to be told!”
Harry shrank down into himself, drawing his knees up and wrapping his arms around them as if he could hug himself. He buried his face in his knees, and his voice became so quiet that Severus almost missed his final comments. “Last time I told somebody about the Harry Hunting, I didn’t get to eat for a week…”
The room spun away again to reveal a snow-covered windowsill. Outside the world had gone dark and hushed, like it only can when the snow becomes deep enough to muffle all outside noise. Figg was curled up in a rocking chair by the window, book in hand, but left forgotten. She was staring intently out the window at something.
Dreading what he would find, Severus stepped closer. He peered through the frosted-over pane of glass into a winter wonderland outside with snow drifts that reached halfway up past people's doors. The cold shards of ice twinkled in the dim street lamp. Severus‘s heart sank as he could make out a small dark shape in the snow drifts behind Dursley’s house.
Alarmed by the site, Severus hurried out the door (passing straight through the barrier in his haste) to cross the street. The memory of Mrs. Figg was trailing behind him, her clicking cane giving her trouble on the icy roads.
Ignoring her, Severus reached the shadow and stared down in horror at the two-year-old boy huddled in a snow drift. Harry was shivering uncontrollably as he slept in a small cave he had dug into the side of the ice that had piled up near the Dursley’s back door. Severus felt his heart crack and turned away, staring balefully through the window that shined with warm light onto the child’s cold reality. Inside he could see Petunia with her husband and son, drinking hot cocoa by the fire. They were curled up together on the couch under a pile of blankets watching the telly. The colorful screen depicted some odd Muggle cartoon with a sad, looking reindeer and a singing snowman.
It wasn’t until his eyes landed on the colorfully wrapped packages under a tree that his fury burned away the perceived cold around him. If he did nothing else today, the Dursleys would burn for what they had done.