An Unexpected Companion
Living with the Dursleys fucking sucked.
Yes, he knew what an astounding revelation that was, but that one sentence could never be understated. Every year, he approached the exact date where he knew someone was going to force him back, and he thought that it couldn’t possibly get any worse than the year before. Unfortunately, like an ever-ascending roller-coaster with no drop-off, it somehow managed to exceed itself every time.
Coming back to the Dursleys inspired a unique, distinct feeling within him that was so very easy to pinpoint. It was as if a cold, dark hole opened in his stomach. Everything he felt, his love for life, his spark, faded into the hole until all that was left was the mind-numbing buzz of apathy. This was the first time he'd actually gone to the Dursleys feeling something.
And it stung.
So many things happened over the course of his last year. He was put into a tournament for adults, he’d competed with the best that three countries could offer, he’d won, escaped Voldemort herself, and stood up against the ministry with Dumbledore.
After all of that, he thought maybe, just maybe, he'd earned the right to make his own decisions. He'd even facetiously remarked that, as he competed in a tournament only meant for adults, that Dumbledore no longer had the ability to tell him where to go. He was informed, in good humor, that while the law only allowed adults to participate in the tournament, it was purely meant to protect children from being entered and said nothing definitive about their status as an adult or their corresponding legal rights. He was a child who’d competed in a game for adults, and the fact that he wasn't legally permitted to be there did nothing to change that fact.
Harry was much less amused than his headmaster.
Now, he got the prophet every day and watched them drag his name through the mud with Dumbledore, and he wasn't even around to say anything about it. He was so glad that he was apparently too young to decide where he lived, but he was just old enough to suffer with his headmaster while he stayed exactly wherever the old man put him.
He didn't even have his fucking wand. Peter Pettigrew took it with him when he’d left the cemetery. Every single time he thought about the bastard, he regretted making his Godfather spare him more and more. Without his wand, he was, to put it lightly, fucked.
Any other kid could've walked into Olivander's and walked out with a new wand in a second. When Harry tried to do the same, he was met with violent rejection by every single worthless stick he’d picked up. Once he’d started attending school, he was certain that his first experience was a him problem. He'd seen plenty of people use other wands during his time at Hogwarts. It was awkward and produced poor results, but it worked.
Apparently, it was a problem with him, but it had more to do with every wand besides his own hating him and less to do with any specific deficiency he used to have. It was as if every wand he picked up besides the one that'd chosen him the first time around fought him with every ounce of power they could conjure. A few of them even physically harmed him when he tried to channel magic through them. That was why he'd left the wizarding world wandless.
That sucked too.
It wasn't just the loss of his partner; it was the loss of his agency and surety. With his wand, both he and his relatives were aware that things could only go so far before, damn everything, magic was suddenly on the table. While they didn't know that, currently, he was incapable of using magic instead of unwilling,he most certainly did, and it made him vastly uncomfortable.
That was why he was outside weeding the shrubbery by the wooden shed when he would’ve politely told them to go fuck themselves normally. It was one thing to push them when he knew he had a safety net, but he was currently riding by the seat of his pants and praying nobody called his bluff. Well, at least he could honestly tell himself that he had nothing better to do. If he wasn’t doing lawn work, he would’ve most likely been seething at yet another reputation-slaughtering article written by whatever employee the ministry could wrap their grubby fingers around.
He was about halfway through with the weeds when his mind suddenly froze in place. It was a habit of his to let his magic run wild while he was at his own house. It was something he’d learned to do at a very young age, even before he knew that magic was more than an interesting aspect of some muggle fiction. When someone was around, he tended to know about it.
Standing up and turning to face the presence, he hurled the small garden trowel he'd been using to remove the more entrenched weeds with all his might. It was brushed aside with little more than a wayward flick of an unarmed hand. It was wandless magic, not that he'd expect anything else from the most powerful magical human currently alive.
“Really? Your first move was to toss a shovel?”
His mind was shooting through any option he could think of as he glared up at the woman sitting on the roof of his relative’s shed. Her legs were crossed, and she looked much more put together than she did when they’d met in the graveyard. Her left arm rested on her crossed legs, and the other was placed off to the side to prop herself against the roof after she finished swiping away his admittedly ineffective projectile. She looked infuriatingly smug, sitting where she was.
“Well, I would’ve used a wand if your rat hadn't taken it from me,” he retorted as he attempted to back away to the door.
Unfortunately, he didn’t think he had many options here. He would've called Dobby like last time if he thought it was going to work. One thing he was certain of when it came to Voldemort, though, was that things only surprised her a single time, no more.
“Running won’t do you much good, Potter,” she informed him with a creepily innocuous smile. “And it’s hardly my fault that Peter took your wand. He won it fair and square.”
“Please,” he scoffed, momentarily allowing his anger at Pettigrew to overcome his fear. “If I wasn’t drugged and magically exhausted, I would’ve killed him. You’re lucky Krum was a better duelist than your henchman.”
“I said he won it fairly. Everything is fair in war, Potter. I never said what he did was honorable.”
“Of course, you’d say that.” Deciding it was better to keep her talking while he thought about how to get out of this shit, he continued. “How did you find this place?”
She shrugged. “Your mother used to live as a muggle. I already knew she had a sister. All I had to do was look through a few records to find her house.”
“Learned a lot about my mother before you killed her, did you?” he spat, now completely sure that getting out was impossible and deciding to speak his mind instead.
“I knew her quite well, yes."
Just like that, he forgot the next scathing comment he was going to shoot before Voldemort inevitably attempted to kill him. “You knew my mom?”
The woman smiled just a little. “Are you asking if I was interested in a muggle-born female who was almost top of her entire class and earned the position of Head Girl before joining the Department of Mysteries less than a year after graduation? Yes, I knew all about your mother. I talked to her many times, just as I did your father.”
… She joined the what?
There was so much wrong with those sentences that he didn’t know where to start, so he just went where his instincts took him. “Why would you care about my mother’s achievements? You hated her for what she was, not for what she did.”
“I didn’t hate Lily Potter at all, let alone for what she was,” she drawled, sounding like this was an annoying routine she’d gotten reluctantly used to. “I fought her because of what she believed in and only after she joined the people sworn to opposing me.”
“Like all of those families you killed were directly opposing you. People don’t refuse to say your name because you stayed away from innocents.”
“Back when I was first gaining a following, I took a few of my most trusted subordinates and created a ritual for tracking people who said my name,” she flippantly informed him. “As long as they were inside our borders, only excessively heavy wards were enough to keep it from sticking. If it was a member of the Order, a member of the Ministry, or a member of the Auror Corp, we killed or captured them. If they weren’t any of those, well, Death Eaters showing up was usually enough to dissuade them from the notion again. That is why, technically speaking, people are afraid to say my name.”
Not truly expecting her to give him an honest response, it took him a second to come up with one himself. He decided to go with the first thing he landed on. "So you’re saying you didn’t attack families in their homes and leave a skull floating in the sky for everyone to see after you murdered them?”
“Oh, well I'm not going to lie, Potter,” she responded with a disturbing grin, shifting slightly on the roof to lean more heavily against her planted hand. “But do you think I’d get the following I used to have if I routinely conducted neighborhood cullings?”
And what the fuck was he supposed to say to that?
He was unluckily saved from answering by Vernon Dursley walking out of the back door. Harry’s heart stopped for a second, and he glanced from his uncle to the woman watching curiously from her perch on the shed roof. She looked rather entertained by the expression on his face, and he realized it was because Vernon couldn’t see her in the least. Of course, someone like her probably viewed hiding from a muggle as a task so easy it became mundane.
“What’s taking you so long, boy?” the man asked him gruffly, obviously irritated.
He thought she looked less entertained now.
“There are just a lot of weeds, Uncle,” he said in an attempt to appease the man. “It’ll be done soon.”
Vernon stared at him for a few seconds before he raked his eyes across the backyard. They lit with glee when he saw the shovel laying on the ground next to the garage. Harry inwardly cursed himself for forgetting that he'd thrown it away so carelessly.
“Lots of weeds, eh?” Vernon asked before stepping into Harry’s personal space, using Harry’s much smaller size to almost smother him with his presence. “Things are changing around here, freak. I won't have you lazing around like your degenerate father.”
Harry refused to look away from Vernon’s eyes, practically daring the man to do something. He’d never be like the boy he saw as his boggart’s form again, magic at his fingertips or not. Standing up for himself was something he’d promised himself he would do without reprieve, and he’d stuck to that promise thus far.
“Do you understand me?” his uncle threateningly whispered as he took another step, almost bumping into him.
That was, at least, until he stumbled over to the side and fell onto the ground with a loud, sharp explicative. Harry looked at his fallen uncle with wide eyes before glancing momentarily back up at Voldemort to see her lazily pointing her wand at the man. It was terrifying that she was both somehow capable of getting past the Dursley’s property line unharmed and quite able to use offensive magic while she was at it, but that was much less prominent in his brain than the fact that, incomprehensibly, she’d decided to help him.
His uncle lumbered back onto his feet, glaring at Harry the entire way. It wasn’t hard to guess why. Everything unnatural that happened was his fault, no questions asked. That unnatural occurrences also covered anything generally embarrassing happening to or around a Dursley was just their special brand of bullshit. Once Vernon was standing, the man seemed to be leaning toward one of those punishments he loved so much when his eyes suddenly glazed over. His pupils contracted slightly before quickly dilating back to their natural state, and he succinctly walked back into the house.
Harry was speechless.
He stared at the door, wondering if his uncle was going to come back out in a blazing inferno of rage. When that didn’t happen for a decent span of time, those eyes went up to the garage. The woman seemed very pleased with herself. That was, at least, until she looked back at him. He wasn’t sure how he’d categorize the expression she wore when their eyes met.
“He seems pleasant,” was the casual observation she made, apparently content to continue lounging on the roof of his uncle’s garage. “Why haven’t you done anything about them?”
Harry scoffed and gave her a hardly concealed glare. “It used to be better.”
“Is that right?” she mockingly pushed.
“Petunia was my mother’s sister,” he said, getting a nod that he didn’t want nor need from her. “She knows just enough about magic to be terrified of what it can do, but that’s about it. Even as a first-year, she was scared of my wand, not realizing that I could probably only tickle her with a jinx. Everyone else in the house just goes along with whatever she thinks she knows about magic, so they were scared of it too. I couldn’t use it outside of school, and they knew that, but just keeping it on hand was enough most of the time.”
She raised an eyebrow when she caught the implication of his words, and Harry found himself feeling foolish that he’d expected her to miss it completely. Of course, nobody listened to him about his relatives before. Why would Lord Voldemort be the one to actually pay attention?
“So…” her head tilted a little to the side. “With your wand gone?”
“Yeah, well, everything’s fair in war, right? I’m sure it’s an amusing joke to you, Pettigrew doing this to me after already betraying my family, but forgive me if I’m not as entertained.”
A small frown was on her face as he walked over to retrieve his trowel. Deciding that, at this point, everything was said, he chose to ignore her from that point forward. If she was going to kill him, then nothing he could do was going to stop it. With that in mind, not showing her an ounce of hopeless fear or petty struggling seemed like the best route to him. Unlike in the graveyard, he had no clever out that he could think of. Kneeling against the ground, he got back to work. When he eventually glanced behind him, he saw that Voldemort was gone.
She’d just… left.
Harry let out a deep breath as the force pushing down on his chest finally let up. Whether through sheer boredom or some kind of miraculous amnesia, she went away without hurting him. His heart was still hammering away within him. Dumbledore assured him that this place was safe. That was the entire fucking reason he was there. It was the excuse he was given every time he begged to not be sent back. Finding out that this wasn’t the case, it was both terrifying and maddening. Those two emotions swirled together within him until they combined into a numb, dull pulse that sapped just about everything out of him that he had left.
After five minutes or so of sitting in the dirt and getting nothing done, he dropped his trowel, went back inside, and closed himself in his room. It was there he sat, staring at his desk and a blank piece of parchment for an amount of time that he didn’t bother keeping track of. During that span of contemplation, he fought with himself over what he should send to Dumbledore.
He wasn’t sure how he was supposed to word the things he wanted to say. Mentioning that Voldemort came over and sat on his Uncle’s roof for a chat before saving him from his uncle and leaving without a trace, well, he didn’t even believe that shit happened yet, and he was there for it. Unfortunately, that was exactly what had happened, and he was reasonably horrified at the idea of someone like that having access to his house.
At the same time, Dumbledore practically fucking dumped him here and cut all communication lines. It’d been weeks since he’d heard a useful word from anyone. Lord, he’d swear that Dobby was taking his mail again if he wasn’t receiving the same bullshit letters every week from even his best friends.
… Dumbledore made us promise.
… Can’t send anything over letter. It might get intercepted.
… You’ll learn everything you need to when you get here this summer.
It was fucking garbage, and everyone knew it. They all left him here, every single one of them, and, for whatever reason, Dumbledore didn’t want him to know anything. It wasn’t a question of ability or time. There was hardly anything beyond the abilities of Albus Dumbledore, least of all updating someone in a heavily warded safe haven about the ongoing war.
For a moment, just a moment, he considered keeping everything to himself. It felt amazing to know that he finally had something the almighty Dumbledore didn’t, and Harry was very aware of just how badly Dumbledore would want to know all about this. With a scoff, he forced those corrosive thoughts from his mind. Taking his quill, he began to write, and he spilled everything he knew. He didn’t just say that Voldemort visited him today; he wrote about everything from the confusing way she’d joked around with him after her resurrection to the way she’d helped him with Vernon for seemingly no reason.
Harry wrote about how she healed his arm, how she tried to convince him to join her until he dropped the boggart right between them, how she told him about her thoughts on his mother, that she claimed to not hate her despite the fact that she was a muggleborn, that her boggart was something so confusing that he didn’t know what to make of it. Everything he could think of, from start to finish, he wrote, and he rolled it up into a tight cylinder, tying it with a piece of twine he had on hand. Harry stood from his desk and walked over to Hedwig, intent on attaching it to her leg.
In the end, Dumbledore was his ally, and Voldemort was the one who ruined his life, no matter how much he currently disliked the man.
It was as he bent over to tediously tie the letter to Hedwig’s leg that something knocked against his window. Almost jumping out of his skin, he whipped around to look at the disturbance. What he saw was a thick package floating outside of his house. It waited a few seconds before knocking against the glass again, and Harry continued to stare at it incredulously until its third knock eventually pushed him into action. Hesitantly approaching his window, he slid it open, and the package flew in. It circled around his room once, floated over to the center of his bed, and dropped lifelessly onto his raggedy covers.
He didn’t take a breath.
It was insane, honestly, that he was legitimately afraid to approach the package. It wasn’t moving anymore, but it was such a strange occurrence that he wasn’t sure how he was meant to process it. Reaching out with his magic, he gave the letter the equivalent of a poke before rapidly pulling it back into himself and physically taking a small step away from his bed. Hedwig squawked next to him, obviously making fun of his cowardice. Personally, Harry thought he was perfectly reasonable in his fear.
When he waited for a solid ten seconds and nothing happened, he approached the package and picked it up. He waited for another five or so for his arms to fall off or something before he slowly reached for the top of it and pulled it open. Tilting it upside down, he gave it a few shakes before a clump of packaging paper fell onto his bed in an unceremonious heap. Sitting down next to it, he pulled it into his lap and unwrapped it until, eventually, a wand was held in his waiting hands.
… His wand.
The feeling he got when he disbelievingly, reverently wrapped his fingers around the familiar handle of his phoenix feather wand was immaculate. He was close to laughing out of sheer joy when his mood suddenly dropped to the floor. There was no signature and no letter, but it was his wand. There were only two people who could’ve sent that, and one of them wouldn’t have done it without direct orders from the other.
An entire month of complete radio silence from his friends and allies…
His eyes flicked to the paper he had sitting next to Hedwig, just waiting to get into Dumbledore’s expectant hands. He’d be safe, pulled away from a place where Voldemort could get to him, and he’d finally be wherever his best friends were. He’d get all of those things by just sending that letter, but he could already see it, the way his superficially improved situation would be so very similar to the one he was in now. He’d still be left blindfolded and helpless, waiting for whatever scrap Dumbledore tossed into his metaphorical cage to gobble up while he knew damn well that what he got was exactly what Dumbledore wanted him to have and not an ounce more.
Everyone he loved was sitting there and ignoring him, and it was, by some kind of decrepit miracle from a cruel God above, somehow Voldemort who gave him something he wanted, something he needed. He didn’t know why she did it, but it was almost certainly something self-serving, and it was impossible to describe to anyone else just how infuriating it was that, despite her ulterior motives, she was still the only one to actually listen to him for what seemed like a fucking eternity.
A dull thunk met his ears as he tossed the confession that was his letter into the trash. Dumbledore didn’t deserve to know that shit - his worries, questions, and suspicions - not now. He’d deal with this like he was forced to deal with everything else in his life: alone.
His wand, as he'd said before, was the mutually assured destruction that he needed to keep the peace in the Dursley household. Vernon’s proclamation of “things being different this summer" was more of a dramatically worded observation that Harry no longer had his guarantee in place. Once they saw the wand back on display, Vernon’s face turned a particularly vivid shade of purple before things went back to normal.
It was because of his wand that he walked out of the front door, intent on ignoring every single chore they wanted him to complete. Reaching out with his magic, he immediately found the presence of his minder. The very idea of it made him scowl. It was one of the many reasons he knew that Dumbledore was intentionally isolating him. The man had valuable, experienced, dangerous people watching his every move from afar.
He was important enough for Dumbledore to send someone to make sure he stayed in a box, but not quite enough for that person to just sit down and talk to him for a few minutes.
He felt the watcher react to his presence. They seemed surprised to see him, and he made a face when they immediately moved to follow. He wasn’t quite capable of pinning their motive for tailing him so closely, not unless he could look into their eyes. There was apprehension and a healthy amount of nervousness within his babysitter, but that could’ve meant any number of things. Harry found it difficult to relate to those feelings if he were being honest.
There was a truly odd sense of bitter relief that came from hitting rock bottom. He lived in a house with relatives who hated him, where he needed a wand to find even a semblance of peace, and a Dark Lord had direct, unobstructed access to his house. If that wasn’t bad enough, even with all of that in mind, he still chose to stay because being in the middle of this pile of shit was better than being whisked away and tossed in the dark by his headmaster.
Yes, it was most definitely the exact definition of hitting rock bottom, but it was strangely impossible to be scared or nervous when he knew that he couldn’t fall any further. Whatever may come, there wasn’t much more that could be done to worsen his situation. He found comfort in that fact and slowly became even more annoyed with his vigilant tail because he knew that they made him no safer. They were both restricting his freedom and completely worthless at the same time.
Fucking brilliant…
His head on a swivel and his eyes uninhibited by a cloak of invisibility, he caught sight of a figure standing on top of a nearby house well before Dumbledore’s man. It was only his skill with spotting quickly moving objects prone to disappearing that he caught the person’s face before she vanished with a twirl. His problematic decision between whether or not he should notify his “guardian” was taken away from him because not even a moment went by before the presence of his tail blurred and faded away.
Two seconds after that, the woman he’d seen on the roof snapped into existence beside him and fell into step with his currently slow pace. He would've been concerned for the status of Dumbledore's watcher if he wasn't very aware of what death felt like to his magic. No, his tail was still alive. That, at least, he knew for sure.
He continued to walk for a block or so without even acknowledging her presence. His destination in mind was still a ways to go, and her theatrics with the teleportation wasn't enough to distract him. When it became clear he wasn't going to talk, Voldemort apparently decided to start the conversation on his behalf.
"You aren't even going to greet me with some depressingly muggle attack like before?"
His wand hand itched something fierce. He wanted to lash out with the nastiest, most grotesque curse imaginable. The fact that she gave him his wand back in the first place didn't matter after the hills of grievances he had against her. He wanted Dumbledore to go fuck himself, but Voldemort was the sole owner of his hate. Only the knowledge that it'd do absolutely nothing but get him tortured or worse allowed him to physically restrain himself enough to not attack, so that was the exact response he gave her.
“What’s the point? It’s not like it worked before.”
“Fair,” she admitted, her stifling cloak disappearing with a vague twist of her hand. Glancing over at the boy walking beside her, she saw his expression and raised a confused eyebrow. “What?”
“You’re wearing jeans and a t-shirt."
Snorting at the observation, she gave him a smirk, one that was wild and out of place on a face like her’s. It wasn’t one that Harry would’ve associated with a Dark Lord; it was intimidating in a very different way from the conniving, intelligent grins he'd previously seen from her.
“I grew up in a dirt poor orphanage in London during the blitz, Potter,” she said, and he suddenly understood where her smile came from. “A little Surrey boy like you? We would’ve torn them to pieces! I can wear jeans if I damn well want to.”
Harry had to force himself to keep walking through his shock. Voldemort was described as an individual who was almost all powerful. She was feared beyond comprehension, and it created this picture in his head that made imagining her living in such a place impossible, at least until now. Even after her younger version told him about the fact that she had a muggle father, he hadn't really considered the possible implications.
“You grew up in muggle London during the war?”
“What, you can’t see Voldemort roughing it with muggles? One thing you’ll learn as you grow up, Potter, is that truly strong people aren’t made without adversity. People like me, people like you, what we went through makes us strong. The rest of them will never quite understand.”
His revulsion at Voldemort comparing the two of them mixed poorly with the understanding he held for the rest of her advice. It was made all the worse because, when he thought about it, he agreed. Ron and Hermione, they were amazing friends, but they didn’t get it. Both of them were driven, honorable people, and, sans this year specifically, they'd both tried their best to stick by him. The two of them, though, were simply different in a noticeable way.
He loved them both dearly, and he hoped that they felt the same, but he knew that, when push came to shove, those two didn’t know what it was like to truly suffer on a level that allowed them to relate. Still, the very thought of Voldemort being someone who actually got it, got him, made him sick to his fucking stomach. That was why he decided to keep walking instead of responding to what she said.
Eventually, he arrived at his destination. It was a small, open park. The entire thing was worn down to a degree that was most definitely unsafe to play on. Fortunately for the children’s health, Dudley and his gang of dumbasses pretty much guaranteed this place was barren anyway. Even after his cousin had long since abandoned his old stomping grounds, the kids never really came back.
“This is where you’re going?” Voldemort asked, and Harry thought she sounded perplexed.
“What were you expecting? I’m stuck in a regular muggle suburb. There aren’t many interesting things to do here.”
When she didn’t answer, he looked around for his tree and walked over to its trunk as soon as he found it. Sitting down against it, he stretched his legs out and boredly stared at the park like he usually did when he came here. This wasn’t for fun; it was nothing more than an escape from the house he was forced to live in. Now, he was worried that he no longer had a reprieve from being around people he hated, not when she was appearing whenever she pleased.
It took a few seconds, but she eventually took a seat against a tree across from his own. He really did want to tell her to just leave him alone, but he didn’t think she’d follow such a demand if he made it. The longer he sat there, the more his magic began to naturally leak from him and surround his current location. As his senses opened up, he found himself unsurprised that Voldemort’s spot next to him was something of a hole in his radar. Back at the graveyard, her lack of control allowed him to feel what was there for him to experience, but it seemed as though that was a one time thing. There were a few he'd met who could do similar things, mostly among powerful adults. Snape and Dumbledore were the two most obvious anomalies. Another was just added to their ranks.
“He really did just leave you here, didn’t he?” Voldemort asked, seemingly coming to an important and perhaps even saddening epiphany.
“Why are you here?” Harry immediately snapped because he didn’t want to hear something like that coming from the mouth of someone so despicable. “I already have to deal with all of this bullshit going on right now, and I’m not scheduled to deal with you until school starts. If you aren’t here to kill me, then just tell me what the hell you want from me and leave.”
Harry’s eyes were stubbornly stuck on the playground, but he could tell she was staring at him. For a few seconds, he thought she wasn’t going to respond. Apparently, though, what he thought didn’t matter much anymore because she did.
“After school, once I got a little older, I spent a long time traveling, learning everything magic had to offer. I’ve stacked myself against wizards and witches considered legends by their people, and I made them fall to their knees. It was my goal to be the best, and I am the best,” she told him, sounding both completely serious and unbearably cocksure at the same time. “Yet my ultimate competitor, the one who has stumped me more than anyone else, is a young boy trapped with a bunch of muggles by the very people he fights for. You’ll have to forgive me for being curious.”
“Maybe you just aren’t as strong as you think you are,” Harry suggested, purposefully trying to piss her off no matter how stupid that was.
“Maybe, but I personally think it has less to do with my incompetence and more to do with something about you … so here I am, and here you are. Make of that what you wish.”
“You really have nothing better to do than stalk a teenager? No dark armies or evil plans to make?” he asked with a hint of caustic venom in his voice because there wasn’t much else he could say in the face of such blatant honesty.
“Dark armies and evil plans are overrated, kid,” she told him with a smirk. “Besides, making plans means I have to organize a dinner party with Malfoy first. I think I’d rather die again.”
He hated himself for the way he almost laughed at her comment.