Photos & Footprints
Harry looked over at Wednesday and felt a small grin curl up the edges of his lips.
They still had stuff to work out, but Wednesday had apologized, even though she didn’t do apologies, and she called him cousin.
If Sarah Potter-Addams - a witch with a spellbook who had been burned for her power - was an ancestor of Harry’s, then Harry and Wednesday were truly related. Distantly, for sure, but Harry would take Wednesday, who had been Harry’s first friend, as a distant cousin over Dudley as a direct cousin any day of the week.
Harry sat at the piano on the town square and watched Wednesday take her seat beside her cello and felt his stomach swoop with a mixture of excitement and nerves. The other students were taking their places with their instruments and the townsfolk were taking seats in the square and Harry suddenly felt like he was going to be sick.
If he didn’t know that nobody was going to remember his performance at all, he’d never be able to go through with it. Luckily, Wednesday and Thing had a spectacle planned that would erase the memory of Harry playing from anyone’s minds.
The band director, Mrs Welsh, a quiet siren woman with large pale eyes and long black braids with blue beads in them, raised her hands for the players attention. Harry put his fingers on the keys and looked at the sheet music for the song they’d be playing.
Or, the song they’d start with, anyway.
When the first note began, Harry ignored the crowd and the students and began playing. It was a simple enough song to play, easy, really. And playing the piano always reminded Harry of one of the few good memories he had at St. Brutus’.
Harry had been twelve and scurrying in the corridors, trying to hide from the group of boys that were intent on finding him.
Chase Alexander, the group leader that shared a room with Harry, called out to him while they all ran.
“Quit running, Potter, you little freak! Come on, let’s see if your head still fits in the toilet!”
Harry stifled a sob and turned blindly, ducking in the first room that had the handle unlocked. He knew he was out of bounds, but he’d rather taking a caning than let Chase drown him again. Last time he did it, if they hadn’t been interrupted by Guard Hamilton, Harry was certain he would have killed him.
Leaning against the door, Harry waited until he heard the boys run past the room before he let out a shaky sigh. He knew he couldn’t evade them forever, but the longer he could hide, the better.
“Hiding from someone?”
Harry jumped and spun around, his hand clamped over his mouth to keep from making noise, and he looked around the dark room he’d ducked in warily.
“Who’s there?” Harry whispered. There was a lot of big furniture covered in sheets and the room gave Harry the chills.
A man stepped forward, moving directly in front of the moonlight casting shadows in the room through the window. He was tall, thin, Harry couldn’t see any features from the shadows. Harry only knew he was a man because of his low and raspy voice, but he made Harry wonder if he should take his chances with Chase.
“I’m nobody,” the man said with a harsh and bitter laugh. “Are you nobody too?”
Harry tilted his head curiously then quickly ducked it. He wasn’t allowed to be curious anymore.
“Yeah, I’m nobody,” Harry said. He looked around the room again as the man moved out of the path of the moonlight and wondered what the covered furniture was. He opened his mouth to ask, then remembered he wasn’t allowed to.
“It used to be a music room, I think,” the man said, answering Harry’s unasked question. He moved closer to Harry and Harry looked up enough to see long, stringy, dark hair and a pale angular face. Harry hadn’t seen him around before, and he didn’t wear the guards uniform, but Harry figured he was a janitor of some sort.
“I’m sorry, sir, I’ll leave,” Harry said, crossing his fingers that he wouldn’t be reported.
The man laughed and reached out for Harry’s shoulder, dropping his hand when Harry jerked away out of reach.
“Don’t go yet,” he said, his voice almost hollow and desperate sounding. “Come here, I’ll show you something.”
Harry slowly followed the man toward a large piece of furniture and let out a small gasp of pleasure when the man ripped off the sheet and a glossy wooden piano was revealed.
“Pretty, isn’t it?” the man asked, smiling as he ran a hand down the wood. “Something so lovely doesn’t belong in a place like this…”
Harry hummed in agreement and the man looked from the piano to Harry, his eyes were grey and filled with shadows, but there was something comforting about them too.
“You don’t belong here either, kid,” he said lowly. “I’m sorry, I wish I could help you leave.”
Harry shrugged, much too used to his own bad lot in life.
“That’s okay,” he told him, breaking contact with those intense eyes. “One day I’ll be free.”
The man smiled sadly and then removed the cloth off a bench in front of the piano.
“Until then, I can show you how I used to escape when I was a kid,” he offered. He sat down and patted the seat beside him. “Nobody can hear us,” he added when Harry hesitated. “I’ll teach you the notes.”
It was probably the lack of people who were kind to him that drove Harry to trust the perfect stranger, or his desperation to find a way to escape, but Harry sat beside him and let the man teach him the basics of playing.
The man was brilliant, magnetic when he played.
When Harry went to find him a few days later after sneaking out of his room, he was no where to be found. Instead, there was a book on the bench called ‘Playing Piano for Beginners’ with a note telling Harry that he wouldn’t be heard if he played in that room.
Harry never saw the peculiar man again, and he got caned quite a few times when he got caught sneaking in or out of the music room, but Harry never forgot how much he felt free when he played.
The band was halfway through the song, an upbeat melody to fit the Founders Day celebration for a man who would kill Harry if he could, when Thing’s signal went off.
It wasn’t subtle, it was a literal explosion.
The statue of Joseph Crackstone, the Jericho founder, began smoking, fire catching from the explosion Thing set off. The students shrieked and abandoned their instruments while they ran with the townsfolk, but Harry caught Wednesday’s eye and they shared a small look before changing the song.
While the previously upbeat melody turned dark, Harry’s fingers flew across the keys in the more comforting tempo. As the fire built around the statue, melting it and destroying Crackstone’s likeness as Crackstone had destroyed so many outcasts in his hunt for witches, Harry felt the fire inside him grow.
Crackstone was suddenly everything that Harry hated; Crackstone was confinement and the dark, Crackstone was loneliness and anger, hurt and isolation.
Crackstone was someone who would kill Harry if he could, he would burn him like he had Sarah Potter-Addams and Harry felt a savage pleasure in playing the song as Crackstone instead was the one being burnt in the town square.
*****
Wednesday looked over to watch as Crackstone’s statue was destroyed by the fire that Thing started and was distracted by Harry.
Harry was like a car wreck with multiple casualties- magnetic and difficult for Wednesday to tear her eyes away from. He wasn’t meek and mild on the piano, he was fierce and fiery.
When he played piano, Wednesday could see how Harry Potter got away with five murders and only convicted for one.
Unfortunately for them both, the firefighters were flocking the square to begin controlling the fire, and it was time for them to leave.
“Come on,” Wednesday left her cello behind in favor of ripping Harry from the piano. “We need to go before Weems can try and pin this on us.”
Harry seemed half in a daze as he took Wednesday’s hand and let her pull him away from the scene.
“Where are we going?” he asked as Wednesday pulled him away.
Wednesday gave him an exasperated look. “To lot 17, where Goody and Sarah lived. Don’t you want to see if there’s any more information on magic there?”
Wednesday doubted if the original cottage still stood, but she was hopeful that her connection to Goody would bring her another vision that would help tie everything together if they were in the area where she once lived.
Crackstone burning witches in the past, a prophecy with Wednesday and Harry in the future, and a monster attacking people in the present.
Someway, somehow, Wednesday knew they were all connected.
They were halfway to the location where the map in Pilgrim World said lot 17 had been when the skies opened up and began pouring down rain. Wednesday rather enjoyed the rain, but she still accepted the umbrella that Thing gave her from her backpack and held it up so that Harry wouldn’t get sick.
“Thanks,” Harry called over the sound of rain. Their feet mushed in the muddy grounds and Wednesday tried to orient herself in the thickening woods to keep track of where they were headed.
“Do you know where we’re going?” Harry asked Wednesday when she paused to look around.
“Of course I do,” Wednesday said confidently. “We are… going north.”
Harry snorted, but he followed along anyway. An interesting act considering he had been very anti-mystery that very morning.
“Why are you helping me now?” Wednesday asked, stopping and turning to stare at Harry.
Harry blinked and then took his glasses off, drying them on his shirt collar.
“Because you apologized?” Harry told her with a small shrug. “And… and I don’t really have much family, so if we are related, and you swear to never dig in my business again, then… then I still want to be friends.”
“Friends,” Wednesday scoffed. She would never swear to not dig in someone’s business, it wasn’t in her inquisitive nature. “You and I are connected by blood and mystery, secrets and death. Friendship is an inadequate word to describe our connection.”
“I…” Harry’s eyebrows drew together, forming a crease in the center of his forehead. “But we are friends, right?”
Wednesday huffed lightly and turned back to the forest that hid Goody Addams’ home somewhere within it.
“Yes, Harry,” she said patiently. “We are friends.”
It was a simple term, but it seemed to please Harry.
The rain had lessened by the time Wednesday believed she found the lot that had once belonged to the family of witches. Wednesday handed the umbrella off to Harry and studied the map Thing had stolen from Pilgrim World.
“This is it,” Wednesday said after consulting the map and the landscape they stood before. The original house from nearly four hundred years ago had quite obviously been torn down and replaced. Instead of a cottage, there was a rundown hunting shack with a tall wooden fence surrounding it. Who would want a fence to guard a house with a caved in tin roof, Wednesday couldn’t begin to fathom.
Regardless, she needed to go inside.
“Are you coming with me?” Wednesday asked Harry after she yanked one of the fence boards down so they could enter the abandoned property.
A foolish question. Harry was only passionate when he played piano, clearly. All the fire she saw in him early had been extinguished and left only the meek boy behind.
“If- if you want me to go with you,” Harry said. He closed the umbrella and seemed to be avoiding Wednesday’s gaze.
“Are you not in the least bit curious to see if we can discover any more information that explains the prophecy or either of our powers?” Wednesday demanded. “There could be answers to your life in there and you aren’t curious at all? What is wrong with you?!”
Wednesday hadn’t meant to add the last part, even if she felt it was a fair question. Enid had been more curious about the history of Crackstone and the Addams than Harry was and it was Harry’s own ancestor! It was Harry’s face that looked so familiar in Goody’s mother. It was Sarah Addams who had Harry’s sharp jaw and thick black hair and magic.
And Harry didn’t seem to care at all.
Harry seemed stunned by Wednesday’s heated outburst for a moment then a small spark of fire ignited in his green eyes and his face twisted up in anger.
“What’s wrong with me? What’s wrong with you?” Harry yelled, his voice rising over the wind rustling through the forest. “Why do you think everything is some mystery to be solved? Why do you think there are never consequences for curiosity?”
“What consequences?” Wednesday asked scathingly. “The terrible satisfaction of solving a problem?”
“How about a cane to your backside? How about being locked up? HOW ABOUT A SCAR FOR EVERY BLOODY QUESTION YOU EVER ASK?!”
Wednesday’s indignation and irritation fled as quickly as the crows in the trees did at Harry’s shout. Harry looked furious, but there was something else there, vibrating just below the surface- fear.
And for Harry to be afraid was unacceptable.
“Someone hit you for asking questions,” Wednesday said, a statement, not a question. “Who?” she asked coldly, revising her plans for the afternoon.
Whoever dared lay a finger, or a cane, to Harry would feel his pain and fear tenfold. They would beg for mercy and Wednesday would never grant it to them.
Wednesday would tear them apart slowly and only stop long enough for them to heal enough to be torn apart again.
Harry’s chest was heaving and he looked uncomfortably close to crying. Wednesday would prefer he shout than cry, tears gave her hives.
“It’s just what happens at St Brutus’,” Harry said in a quivering voice that Wednesday didn’t care for at all. “Part of the program.”
So many aspects of Harry’s personality suddenly became crystal clear for Wednesday with that single admission. It was why Harry so often seemed curious, then ducked away from his own questions, too afraid to seek out the answers.
Wednesday had been raised to always find the truth, through whatever means were necessary. Harry had been brainwashed and beaten to think that inquisitiveness was a crime.
“This summer we are going to burn that school to the ground,” Wednesday told Harry firmly. “Then you and I will dance in the ashes.”
Harry’s eyes leaked out a tear and Wednesday felt the first hive appear on her neck.
“You’ll have to burn it without me, I have to go back to my relatives this summer.”
“Obviously,” Wednesday drawled. She reached over and touched Harry’s wrist lightly. “You’ll spend the summer with your cousin, Wednesday, your other cousin, Pugsley, and my parents. I believe it’s time you got to know the rest of your relatives, don’t you?”
The way the fear in Harry’s eyes slowly shifted to hope was a delight to see.
The growl that ripped through the forest was not.
*****
One moment, Harry was seized by a fierce hope that he could spend his summer break with Wednesday - his friend, his cousin. The next, Wednesday had an iron grip on Harry’s wrist and was pulling him through the forest, running from the growl that was entirely too close to them.
“Here!” Wednesday cried, pulling Harry in a small hidden space made up of tree branches and bushes. They had to get on their hands and knees to crawl inside, but it was a cozy space once they were hidden from the monster inside of it.
… too cozy.
Harry looked around the cave like area slowly. It was nearly tall enough for them to stand, but they would have to duck their heads to not disturb the roof made of branches. Covering the dirt ground was a simple gray blanket. When Wednesday turned to look around, Harry spotted a pillow and book in the corner behind her.
“I think someone lives here,” Wednesday whispered. She inched around Harry and plucked something from the ground behind him, a silver lantern. She lifted it to her nose and smelled it.
“This was lit recently,” she told him.
Harry grabbed the book beside the pillow and curled his nose at the foreign language.
“I don’t know this,” he admitted, handing the black book with golden script across the front to Wednesday.
“It’s French,” Wednesday told him, because of course she knew French. “‘Memories’, it says.”
Harry watched as Wednesday flipped the book open and displayed a variety of photos. They both made a noise of surprise when photos began moving. The people in the aged pictures were waving and pushing each other, moving within their frames on a repeated loop like a video.
It might have been more startling if Harry hadn’t seen toads leap to life from sketches and girls with long blonde hair skipping around Nevermore without faces.
Harry certainly didn’t think it held as much interest as Wednesday, who brought the photo album to her face and narrowed her eyes at one of the photos.
“Harry…” she said slowly. “Why does this man look like you?”
“What?” Harry had to refrain himself from yanking the book Wednesday’s hands. “Let me see.”
Wednesday turned the book around and Harry ducked his head closer to look and his breath caught in his throat at what he saw.
The very first photo in the book stood a group of five teenagers, their arms locked around each other in an easy and casual embrace. They were in matching black uniforms, all of them wearing red and gold ties, and they stood in front of a beautiful lake that sparkled in the background.
At one end of the line of teens, there stood a boy with flat blonde hair and watery eyes. Beside him was a tall man with sandy colored hair and scars across his face. Ruffling the tall man’s hair was another man, equally tall, with long thick black hair pulled up in a messy bun and a laugh spilling from his lips. But it was the man beside him that Harry stared at.
Whoever the man was, he had Harry’s face. If Harry smiled, it would look like his. His hair, wavy black hair that got messed up every time the girl beside him yanked on a lock of it, looked like Harry’s. He even had on a pair of glasses, just like Harry’s.
“There’s no way you’re not related,” Wednesday whispered, drawing Harry from his reverie as he pondered who the man was. “And look, look at her eyes.”
Harry tore his eyes from the boy and looked at the girl beside him. She was beautiful, with long red hair that flowed in the photo and Harry could practically hear the musical quality of the laughter that was pouring from her lips. But her eyes… her eyes were a bright green, so green that Harry couldn’t look away.
“Do you think… do you think those are your parents?” Wednesday asked Harry.
“No idea,” Harry said. He felt a swell of emotion in his chest, something he couldn’t identify but made him feel like he was being crushed by a heavy boulder. “I’ve never seen photos of them before…”
“Let’s take this with us and we can go through it,” Wednesday said. She gave Harry the photo album and he regretfully closed it. “How certain are you that your parents are dead?” she asked as she looked around the crude cave they stood hunched over in.
The boulder on Harry’s chest exploded and shot shards of hard rock through his body, causing him to stagger backward and bump into the wall made of branches. He couldn’t speak to answer Wednesday, he didn’t think he could even breathe properly.
‘How certain are you that your parents are dead?’
How certain was he?
What proof did he have?
That his aunt and uncle said so? They said all sorts of things that Dr. Kinbott said were lies. What if… what if Harry’s parents hadn’t died in that car accident? What if something just happened that caused other people to think they had died?
What if they’d been looking for Harry and couldn’t find him?
Harry clutched the photo album to his chest and tried to think rationally. Except ration and logic had flown out the window when Harry could kill a classmate with a touch and he would appear at dinner the very next night.
Could Harry have discovered more than one family member in the same day?
“D- do you think they could be alive?” Harry croaked out, catching Wednesday’s attention from where she had been inspecting the rest of the cave.
Wednesday arched her eyebrows at whatever expression was on Harry’s face.
“Possibly,” she said. “Are you interested in investigating now?”
For the possibility of having his parents alive, nearby, and maybe missing Harry as much as he missed them?
“Absolutely.”
*****
Wednesday led Harry out of the makeshift cave that someone had built back toward the abandoned shack that once held Goody Addams’ home. She sighed when Harry refused to let her place the black photo book in her bag, he preferred to clutch it to his chest like Pugsley once used to carry his decapitated rabbits head when he had been a toddler.
“You wait here, yell if you hear anything,” Wednesday told Harry as they approached the shack. When Harry didn’t answer, Wednesday snapped her fingers in his face.
“Harry, focus,” she told him briskly. “The sooner I go look around, the sooner we can go examine those photos.”
Of course that would catch Harry’s attention and he quickly agreed to keep watch while Wednesday went to investigate.
The mystery of what the monster had been doing was resolved as soon as Wednesday stepped inside the shack.
In the center of the floor, torn to pieces, was a man’s body. He was older, perhaps mid-fifties, and clearly homeless if the blood matted beard and wrinkled lines on his face were any indicator. Wednesday stepped forward to get a better look at the scattered body parts and reached out to a support beam to keep her from slipping in the blood.
A pointless endeavor as the touch of the beam ripped her front the present and sent her backwards on the floor, directly in the blood.
Goody Addams, with her blonde braids and white nightgown, ran from where she’d been hiding behind her house, following the mob that drug her family further in the woods. She held only the blue book of spells that Wednesday knew was currently in her room and had a look in her eyes that Wednesday recognized all too well- vengeance.
Goody chased the mob, stopping to hide behind a large oak tree as her family was thrown in an unfamiliar building built from iron.
“Tonight we rid our town of the outcasts that have plagued us!” Joseph Crackstone yelled, holding his torch high while another member of the mob chained the iron door closed.
“BURN THE WITCHES!” the mob screamed, rabid for the death of outcasts.
Goody closed her eyes and clutched her book tightly before she turned on the spot, disappearing and dragging Wednesday with her. When they reappeared, they were inside the iron building and surrounded by the others that were locked inside.
“Mama!” Goody cried, running directly to Sarah Addams-Potter. The woman held her arms open as much as she could, though it was restrained by the chains she wore.
“My love,” Sarah whispered, holding her daughter tightly. “You must go, flee. Find your cousin Abraham, he will help you.”
“I can’t leave you, Mama,” Goody cried, sobbing on her mother’s chest. “Disappear, Mama, like you taught me.”
Sarah released her daughter and held her arms up, showing the silver chains that held her in place.
“I cannot, my love, they have bound me with our own magic,” Sarah whispered. “Crackstone is more than he appears.”
“Then I will kill him and save you!” Goody yelled.
Sarah coughed as the smoke from outside the building began to grow, causing the others locked inside to shriek with terror.
“Go, now, Goody,” Sarah yelled. “Where you go, my love will follow. Find Abraham, he will help you with your power and your visions.”
“Mama, no!” Goody sobbed. “Please, Mama!”
“Go, NOW!” Sarah pushed her daughter away when the flaming torches were thrown through the window. “Do not let our family die tonight, my love. GO!”
Goody was still sobbing when she turned on the spot and left her mother behind with only a sharp crack and the sound of the other outcasts screaming.
Wednesday rejoined her body in the present with a gasp and scrambled to get off the floor, out of the blood she was laying in.
“Harry,” she called, suddenly desperate to know that the boy who so resembled Sarah Addams-Potter was safe. “Harry!”
“I’m out here,” Harry called back from outside. “Are you alright?”
“Fine,” Wednesday said. She sent a final sweeping look around the cabin; seeing nothing of interest, she decided to call it a day before curfew hit.
God forbid Wednesday and Harry be caught past curfew on another night when a man was murdered.
Except it seemed as if they had already been caught.
When Wednesday squeezed back through the opening in the fence she made, she found Harry standing outside with Xavier and the large black dog from the night Rowan had been killed.
Harry still held his book tightly in one arm, but the other was wrapped around the neck of the dog, scratching its unruly dark fur dotingly.
“What are you doing here?” Wednesday asked Xavier curtly, eyeing him with suspicion.
“What are you doing covered in blood?” Xavier countered with instead of answering her question.
Harry let go of his dog and jumped to his feet, looking at Wednesday with the worry that he wore as constantly as his glasses.
“Are you okay?” Harry asked quickly, reaching out for her. “I didn’t hear anything, I’m so sorry.”
“I’m fine,” Wednesday told him, glaring at Xavier. “It isn’t my blood. It’s the blood of the man inside that cabin that was killed by the monster.”
Harry’s face paled, but Xavier seemed skeptical.
“The same monster that you claimed killed Rowan even though Rowan is definitely alive?” he asked. “The same monster that only you and Harry have seen?”
“The very one,” Wednesday confirmed.
“It’s real,” Harry said, his voice suspiciously upbeat. A happy lilt to it that Wednesday suspected came from the book he clutched with hopes of finding his supposedly deceased parents.
Any couple that died in a car accident, leaving behind a scarred and orphaned son, and left no news article about their accident and burials were not people that Wednesday was willing to confidently call dead.
“I’m not saying it’s not real,” Xavier told Harry, much more kindly than he spoke to Wednesday. Wednesday wondered if it had been her threat the other night that softened his tone or if Xavier had ulterior motives in smiling at Harry as if they were friends.
“All I’m saying is without proof, nobody else is going to believe you guys, that’s all,” Xavier told them.
“I’ve got proof.”
Wednesday and Xavier both gave Harry looks of surprise.
Clearly Harry had been busy while Wednesday had been inside the cabin.
“Er… well… he does, anyway,” Harry said, ducking his head to avoid their gazes and smiling at the dog that wagged its tail beside him. “C’mon, buddy, can you show them?”
The dog yipped, clearly intelligent, and led the three students through the woods. They hardly went ten feet from where Harry had been standing before the dog barked again and nosed at the ground.
“See?” Harry said, gesturing to the muddy ground. “Proof.”
Wednesday looked down and saw the enormous footprint with claws at the toes and gave the dog an approving nod.
“Excellent,” she said, “let’s follow the trail.”
“Oh, yeah, great idea, follow the trail of the monster that killed a kid,” Xavier muttered.
Wednesday gave him a sharp look. “I’m sorry, I thought you didn’t believe Rowan died?”
“I… I don’t know,” Xavier said with a grimace. “Rowan and I were roommates and now… whatever happened that night, he was different when he came back.”
“Dying and coming back to life could do that,” Harry quipped quietly. “Oi! Wednesday! Look!”
Wednesday looked where Harry pointed, him and his dog drawing up short, and knew that the mystery of the monster had only increased.
The final two footsteps that hadn’t been washed away by the rain were human.
“The monster is a person,” Wednesday breathed, her eyes uncharacteristically wide. She looked at Harry and he shared her shock. “It could be anyone.”
Wednesday, Harry, and Xavier made their way back to Nevermore quickly, Harry’s dog following along and barking irritatingly.
“Where’d you get a dog, anyway?” Xavier asked Harry.
“He just follows me,” Harry said, that photo album tucked to his side. He accepted the stick the dog brought him and then threw it for the dog to chase after. “He first showed up at my old school, when I was around eleven, and he’d hang around the yard we exercised in.”
“Well he’s a good dog then,” Xavier laughed. “My dad never let me have one, but I always wanted one.”
Wednesday had never wanted a dog. They were disgusting, slobbery, dumb creatures that created messes and destroyed the neat order that Wednesday liked to keep her belongings in.
The rest of the walk, Wednesday watched Harry’s dog with interest. Harry’s dog was not a disgusting, dumb creature, though it did slobber on Harry when they parted at the gates.
It wasn’t until Wednesday went to part from the boys, headed in opposite directions for their dorms, that it finally clicked in Wednesday’s head what bothered her the most about Harry’s dog.
“Harry…” Wednesday stopped him from running off to go tear through his new book of photos. “Where did you first meet that dog?”
“St. Brutus’,” Harry answered quickly. He fidgeted from side to side, clearly anxious to get to his room to investigate his album.
“When you were eleven?” Wednesday confirmed.
“Yeah.”
“And you’re certain it’s the same one?”
“Yes.”
Wednesday sighed. “And it never struck you as odd that a dog followed you across an ocean clear to the United States?”
Harry ended his fidgeting and blinked owlishly at Wednesday.
“Er… no. I… I guess I didn’t.”
Of course not. Because Harry had his curiosity beaten from him and it was up to Wednesday to help him rediscover it.
“Goodnight, Harry,” Wednesday told him with a final pat to his shoulder. “Bring your book to breakfast, we’ll begin putting some of these mysteries to rest.”
After Harry dashed off to bed, Wednesday began a list in her room.
Monster- human?
Prophecy
Goody Addams- survived?
Visions
Magic
Rowan- alive?
Harry’s parents- alive?
It seemed as if for every answer Wednesday received, she gained two more questions in exchange.
*****
Harry sat in the middle of his bed with the covers pulled over his legs as he slowly flipped through the pages of the photo album they found. Most of the photos were of the same group of friends, and only two of the photos that filled the pages didn’t feature the boy with the messy hair and glasses that resembled Harry so much.
It was only when Harry carefully pulled the first photo off the page and peered at the back that he felt excitement explode inside him once more.
Peter Pettigrew. Remus Lupin. Sirius Black. James Potter. Lily Evans. Year Seven.
Harry flipped the photo back over and looked at the boy who not only resembled him strongly but had Harry’s middle name as his first.
“Dad?” Harry whispered, touching the photo where the boy stood. He looked over at the girl with his eyes and could practically hear his heart hammering in his chest. “Mum?”
They didn’t answer him, the photo didn’t speak, but Harry felt a fierce rush of unfamiliar hope that maybe one, or both of them, had survived.
Maybe they would speak to him soon.