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They had bars on his windows, Mum!
They had bars on his windows.
Bars on his windows.
It had been bothering her from the moment it left her son’s mouth. There were all kinds of disciplinary actions she could more than understand. Merlin knew Fred and George had been putting her through the wringer since they first learned to toddle, but she could think of no acceptable reason to bar the windows of a twelve-year-old so well behaved and respectful as Harry. Alright, so she may have been projecting her desire for a child that didn’t get into trouble on young Harry, but that didn’t mean the boy deserved to be locked up as though he were in jail. She wanted to write the whole thing off as a flight of fancy from one of her three youngest boys to try and get themselves out of trouble, but the conviction they’d said it with… Her boys might tell some fibs here and there when it suited them, but they weren’t likely to lie about something so extreme.
And then there was the way Harry shifted uncomfortably at the barest mention of his treatment. She couldn’t discount it. Especially not after that whole mess with the diary and the basilisk. Hearing about that mess and that the monster had apparently been beneath the school for decades was the first time she’d ever been inclined to agree with the Board of Governors that Hogwarts was getting out of hand.
That was how Molly Weasley came to find herself Disillusioned against a hedgerow on Privet Drive in Little Whinging barely a week into summer hols. She’d fought with Albus--hard--to have the boy placed in her care for the summer. He’d been through so much for a child so young. He didn’t need a poor home life on top of that, but Albus had insisted that he needed to return to the house every year. So, she settled in across the street to watch. She wanted to see for herself what treatment the great Albus Dumbledore was willing to subject a child to when there was a loving family more than willing to take him in without hesitation.
Minerva had once told her that Harry’s guardians were the ‘worst sort’ of Muggles.
Molly thought that was giving them rather too much credit. The longer she watched, the more angry she became. They were practically torturing the boy. He was an indentured servant, and one who couldn’t use magic to help himself along to boot. Her children had chores, of course, but nothing like what Harry was going through. He was doing his schoolwork by flashlight under his covers because they’d actually forbidden him from studying! Appalling wasn’t a descriptor vile enough for what she was witnessing. It was enough to turn her stomach, or would have been if she weren’t spitting mad enough to burn right through the revulsion into an absolute snit. She needed to move fast to get around Albus, and that was exactly what she was going to do.
The muggle solicitor wasn’t hard to find. A quick Confundus Charm ensured that she got absolutely everything she needed, fine text and all. Her formal magic wasn’t the best, but it was enough to make a document magically binding. The next morning she rapped on the Dursley’s door just as they were finishing up breakfast. She didn’t wait for an invitation to come inside when Harry opened the door, instead storming past him directly into the kitchen and whirling her wand about in a flurry that rattled every cabinet. These muggles would have no doubt that she was an Angry Witch who was Not Afraid to hex them to within an inch of their lives. She thrust the bundle of papers directly in Petunia Dursley’s face, correctly assuming that whatever magic bound Harry to them would be through the awful woman’s relation to sweet Lily Potter.
“You don’t want him,” she snarled, giving the papers a little shake. “I do. Sign and let me take him away from here or I swear by my brothers’ graves I will spend the rest of my life making sure you never have a moment’s peace again.”
They signed, of course. Albus would get over it.