Chapter Text
Harry had never heard music. If he was asked, he would say there was music in the way ballerinas moved the one time he saw them on the telly when Vernon had fallen asleep and left it on, a slow kind of music when he was cleaning all day and his movements were steady and repetitive, and a wonderful music in the hands of skilled signers as they conversed in British Sign Language. See, Harry Potter was deaf. You might think that he developed the disability due to abuses from his brutish muggle guardians, the Dursleys, but he had been born that way and, quite frankly, didn’t consider it a disability at all. His Deafness was part of who he was, and he wasn’t ashamed of it the way he was of his scrawny frame or ill fitting clothing. At the very least, it meant he almost never had to hear the Dursleys yelling at him.
He had partial hearing in both ears, something the audiologists from the school called “residual hearing” and the Dursleys called “enough hearing to know when they were calling his name” - it usually wasn’t, but that was a separate issue, and they had many problems communicating because of it. If the Dursleys had ever bothered to learn any BSL, they wouldn’t have any problem communicating with him; after the school’s audiologist had diagnosed the hearing loss, they’d brought in a BSL teacher and interpreter. Still, his “family” mostly preferred to yell until even he could hear the shouting and to point aggressively at wherever he was supposed to be going - usually the kitchen, Aunt Petunia's garden, or the cupboard he called his room.
The raven haired boy was currently in the cupboard - a cramped room under the stairs whose walls rattled whenever his cousin thundered down from his own room every morning, the only thing that could wake him up since cheap alarm clocks weren’t loud enough for him. There wasn’t much in the room to indicate that a person lived there, just a lumpy mattress, a few changes of frayed clothing three sizes too large, and bare walls.
Harry was sitting on the center of the mattress, which was stained from dirt he brought in from gardening, with a threadbare book in his lap. It had an obnoxiously yellow cover and the pages were tissue paper thin from how often he’d flipped through them, but it was one of his most prized possessions. When he’d entered the school system and teachers had seen how he was physically unable to follow their directions because he hadn’t heard them, they’d called in an audiologist to assess him; the audiologist, a doctor who focused on hearing, was the one who had given him his first book on BSL and helped explain to the frightened child that he wasn’t broken or a bad student and how he desperately needed an interpreter in his classrooms. The Dursleys had protested, although less so once they realized that they didn’t have to pay for anything and having an interpreter meant that they wouldn’t have to pay for hearing aids, and Harry had met his interpreter before the year was out.
His interpreter was named Mr. Lupin, and he was a kind man who offered a small piece of chocolate to Harry each morning before Maths began. He got sick every few weeks - something that Harry accredited to “cooties” when he was very young and that some cruel students attributed to HIV when he was a bit older - but he was so kind and genuine that Harry would still pick him over any other interpreter offered if he’d had the choice.
Both his tutor and their relationship were strange but not unpleasant. When they first met, Mr. Lupin had seemed unsure of himself and his place in the world, had seemed confused by simple things like basic political or historical references, but Harry didn’t fault him. After all, the boy had spent most of his life locked away in a cupboard - and locked away by silence. Not the physical silence of his deafness, no, but by the lack of conversation in the house, by the lack of any noises that weren’t yelling, by the lack of friendly familial touches that could lend support or solace. At the very least, the animals he met while gardening for Aunt Petunia hadn’t seemed to mind that he couldn’t hear. According to his books, he was missing birds singing in the trees. Still, he suspected that most hearing people had never felt the nose of a rabbit bumping their palms to eat food from calloused hands. Their loss.
Lupin wasn’t normal, but neither was Harry. They both seemed slightly disconnected from the school they went to five days a week, as if they weren’t truly meant to be there and were just pretending they did. Like Harry, Lupin flinched at sudden movement and what Harry could only assume were loud noises; Harry was worried he’d be hit, but he suspected the instinct came from a different cause for Lupin. Whenever it happened, Lupin looked almost feral for the briefest second, his kind face twisted in a protective rage that would morph into kind concern as soon as he realized that Harry was alright. And sometimes, when he thought Harry wasn’t looking, he looked at Harry as if he were precious and loved. Harry had never experienced that before, and he liked it.
The semester before Harry’s eleventh birthday, Lupin was acting rather strangely at school - stranger than mysterious illnesses and chocolate that appeared out of his pockets without ever being melted or crushed. He was dropping hints about Harry moving on to bigger and better things, about him expanding his horizons, and Harry had had to ask a terrified but resigned “are you leaving me?” for the man to stop. Because no, he wasn’t planning to leave Harry Potter alone, not ever again, but they weren’t staying here either.
On July 31, Harry turned 11. It was a perfectly normal Tuesday and he was woken up, as usual, by his cupboard under the stairs shaking from an outside force. He dressed in the nicest clothes he had, a subtle birthday gift to himself, and pretended the threadbare and baggy t-shirt he wore was a suit or some other fancy, distinguished thing. He crept out of his tiny room, one hand always on the wall and bare toes pressing firmly into the ground beneath his feet so that he could try to feel and locate any sounds in the hallway. Through those, he noticed that the shaking he’d noticed before wasn’t actually coming from the stairs above him like he’d thought - and not from his doorway either. The floors shook in staccato blasts, and Harry used his sense of touch to follow it to its source. When he rounded the corner, one hand trailing on the wall despite the fact that his aunt would say he was leaving his grimy fingerprints on the wallpaper if she caught him, he froze at the sight before him.
In the living room, slamming a bright pink umbrella on the floor, was a giant. And by his side, papers tucked against his chest and looking resigned, was Mr. Lupin.