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In the back yard at Number 4 Privet Drive (Little Whinging, Surrey), two boys were at play. One had black, untidy hair, glasses, and clothes that looked a bit too big for his rather skinny frame. The other had blond, sleek hair, small, sharp eyes, and looked as if he snuck a few midnight snacks too many. Both looked about the age of ten or eleven, and both were starting to get a sunburn.
They were not, of course, playing with each other. In the case of the blond boy, this would have meant descending the social ladder by several rungs and risking being seen to spend time with his cousin, whom everyone knew only wasn't the most bullied boy in their school because the teachers were somewhat afraid of his mum and kept an eye on the playground when he was on it. And in the case of the black-haired boy, it would have meant putting up with his cousin's tendency to accidentally break things, or get bored and insist on changing to a new game, generally one that involved running, hitting, or video-games, none of which the black-haired boy enjoyed.
So the blond boy, whose name was Dudley, continued to wait for his actual friend to arrive, and in the meantime pretended to fight off assailants with his stick; and the black-haired boy, whose name was Harry, continued to try to carve a stick into a - well, he wasn't sure yet, but for now he contented himself in scraping the bark off and getting rid of the knots. The knife had been a gift from his godfather, an early birthday present; his mother had given his godfather a frustrated look, and then conceded that Harry could use it, but that if he cut all his fingers off he wasn't to come crying to her.
Harry's godfather had winked at Harry and said, "She's all talk, Harry. You cut your fingers off, you come straight to your Mum, she'll fix them back on in half a second. Mums are magic, you know."
For some reason, that had made his mum shove his godfather's shoulder and say, "Sirius, I am warning you - " and Harry's godfather had laughed, holding his hands up in surrender.
"It's an ordinary pocket-knife!" he insisted. "Nothing for you to object to."
Later, when she tucked him in, Harry had asked his mum what all that had been about. His mum had said, "Nothing, love. Just old jokes. Go to sleep." But it stuck in Harry's mind, and he thought about it as he cut (carefully, cutting away from himself exactly as Sirius had said and Uncle Vernon confirmed) and sliced away at bark and other bits.
Neither boy was particularly sensible of the fact that he was being watched. At first, only by one woman: tall, blonde, and with the air of a woman who is fighting (and knows she is) against natural endowments to try not to look like the bitchy gossip from a thousand soap operas. She chose her clothing and her jewelry with care, so that her neck would bring forth the adjective elegant instead of long or skinny; her hair-style had been chosen precisely so that it would make the word for her features strong instead of horsey. At the moment, she was biting her thumbnail and staring out of the window at the blond boy, Dudley, with a worried eye.
Her kitchen was of the sort that is exceptionally clean at all times, and filled with the sort of dishes that one admires in catalogues - at least for the most part. It had curtains with a pattern of small flowers on them. She had a cup of tea on the table where she sat, and a number of forms that appeared to be asking her for this number or that number, this name or that name. She didn't see the red-haired woman come into the room, but she did hear the other woman's steps. Or she should have, but when the red-haired woman said, "No saucer, Petunia? What would the neighbours think?" in a lightly teasing voice, the blonde woman startled and turned around wide-eyed.
She recovered herself quickly and rolled her eyes. "Oh hush, Lily," she said, turning back to her forms as if she hadn't been so lost in thought her sister had managed to sneak up on her. "There's tea in the pot, it should still be warm." And she busied herself with her pen.
Lily cast her a knowing look, but poured herself some tea (hers in a rather battered mug painted with a child's best effort at a deer) and limped to the table before she said anything more. "That," she said as she sat down, nodding to the stick that Dudley swung around to fend off invisible pirates, or whoever he was fighting, "looks an awful lot like a Smeltings stick to me, Petunia."
Petunia shot Lily a warning look. "Don't," she said. The forms she was currently engaged in filling out did, in fact, have Smeltings written across the top.
"What happened to hating the entire tradition of boarding schools," Lily asked, leaning back in the kitchen chair, "and telling Vernon 'no'?"
"You must have heard," Petunia said, shortly. She did not look up from her work. Lily sighed.
"No, I told you," she said. "Nobody needs to have their sister listen in on their fights with their husband, I muffle every time I think you're starting up." She did not mention what else she did the same thing for, if she caught an earful. Her sister simply sighed.
"It's very important to him," Petunia said. She put the pen down and brought her thumbnail to her mouth again. "I hate it," she admitted, "but I think - " Petunia didn't finish the sentence, or choose to actually say, I think this is a fight that would go all the way, but the expression on her sister's face said she understood. "Besides," she said, more briskly, "it does have an excellent academic rating, and I think it might be good for Dudley to be around other boys his age. New boys, I mean." Boys, she did not say aloud, who are not Piers.
Lily, who didn't like Dudley's best friend anymore than his mother did, patted Petunia's hand. "He'll be fine, I'm sure. And if he's not you know he'll tell you. Dudley would never hesitate to call you the minute anything went wrong. You'll probably get a call from him protesting the school's mandatory bed-time the first night he's there. Or the fact that the kitchens get locked up overnight."
Petunia stopped worrying at her thumbnail. "You're probably right," she said, in a voice that still held a world of dire predictions.
"Look at it this way," Lily told her, her own eyes going to her black-haired son and taking on a slightly faraway look. "You can at least be reasonably sure that nobody at Smeltings has any reason to want to kill Dudley, right?"
Petunia shot her sister a sideways look and said, "Oh, Lily, surely you're overreacting. Both Dumbledore and Black said - "
"Dumbledore's not telling me everything," Lily interrupted, flatly. "And frankly, Tuney, I'll trust Sirius Black to worry enough about my son when, when - "
"When pigs fly?" Petunia said, dryly, and Lily gave a short, humourless laugh.
"No, I've seen that - when Vernon votes Labour." Lily sighed and scrubbed a hand over her face. "But what am I supposed to do? His birthday's tomorrow. There's no Muggle school that would be any safer, and he needs . . . " She paused, and then sighed again. "He needs to go somewhere he's normal."
"I'm not sure that's possible," Petunia said, voice slightly waspish, and Lily lightly kicked her ankle with her good foot under the table.
"Be nice," she said.
After a moment in silence, both of them watching both boys, Lily began, in an entirely different voice, "I've a question, Tuney."
"That's twice you've used that nickname today," Petunia pointed out, slightly suspiciously. "What are you after?"
Lily turned her own tea-mug around by the handle, and sighed. "I've got a present for Dudley," she said. "Well, two, really - one is that someone clever paid attention to the - normal world," and if you weren't listening closely, you might entirely miss the stumble and substitution of the word there, "to realize that Polaroids were a good idea, and managed to duplicate the idea for wizarding photographs. Sirius sent me one as his yearly guilt-offering; I can give him a picture of you all with it, if you'd like. The other is this - "
She put a box on the table. It was small, and the wood was quite beautiful. She opened it to reveal what looked like a short cylinder, also made out of wood, but shaped like a pen or a fat pencil without a point. "I know he likes cleverly engineered things," she went on, when Petunia said nothing, "secret things, and things nobody else could possibly have. This is all three. With a word, it will be a pen, a pencil, a magnifying glass, a pen-knife, a skeleton key, a thermometer, or a light." She demonstrated the last by picking it up and murmuring, lumi to it. The end lit up quite brightly, with a warm golden light. Lily then murmured, fini and the light went out. She put it back in the box. "I thought it might - " she paused. "If it bothered him that Harry's going and he isn't, I thought it might make him feel better. And if it doesn't, well, it's just an interesting and useful thing to have."
Lily watched Petunia's face for a moment, as a spasm of several things went across it, and held her breath. But in the end, her sister merely nodded, if a little jerkily, and said, "Just make sure he knows how to make sure nobody else sees it. Them. You know what I mean."
Lily tried to make sure that it wasn't obvious as she let out her held breath, and said, "Of course."
They both went back to staring out the window. After some silence, Petunia said, under her breath, "Damn it, Vernon," even though he was certainly not there. Lily reached her hand over and squeezed her sister's.
Outside, the boys played on, oblivious.