Chapter Text
At the Dursleys, Harry's options for resistance are limited. His magic offers what little is available and takes the first steps—it keeps Dudley from hitting him when it can, it opens the closet door when he needs it to, and it keeps Harry's hair long.
Harry's hair is long and getting longer. He doesn’t want to cut it—he likes that it hides his scar, he likes that it hides his eyes and the anger in them, he likes the way it feels in a summer breeze. It usually curls behind his ears, unruly and wild and dark, and Petunia couldn't ever cut it but even at Hogwarts Harry doesn't mind it.
So first year comes and goes and it doesn't get cut. He goes back to the Dursleys for summer, bruises around his neck, burns on his hands, and Petunia holds him down and shaves it all off. Something in Harry, something he felt when his teacher tried to kill him, gets very hot and then very cold, and he thinks as loudly as he can NO. By the next morning, it's all back, and two inches longer.
(The first thing Harry’s magic did, when other children’s accidental magic floated toys or opened flowers, was say don’t touch me. Don’t touch me. Harry’s hair grows and his skin bruises and the anger in him, never absent, finds release where it can.)
Nobody really says anything until third year. By then it's just above Harry's shoulders, curly and wild and thick, and when Sirius sees him he still sees James but he sees Harry too. "Just like your father, though your hair is a lot longer, and with-"
"My mother's eyes, yeah," says Harry, smiling shyly, running a hand through loose curls, Sirius looking at him with so much fondness that it's blinding.
When Sirius says goodbye, he winds his fingers through Harry's hair, pushes it past his ears and presses a long, hard kiss to his forehead. Hermione thinks to herself that they look almost similar, Sirius and Harry, despite Harry's brown skin and Sirius' gauntness, both a bit wild in the eyes and with wilder hair, Sirius’ matted and thin and halfway down his back, both too skinny, both deciding to become family because they have no one else to claim.
Fourth year comes and Ron pulls Harry by the hand around the Burrow, says “Mum’s trying to cut Bill’s hair, Harry, you’d better not let her see yours!” Fred and George tug him between themselves and shove a quidditch hat onto his head, teasing him for his rugged looks until Charlie interrupts them by saying he likes it.
Everything starts to go wrong at the Quidditch World Cup, and when Ron stops being friends with Harry after he’s entered into the Triwizard Tournament, Harry’s hair hangs in front of his face to hide his expressions, like he used to do at the Dursleys, feeling sullen and bitter and, mostly, horribly hurt.
Rita Skeeter reaches out to tug Harry's hair into place for the group photo. He slaps her hand away without thinking, her nails longer and gaudier than Petunia’s but her outraged gasp just the same, and maybe she would say something more but Viktor clears his throat and Cedric puts a hand on Harry's shoulder and Fleur tosses her long blonde hair with a loud noise. Their protection isn’t much but it’s more than he expected.
(When they see him, they feel frustration and outrage that he’s competing at all, but they also see a kid—fourteen years old, without any champion’s family to visit him, with messy hair that he has to push out of his eyes.)
Harry's hair is just past his shoulders now and when he goes to the ball, Parvati and Padma roll their eyes at its unruly mess until he gathers it all into a bun. They give him a bottle of curl product for Christmas, and when he tracks them down, they show him how to use it, long nimble fingers detangling and twisting their way patiently through what he had always believed to be untameable. The twins wolf whistle at him until his face burns, but he's smiling.
Voldemort pushes his hair back roughly and Vernon uses it to pull Harry around and that summer Harry cuts it all off, sobbing in the bathroom. It doesn't make anything better and he can't stop crying, hands full of dark locks, and the next morning it’s back, tentatively brushing his skin. He works his fingers through its length and reminds himself to breathe, tries to stop thinking about the way Cedric’s eyes glazed over, tries not to remember how Sirius had to wash blood out of his hair and off his face when he sat on the hospital bed afterwards, with Ron and Hermione holding a hand each as Harry sank deep into numbness.
When Harry finally gets taken to Grimmauld place before his fifth year, after a dementor attack and before a court appearance, he's angry and hurting. Molly says "Oh, Harry, don’t you think it's time for a trim?" and Sirius says "He's not your son, Molly," and Harry wakes screaming more often than he doesn't. Bill ruffles his hair and bumps his shoulders, Charlie winks at him across the table, Remus smiles from the doorway, but as hard as he tries, Harry can't forget how these people let him compete in the Triwizard competition and yet now choose to call him a child. He finds old pictures in Sirius’ room of the Marauders, young and smiling, and traces their faces with his finger, James’ hair a wild cloud that didn’t dip past his ears while Sirius himself had long glossy hair to his shoulders, far healthier than it is after a decade of nutrient deprivation.
At school, Umbridge carves words into Harry's skin and tries only once to cut his hair as punishment. Now nearing his collarbones, it comes back before she's even lowered her wand, and Harry hides his smile—this is his oldest act of resistance and he’s well practiced at it.
George and Harry get kicked off the quidditch team for beating up Malfoy, and the quidditch team holds them back, George’s face bright red and Harry’s hair as agitated as he is. Angelina is near tears at their lifetime ban but she still shoves at Harry’s head as affectionately as ever, sighing helplessly as Fred slings arms around George and Harry and presses sloppy kisses to their cheeks, still mumbling curses.
When teaching the DA, Harry ties half his hair up into a bun, and when kissing Cho, her hands get caught awkwardly in his curls.
Harry wakes up screaming and hissing and tasting blood. He stands in Dumbledore’s office knowing how it looks when a grown man is bleeding out, knowing how it feels to kill, and Dumbledore still won’t look at him. He doesn’t think he should visit Arthur—he did that to him, he did—but the Weasleys drag him there, and when Molly sees him she brushes his still sweaty hair out of his eyes and pulls him into the tightest hug of his life. Ginny holds his hand and squeezes. The twins, for once, are fully serious when they wrap arms over his shoulders and tug him to their sides.
Harry has another dream. Sirius is screaming. Kreacher is laughing. Then they're in the ministry and they’re fighting and Harry is so angry at the Death Eaters (grown adults who watched him writhe in agony not even a year ago) and so proud of his friends (so scared for them, he’s so scared for them) but they’re cornered until the Order arrives. Sirius is at his side and curses are flinging everywhere, and Sirius calls out “Nice one, Harry!” and then Bellatrix shoots something bright from her wand and Sirius goes tumbling back, back, back and through the veil.
Harry is screaming and straining against Remus's arms, his heart a twisting mass of NO NO NO, his hair coming loose and tumbling in front of his eyes, streaming behind him when he shoots off after Bellatrix.
When Voldemort possesses him it splays lifelessly across the floor and his cheeks, collecting glass and dust and blood.
Harry loses control in Dumbledore's office, his magic and his anger bursting out of him in explosive violence, tears on his face, his throat sore from yelling, then I don't want to be human and insurmountable grief. His hair an unruly mess that he can't find the energy to tend to, and he covers his face with his hands, hurting so badly he can't find the words to describe it.
He goes back to the Durlseys. His hair keeps growing.
It's sixth year and Draco is up to something and Harry's hair is by now quite long, and he pulls half of it out of his face into a bun or ponytail when he's coaching the quidditch team—Ginny takes it down when she kisses him. Slughorn eyes him with confusion—Harry knows he doesn’t look quite as people like Slughorn expect him to, with his long hair and his jagged scar and his mother’s eyes at their flintiest. Luna, with a small thin scar on her throat from the Ministry attack, sometimes tracks Harry down and winds things through his hair, little bells and charms and rings, and she thinks of it as protection so Harry keeps them in as long as he can. He misses Sirius. He fights with Hermione about the potions book, but when Ron is off with Lavender, Harry spends evenings in front of the fire with Hermione braiding his hair back and out of his face, his curls winding around her fingers until it gets easier for her to breathe.
Dumbledore dies. Snape kills him. Harry was right all along and his rage is an inferno.
By the time seventh year arrives and Harry and Ron and Hermione are on the run, Harry's hair is so long that he takes to wearing it in a ponytail, reaching halfway down his back. Ron’s hair grows long too, behind his ears, nearing his shoulders, while Hermione cuts off a huge chunk of her own tight curls in a fit of locket-enhanced frustration. The tent becomes a world of their own, hiding from the outside, wearing Molly’s sweaters to feel a little closer to all the people they’ve left behind. Ron listens to the radio constantly. Harry hears every name listed as dead and they weigh on his heart like stones. There isn't a day that passes where it doesn't feel as though they are running out of time.
After Ron leaves them, on the quiet nights, Hermione untangles his verifiable mane with her fingers and he braids her wild afro out of her eyes, trying to tame their hair without the products or the time that they used to have at disposal, recapturing a little bit of nostalgic routine from easier times, and the space where Ron would usually sit takes up so much room that it aches.
They face Nagini and Harry’s wand is broken and they keep going because they don’t have any other option. Harry gets pulled into the lake, and his hair streams behind him as the locket wraps around his neck and tightens. Ron pulls him out. He pulls a sweater over Harry's thin, shaking chest and with shy, careful fingers he brushes Harry's long hair out of his eyes and behind his ears. When the image of Hermione and Harry rises out of the locket before Ron kills the horcrux, false Harry’s hair isn’t as long as real Harry’s, and it’s glossy and thick and healthy—real Harry’s hair is a mess. Real Harry is half starved and exhausted and angry at Dumbledore, at Voldemort, at himself.
They get captured by snatchers and Hermione is tortured while Ron throws his body against the doors. Bellatrix pulls Harry’s hair up and over his forehead, says, “Is this him, Draco? Is it?” Draco’s cowardly eyes go teary as he stammers a confused reply, still willingly committing atrocities with his family but feeling guilty about it, even after all this time. Dobby dies. Bill and Fleur feed them a cooked dinner for the first time in months. Harry has a long, hot shower, and he washes his hair for longer than is probably acceptable, and when he emerges he feels almost human again.
They rob Gringotts and free a dragon, and everything begins to move very quickly, until Aberforth is opening a portrait and Neville is climbing out of it, bloodied and bruised and beaming.
Harry’s known he was a figurehead since he was eleven, understood the danger of it at fifteen, and hated it at seventeen—this is the heaviest the responsibility has ever felt, with children’s faces staring up at him in the Room of Requirement, tell us what to do, the remaining members of the DA saying tell us who to fight, Ron and Hermione brushing up against his shoulders like they always have.
Harry takes a breath. He stands up straight and gathers his hair into a messy ponytail and asks the children hiding in the Room of Hidden Things if they know where to find the last missing horcrux.
There’s so much death that night. Lavender, bloodied and raw, left twitching on the floor as Parvati screams and clings to her clothes. Fred, with his brothers bowed over his prone form, his parents sobbing roughly. Lupin and Tonks, hand in hand, leaving their son parentless—Harry stares at them and feels so very old, and so terribly alone. Colin Creevey, eyes open and unseeing as though again petrified. Snape, with memories and blood and tears sliding over his skin and spreading across the floor, one hand fumbling at Harry’s cheek and touching his hair, you have your mother’s eyes.
When Harry walks into the woods and turns the resurrection stone, it shows him his loved ones, all dead and gone. Remus—his body not yet cooled. Sirius, healthier than Harry had ever known him to be, hair glossy, saying quicker and easier than falling asleep. His parents, too, Lily and James, barely even twenty-one. James really does look like Harry—he’s a bit taller, his skin a shade darker, and his hair is wild and thick but it stops at creating a halo around his head, and Harry's tumbles down his back. Lily, her bright eyes warm, an exact match to his, her shiny red hair nearly reaching her waist. Their ghosts are only a few years older than him, now.
When Hagrid carries Harry into the courtyard, sobbing, cradling Harry like a child in his arms, Harry’s long hair spills over Hagrid's arms and swings from step to step. Ginny screams no and McGonagall screams NO and Hermione and Ron make horrible, choked off noises. Neville bursts into flame and keeps fighting and kills the snake, just like Harry asked him to, so bold and brave and beautiful that Harry’s pride nearly swallows him whole.
He stands up straight and slides of the cloak and says, “Tom.”
They fight, as they always do, as they have been for Harry’s whole life. At the end of it, Voldemort—Tom Riddle, mortal once more— falls to the ground and lies there, an empty husk of what he was. He's dead, and Harry is alive.
Harry sways in place and stares down at him, and the battle around them stops dead—someone screams, and then a great resounding cheer rises up and drowns out the sound of Death Eater rage.
Harry stands in place and lets the others subdue those who remain. Hermione and Ron sprint desperately towards him, weaving around obstacles and shoving Death Eaters violently out of their way, though he doesn’t notice until they collide roughly into him. He staggers back, hands raising helplessly, as Hermione’s arms wrap around his waist and squeeze and Ron pulls him into his chest, still so much taller than Harry, his biceps straining from how tightly he’s holding Harry close. They hold him between themselves and Harry slumps forward, lets himself be held, resting his forehead against Ron’s collar, one arm around Ron and one arm around Hermione.
“He’s gone,” says Harry, wonderingly.
“Don’t you ever do that again,” says Hermione, “Don’t you ever. Oh, I hate you.” Then she bursts into tears and says, “I don’t mean that, you know I don’t, I love you, we love you, we do. Oh, thank god.”
Ron laughs wetly, the sound torn from somewhere raw. “We did it,” he says. “Harry, you did it, it’s over. It's over.” He presses a kiss to Harry’s hair and exhales shakily. Around them, the battle draws to its sputtering end, Death Eaters stunned or killed or bound, families and friends drawing their loved ones close or falling helplessly to their knees next to their bodies.
Later in the evening, someone will set off fireworks over Hogsmeade, and people will begin trying to repair Hogwarts. Later in the evening, those with fight left to give will storm the Ministry and tear it apart. They’ll begin the thorough, difficult process of cleansing the world of magic from the people and ideas that brought it to war—they’ll free the muggleborns in Azkaban, arrest the officials who turned in their friends, submit every Ministry employee to enough Veritaserum to determine who did and didn’t believe in what they were doing, persecute everyone who did Voldemort’s job for him and made it that much easier for the Wizarding world to collapse into hate.
Later in the evening, Luna and Neville will find Ginny and hold her close, let her sob into their shirts, because they kept Hogwarts’ children safe after Harry left but they’ve lost people anyway.
Later in the evening, Harry will stumble next to Remus and Tonks’ bodies and sit by them until he starts to cry, wanting their shades to have been real but knowing that they weren’t, wondering how he’s going to tell Andromeda, wondering how he’s going to raise Teddy. Hermione and Ron find him, their eyes and cheeks wet, and they sit next to him, Hermione’s head on his shoulder, Ron’s fingers carding through Harry’s loose curls.
“Let’s go,” says Hermione, eventually. “We deserve to rest,” she says. Harry is numb, but Ron and Hermione know how to deal with him like this, and he trusts them and lets them manoeuvre him around. They pull him up to their old dorm room and ward it strongly enough that no one will even be able to approach the room (sending a message to McGonagall and the Weasleys to let them know) and get changed sloppily (Hermione in Harry’s sweatpants, the boys without shirts at all,) then fall into bed all together, Harry sandwiched in the middle. Hermione puts a hand on Harry’s chest, palm pressed to the new lightning-bolt scar that cleaves it nearly in two. Ron slings an arm over Harry’s waist and grips Hermione’s shirt (which is really Ron’s own shirt) in his hand.
They murmur things to each other, warm and safe in the dark, so full of relief that they can’t yet feel it, until they fall asleep. It's over, and they are alive.
Life goes on, as it does.
There are funerals upon funerals and rebuilding and reconstruction.
Hogwarts is repaired, the Ministry is dismantled and thoroughly cleansed. A new organisation takes its place, the Government of Magic, headed by Kingsley Shacklebolt as Minister, Hermione as Head of Justice, Ron as a key strategist on the GoM’s board of members and responsible for implementing new strategies and programs—one of the first he designs is to protect children in abusive households, like Harry, like Sirius, like Snape. Harry stays at home in Grimauld, and he helps the GoM, and he hunts down Death Eaters and trains Aurors, and he visits Teddy two or three times a week, who flickers his eyes green when he wants Harry to hold him, and grows a cloud of dark, loose curls when Harry walks through the door.
A year after the Battle of Hogwarts, Ron and Hermione and Harry hand in their resignations. Kingsley promises they’ll have a place when they return, but they don’t care, they’ve had enough of responsibility and pressure and they deserve a break so that’s what they give themselves.
They go to big dinners with the former DA, and they go to the beach, and they travel to places they’ve always wanted to go. They manage to heal Hermione’s parents, and they play quidditch, and they do a million other things, relearning joy, relearning trust, relearning kindness.
The war is over and their world is recovering. They recover with it.
Eventually, many years later, Harry stands in front of a classroom where he himself was taught by teachers who more often tried to kill him than help him. His hair, now trimmed to reach just past his collarbones, with a few streaks of early-onset white, is kept in a loose bun. His students call him Professor Potter, and his godson takes a lot of joy in it. His family, most of whom are not related to him, call him Harry. All is well.