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Harry did nothing but cry.
He cried for Lily and James, screamed and sobbed relentlessly, because he was too young to understand that no matter what he did, he would never get to see them again. The year he’d gotten was all that he’d ever get.
Love, however, he did not lack. Sirius refused to give the baby— his godson— to Hagrid, distrustful of any arms but his own to hold Harry. Remus returned to their apartment two weeks later, scratched and sore from the wolves, to find the aftermath of a war and his husband holding a crying baby.
They adjusted, of course, but it was hard. The crying mirrored Remus' and Sirius' at night and pierced the heavy air during the day. It devastated them to no end, that they knew what would help but they were gone forever. Permanently. Permanence was terrifying, wasn't it? To know that something was there forever. Or gone forever. Harry would scream and sob, heart-wrenching sounds that they couldn't bear to Silencio, until there would be nothing left in his lungs and he'd become limp and exhausted in the wrong person's arms.
Except. Except. He stopped crying when he turned two.
He stopped talking, screaming, babbling, sobbing. He stopped reacting much to them at all. Silent and wide-eyed, he didn't utter a single noise.
Abruptly, Remus and Sirius missed the crying, the mark that meant Harry was still there. That James and Lily were still there, bundled into an infant with so much life in his tears and frowns and screams.
No, there was no sound at all, and it was much, much worse.
They were told it would go away. It didn’t.
They were told he’d grow out of it. He didn’t.
They were told it wasn’t normal. It was for them.
They weren't sure if it was the curse or simply psychological, but Mungo's psychology department consisted of primitive logic and insulting accusations and Remus and Sirius swiftly took Harry away from their probing fingers and beady eyes.
Fourteen years later and Harry still hadn’t said a word. By this point Remus and Sirius were more than used to it. He was fluent in English, of course, and was taught to read and write— from an exceptionally young age, as Sirius liked to boast to everyone— but he simply did not speak. Not a word, not a noise.
Remus, from the beginning, pushed to leave him be. After all, he spent much of his childhood dragged from healer to healer in hopes of curing his disease, and he didn’t want to do the same to Harry, not even in good conscience. He didn’t want Harry to feel as if he needed fixing.
Sirius took longer to accept that Harry might never talk again. He was terrified it was his fault, and terrified that James would have been disappointed in him, and terrified that he failed James and Harry. Eventually Remus knocked sense into him and he shed his anxieties and embraced who his godson was at that moment instead of searching for a way to change him. He, of course, brought Harry up loved.
Their household used almost solely sign language and by the time Harry began Hogwarts, much of his teachers knew BSL as well, either through warnings from Sirius— his position in the Wizengamot was more than enough to convince most of them— or just an intent to be as helpful to Harry as possible. The latter group contained Minerva, Hagrid, Flitwick and Pomona. only Severus refused. He was never particularly rude to Harry, as Harry’s parents had feared, but instead refused to accommodate him and docked points if he didn’t answer a verbal question in class. It was cruel and, by Harry’s fifth year, was a behavior that had led to multiple angry meetings between Sirius, Remus, Albus, and Severus.
They were concerned about bullying, of course. But from nearly the first day— Harry was sorted into Ravenclaw, smart and witty but sometimes endearingly dense and oblivious— a Hufflepuff named Cedric practically adopted him into his ‘merry band of mismatched wix’ as Remus called it, which held a Slytherin whose hands never stopped shaking, a Gryffindor with a fascination with dinosaurs, a Muggleborn Slytherin with the will of a bludger, a chirpy Ravenclaw who lacked literal smarts but could recognize how people were feeling uncannily well, and lovely Luna Lovegood a year later. Harry found other friends, but it was this group that carried him into his fifth year. The merry band of mismatched wix were not separate from the others because they were different from the others, but because they were similar to each other.
Harry loved Hogwarts. He landed on the Ravenclaw quidditch team his first year because of the contagious cockiness of his yearmates— while most of them fell off of their brooms, Harry remained aloft, and Flitwick plopped him into the seeker position. Ron, the Gryffindor who he'd befriended young because their parents were friendly, cheered for him at every game— at least, until Ginny joined the Gryffindor team.
Luna discovered an old spell Harry's third year that allowed the wand to write words into the air. Harry used this often, though at first he always wrote the words facing him, and they were reversed to anybody who attempted to read them. They found that the color and texture of the letters could be manipulated with and Harry made sure to use glittery, messy letters when he was in Snape's class, getting glitter all over the floor. This of course infuriated Snape but any attempt to get Harry to clean would have Harry writing Sorry in the air over and over again and getting even more glitter on the floor.
Voldemort never did rise again. Maybe it was the lack of a rat to bring him back— long disappeared into a black dog’s mouth on October 31st 1981— or maybe it was the lack of death eaters left standing after Marlene Mckinnon single-handedly seized the auror department and launched attacks on every known stronghold of theirs. Who knows.
Either way. It was the end of fifth year, and Harry had just kissed Cedric Diggory for the first time after Harry’s team won the cup for Ravenclaw, and he was okay. He hadn’t uttered a word in fifteen years, but that was okay. He was okay.