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A creak on the stairs startled Harry. He whipped his head around, only to knock his glass of water off of the kitchen table. Unfortunately, the glass shattered on the tiled floor, and Harry nearly lept out of his skin at the noise.
“Hey, Harry. It’s just me,” Mr. Weasley spoke softly, poking his head around the corner of the wall leading to the stairwell. His eyes shifted to the broken glass abandoned on the floor.
Harry jumped out of his seat. “I-I’m sorry! I’ll get a dust pan and clean-”
“No need, lad,” Mr. Weasley replied, stepping into the kitchen. He leveled his wand towards the glass and Harry clenched his eyes closed, sure that the end of his spell would find Harry and he would be in the worst trouble he’s ever been in his entire life.
There was a sound of glass clinking together and wind rushing through the air. When all was still, Harry opened his eyes. The glass was no longer on the floor, and Mr. Weasley stook patiently at the entrance to the kitchen.
“Be careful. I levitated the glass onto the table behind you there.”
“Oh,” Harry said, feeling heat creep up his neck, “I-I’m sorry, Mr. Weasley.”
The problem with being alone in a kitchen with Arthur Weasley after one a.m. is that Harry has been avoiding him ever since Ron and the twins rescued him from the Dursleys.
If Harry was embarrassed by the amount of times he has flinched over Mr. Weasley shifting in his seat reading the daily prophet or he retreated up the stairs when Mr. Weasley came home from work, then there was no way Mr. Weasley hadn’t noticed.
Which was another problem he’d been having.
“It’s quite alright, Harry. And you can call me Arthur.”
He was able to call Mrs. Weasley “Molly,” but couldn’t call Mr. Weasley by the name he has specifically asked Harry to call him multiple times every week.
There was just something that stuck to the back of his mind when he tried to get the name off of his tongue. Some fear he couldn’t even attempt to verbalize.
Mr. Weasley moved towards the stovetop, taking the kettle and gingerly filling it up with water in the sink. He took out two mugs and two teabags, setting them down on the counter. He reminded Harry remarkably of Aunt Petunia preparing afternoon tea for her friends.
“I’m sorry for waking you up,” Harry whispered as Mr. Weasley sat down across from him. The man immediately waved it off.
“Did Ron happen to tell you the prank that the twins played on him when he was seven? Perhaps involving a few spiders?”
Harry snickered despite the fact he was currently violently uncomfortable with this entire situation. “‘Course he did. He needs to defend himself somehow when Fred and George bring it up.”
“Well,” Mr. Weasley continued. “What he probably didn’t tell you was he woke up nearly every night for a month with nightmares about it. Myself and Molly took turns calming him down, but after a few nights we found something rather peculiar.”
Harry fiddled with the loose string on the night-shirt Ron lent him. He was pretty sure it belonged to Fred or George at one point going by the too-large sleeves and burned patches of fabric he’d found on the shirt. Ron would never treat one of his shirts so carelessly.
Ultimately, it was easier to deal with Mr. Weasley when Harry could only hear his voice. He was soft-spoken and had some kind of calm undertone to his voice that Harry quite liked if he didn’t think too hard about it.
“Both me and Molly did the same exact thing to calm him down. We sat with him and soothed his fears and attempted to get him back into bed, but whenever I did it, he would take nearly three times as long to fall back asleep.” Mr. Weasley chuckled, “Then was the fact he kept avoiding me. I couldn’t get him to play a game of wizard’s chess if I offered to make his brothers do his chores for a year. He wanted nothing to do with me anymore. We were stumped, and I was feeling like a complete failure of a father.”
Harry whipped his head up, meeting Mr. Weasley’s eyes. The man gave a weak chuckle and nodded. “All completely true, Harry. If I can’t soothe my son, then I have fundamentally failed as a father, at least in my own eyes.”
Harry didn’t quite know what to say. Vernon was Dudley’s father, but he didn’t think bribery counted as soothing. Vernon wasn’t the soothing type, he supposed.
Mr. Weasley continued, “One night, I heard Ron crying. It wasn’t my turn, but somehow Molly was still asleep, so I got up to soothe him myself. I sat down next to Ron, asked him what was wrong, and he said he kept dreaming that I would throw him in a pit of spiders and it scared him even though he knew it wasn’t true. It finally clicked that Ron was afraid of me.”
Harry shrunk into his seat. He didn’t like where this was going.
The kettle whistled softly under some kind of muffling charm. Mr. Weasley rose from his seat to tend to the tea. The familiar sounds of cups softly clinking and Arthur shuffling around the kitchen relaxed Harry into a somewhat reasonably calm state. Arthur placed the cup just within arm’s reach of Harry, letting him reach across the table to get the warm mug before sitting down himself.
Harry sipped the tea. The cup was chipped, the tea was most likely the cheapest on the shelf, but to him, it was divine.
“What did you do?”
He smiled somewhat sadly. “I told him I’d never do that to him. But just because someone tells you something, or even just because you know something, doesn’t always make you believe it.” Mr. Weasley sipped his tea, seeming to think deeply.
“After that, I was patient. I reassured Ron as many times as he’d let me, and slowly but surely, he came back around. It started with wizard’s chess once a week. Then I started encouraging him to sit closer to me at dinner and with lots of people around. One day I came home and he was so excited over something he had heard about the Chudley Cannons and completely forgot he was ever afraid of me. But then the next day he’d jump when I walked into the kitchen.”
“But did he…?”
Arthur nodded. “He did. I couldn’t tell you the exact day he stopped being afraid of me or the last time he had that nightmare, but one day Ron ran into my arms, laughing, and I realized he hadn’t been scared of me in weeks.”
Harry focused on the steam rising out of his mug, curling and twisting into the air before the tendrils became too thin for him to see any longer.
“Do you think I’m afraid of you?”
Arthur didn’t respond right away. “I think you are afraid of someone, and that person makes you afraid of me. Maybe it’s because they also have red hair, or maybe I dress like them, or maybe I speak like them, just like how Ron was most likely afraid of me because the twins look like me.”
“Oh.” Harry squirmed in his seat. “I’m sorry.”
“You don’t need to apologize. It’s not your fault.”
“No- but I-” Harry struggled, but Arthur stayed silent, allowing him the time he needed to compose himself. “You’ve got to find extra space for me even though you have a lot of other kids and buy extra food for me even though you don’t have a lot of money and worry about if people are going to do something to me when we go out and I- I feel like you’re going to kick me out and I’m going to have nowhere to go.”
“Harry,” Arthur placed his mug to the side, steepling his hands together on the table. “Me and Molly would never kick you out. You are always welcome here. You are remarkably smart, kind, and compassionate for a 12-year-old, and we would only let you stay somewhere else if we were sure you were safe and happy.”
Harry twisted the empty mug in his hands. He had the oddest sensation of grief hearing those words. He can’t remember anyone talking to him like that in his entire life. He has mourned over the loss of loving parents enough times in his life, but he never truly understood what he was missing as fiercely as he did until Arthur sat patiently across from him, eyes filled with an indiscernible mix of sorrow and understanding.
“Thank you, Arthur.”
“Anytime, Harry.”