Chapter Text
‘Time shall unfolded what plighted cunning hides.’ — Shakespeare, King Lear Act 1 Scene 1
Very little had changed at 4 Privet Drive. Aunt Petunia had new shoes that possessed a menacing heel click. Dudley kept expanding his waistline. Uncle Vernon’s moustache turned greyer—or perhaps it was just that his complexion turned ruddier. Harry did his best to not be there to make such fine distinctions. The library was quiet and the woods were green. Uncle Vernon had secured all his school things in the cupboard. Magic Harry was all locked up and smallest bedroom Harry was a scrawny, annoying eleven year old boy with a long list of chores to fill up his days. They wore him out and faded his dreams of Quirrell. And Voldemort.
And of the Mirror.
Having him thrust back upon their lives had drawn the Dursleys’ attention to him. It took him over two weeks to gather up his shadows and drop into obscurity. Some chores were more important, such as cooking and cleaning the house. Aunt Petunia wasn’t going to overlook a dirty kitchen. Not that it had been in the immaculate condition he’d left it. Uncle Vernon cared about the state of his car. A little shadow play made it look glossy and expensive. Harry made sure to be seen polishing it. Dudley was trickier. He’d had to give up the enjoyable game of giving Dudley better food than his parents. It agitated Petunia, and he wanted her complacent.
Smeltings apparently had classes in advanced bullying and Harry Hunting as a sports option. Dudley had organised his gang to find Harry whenever he was out of the yard (and they weren’t eating or at the cinema or playing video games or watching telly). At home he avoided being alone with Harry. Perhaps he thought Harry couldn’t deal with a group. He hadn’t counted on his cousin becoming much faster and more wily a target. The enjoyment of the hunt melted under the summer sun.
There was one thing truly different at Privet Drive. He had to write a letter weekly to Professor Flitwick. This had been presented to the Dursleys as practice of his penmanship. The day after he got back, Petunia sat him down at the table and handed him a stationery kit that included a fountain pen. “You are to write a letter to your teacher. They didn’t say what to put in it, but if you don’t do it they will be coming here and I. Will. Not. Have. That. Do you understand?”
“Yes, Aunt Petunia.”
“They furnished the stationery. The envelopes are addressed and stamped.” She stalked off.
Harry didn’t know how else to think of it. She didn’t storm. She didn’t stomp. She moved in a stiff, jerky way as if repressing violent impulses, firing those clicky heels in random shots. How had Professor Flitwick arranged this?
He didn’t tell Aunt Petunia that the fountain pen was self-inking. He wrote carefully; the bit about penmanship was more than an excuse. Having no idea what to write about, he rambled on about the nice pen and how fat Dudley was getting and that the roses were very fine this year. How magical it was to watch a green bump swell and show stripes of red between the green. The unfolding of the petals in a graceful swirl was as beautiful in its way as a unicorn.
Dudley had chopped off a bunch of rose stems and he and his gang had used them as whips to slap other kids with. Somehow Harry got in trouble for this even though it was entirely obvious who had done it. All Dudley had to do was blubber and blame Harry.
Dudley was going to have to be dealt with.
Plan One: Pin him down.
“Say, Dudley, do you still play ‘Wolfenstein’? Can I have a go while you’re out?”
“No, I’m still playing it.”
“Can I play it when you get a new computer?”
“No, I’ll need the old one too.”
“But you never play it any more.”
“Yes I do!”
“Can I play it with you?”
“No! And don’t come in here!” Dudley went into his room and started the game, turning up the volume so that Harry could hear him playing the game that Harry wasn’t allowed to play. Mission accomplished, for the moment.
June afternoon was one of the prettiest rhymes in England. It was Saturday. Lawns had been mowed in the morning and pale English people were out getting their yearly sunburns. Harry wrapped himself in shadows. Nobody he’d met in Little Whinging could match Professors Dumbledore or Snape for penetrating gazes. Still, the petty nosiness of neighbours snagged on him like a dragged fishhook. He practised his sneakiness on the way to the library and to the park.
On the truncated stem of a murdered rose, another bud had started to grow. By the trembling of a tiny green leaf he knew it. Summer was near. He followed a bee to one of the trees they’d met in. He stood on a protruding root and leaned against the trunk. An ant marched into his field of vision. Its legs moved with steady confidence that never acknowledged gravity. Gazing up and past it, he glimpsed bits of blue sky through the canopy. Despite having learnt that talking aloud to trees could backfire on him, he said, “It seems ever so much longer than a year since I was here.”
“A year is a small word to fit the journey of the world.”
He’d rehearsed all kinds of things to say to her. Things he wanted to tell her. He looked up at her as she lay along a branch with her hair hanging down on both sides. One hank had been woven into many tiny braids ending in pieces of polished bone and metal. Were those soda can tabs? He did not ask. “It’s like the journey of this ant. Marching up the tree.”
She stretched out her hand to him offering a piece of honeycomb. He took it and ate in little nips to feel the resistance of the wax against his teeth. She lay with her cheek against the branch, sunlight sparking one eye to a sunny day and shadowing the other in clouds.
He never tired of looking at her. Today, songs passed between them without any words given speech. The wild honey liquefied on his tongue and spilt sunshine down his throat.
Honeycomb was delicious and probably good for him in all possible ways, but he was almost twelve and a reliable stale cheese sandwich was not to be scorned. He circled around Privet Drive to Mrs. Figg’s house.
It had a kind of fitful shimmer, the way a light bulb beginning to fail flickers. He knocked on the door.
Mrs. Figg opened it and smiled. How had he not noticed before the secrets that smile held? Or the way she had trouble meeting his eyes?
“How are you, Harry?”
“I’m fine, Mrs. Figg. I thought I’d come by and see if I could do anything for you in your yard or in the house.”
“Er…”
Behind her, a kitten stared at him from around a corner. Its blue eyes were round so that it should have appeared innocently surprised like a photo in a soppy calendar. Yet he felt looked at, and yes, judged. “Mrs. Figg, you have always been so kind to me,” he said, before she could respond. “May I clean your litter trays for you?”
He felt like he was asking the kitten instead. The kitten looked like it wasn’t sure he was worthy to scoop its poop.
“Oh. Oh, yes. I’m. I’ve. They could. I think so.” Mrs. Figg stepped back. “Come in.” She coughed over all her unsaid words.
Harry went in. “Do you have any new ones?”
“Oh, there was a litter three months ago. A female and a male. They—”
“I meant, new litter trays. So I make sure I clean all them.” He smiled smilingly.
“Er. No. Oh, you’re always underfoot.” She was looking at the kitten, but he felt spoken to.
The kitten turned its back on them and began to climb the stairs. Its bum wriggled before each mighty bound.
“This one is the female. I named her Branwen and her brother Bran. Isn’t she a lovely colour with the white body and the dark points?” Mrs. Figg sounded nearly as smug as Draco Malfoy, no small feat.
The kitten flirted her plumy tail. Her dark ears were swivelled back so Harry knew she was listening. They followed behind her like an entourage.
“She doesn’t look like any of your other cats.”
“It’s the first time I’ve bred this coat.”
“Why are they named after cereal?”
“It’s not—they’re names from history. After a while, it gets hard to find new names and I thought they should have special ones. Something better than, oh, ‘Pearl’, or ‘Sooty’.
The kitten reached the top step and looked back at them disdainfully, or maybe that was her default look.
As Harry cleaned the litter trays, Mrs. Figg drifted in and out on a cloud of cat hair, chatting randomly from the overflow of unsaid conversations. She’d never been so talkative before. Perhaps she was tired after a year spent talking only to cats and people in shops. Branwen and Bran sat on a shelf and supervised Harry.
When Harry was eating his cheese sandwich and bonus apple, he felt he was safe to ask, “So, Mrs. Figg, how long have you been raising part-Kneazles?”
“Since after my husband died. He was allergic, you see, they couldn’t do anything about it. Said he’d crossed a Kneazle and… and… oh, dear.”
“I have learnt some things at Hogwarts, you know.”
“Oh, dear, maybe you should go.”
“I don’t want the Dursleys to know. What a fuss they’d make.”
Mrs. Figg bit at her lip. “I wasn’t supposed to put my nose in. Just watch. I didn’t even offer to babysit. Your aunt just showed up on my doorstep…” Her eyes were blinking rapidly and mascara shed black flecks onto her cheeks.
“Please don’t be upset. You were as kind to me as you thought you could be. I won’t come over any more than I used to. It’s better that way, you know.”
She nodded and stood up with a scrape of her chair. “If you’d be so kind as to mow the lawn,” she mentioned in a voice that hardly wobbled.
Harry could see the knowing in her eyes, and the fear. The secrets all but clanked from her chained tongue. “Of course. Thank you for lunch.”
Somehow, mowing Mrs. Figg’s lawn was like a victory dance.
Entirely failing to register on any scale of world issues but nevertheless important to Harry, Dudley was not very good at video games, which is why, once more, his computer was broken. Harry had broken the computer he had never touched in a room he didn’t go into except under Aunt Petunia’s supervision to clean but obviously he was breaking in there on the sly like a domestic ninja to sabotage Dudley’s life.
Aunt Petunia started muttering about locks and the hairs in Harry’s ears bristled.
Plan Two: Get them out of the house. Appropriately, it needed a two ploy tactic. First, he scoured the newspaper advertisements and found one for a newly opened restaurant that was offering a discount to local guests. He left the paper cunningly folded so as to draw attention to this. Vernon smacked him with it first, but a newspaper wasn’t the worst thing he’d been smacked with.
Harry kept an ear open to figure out when they would go. On the afternoon of the chosen day, he said to Aunt Petunia, “The Professor wants to hear how I’m doing on my summer homework. May I get my books out of the cupboard?”
She sent him to his room. He put his ear to the floor and heard the raised tones part of her phone conversation with Vernon.
The final result was that he was allowed to move the books to his room, but not his wand, which he didn’t mind since he wasn’t allowed to use it anyway. Under Petunia’s grudging vigil, he took the books out, stacking them so she could see the cover of each. If her mouth got any tighter it would never open again.
Apparently they were meeting Aunt Marge at the restaurant so that she could get in on the discount. But she was supposed to come in for a drink before going home. Aunt Petunia gave him some chores so the garden would look extra nice for her sister-in-law.
While the Dursleys dressed up to be seen to eat a meal savoury with the taste of saved money, Harry got started in the garden He trimmed the edges of the lawn and raked up the cut grass. The Dursleys nearly ran over his toes as the car pulled out. Next he tackled the rhododendron, which was no longer blooming and needed to have the browning blossoms snipped.
Someone was looking at him. Someone close. Someone magical. Harry cupped a cluster of flowers and tilted them to the side. The big blue eyes of a house elf gazed up at him. “Hello. I don’t remember ever seeing you at Hogwarts.”
“Dobby is not being from Hogwarts,” said the elf, trembling. His body gathered in a visible intention to move.
“Don’t go, please.”
“The great Harry Potter says please to Dobby.” The blue eyes rounded more than a kitten’s, so alarmingly round that Harry worried they might bulge from the sockets.
“You look upset. If you sit under the rhododendron and rest a few minutes, I’m almost done with the garden.”
The elf started sniffling into a corner of its tea towel. Harry politely averted his gaze.
“Harry Potter must not return to Hogwarts.”
Harry pinched his mouth shut on the question that tried to get out. The house elves didn’t riddle like Summer or Aslan, but they responded to the pattern. He’d go as far as he could without asking questions. “If I didn’t go to Hogwarts they would come here looking for me.”
“Harry Potter is not understanding. There is danger, so much!”
“It was like that last year. Voldemort tried to kill me. It’s still better than here.” Quirrell’s crumbling body swam up out of some dark space where secrets festered. He fixed his mind instead on Summer’s honeycomb, on the sunborn sweet and secret munch of it.
Dobby attempted to look sly. “Harry Potter’s garden looks nice. Maybe it could look not nice at all.”
Harry sat back on his heels. He’d never expected to be threatened by a house elf. He’d seen their magic. Dobby could make a wreck of the garden. “You’d only make Hogwarts better in comparison,” he said, thinking of Petunia and Vernon’s likely reaction.
“Harry Potter must not be killed!” the elf wailed.
“And it is being the bean sídhe, you are.” It was Summer. He had never heard her voice sound like an old knife sharpened to a smiling curve. Faster than his eyes could track, her fingers fastened on Dobby’s ear. Dobby couldn’t seem to move except for his bulging eyes. “Well met.”
“He came to warn me.” Harry saw shadows swirling around Dobby as if trying to take him away, and failing. The little elf cowered. “That there was danger at Hogwarts.”
“He m-must… s-s-stay away!” Dobby tried to pull free of Summer’s fingers yet accomplished no more than a twitch.
Summer looked at Harry. “Behold your master, who commands and you must abide. Is he not mighty?”
Harry sat in front of the bushes with his clippers beside him. In the way Summer had of fitting into space, she was down on one knee next to Dobby and still under the bush. That they were made smaller or the bush larger, Harry could not tell. “I have seen house elves wield magic easily, with no wand or words. Yes, he is mighty.”
Dobby’s mouth dropped open.
“And cruel, that he would torment you to bend you to his will?”
“That he would undo my work and shame me before… my guardians, yes.” Summer had upended the situation and the shifting perspective dizzied Harry.
“No, no,” whimpered Dobby. “Dobby must save Harry Potter.”
Summer let go of his ear. Dobby sat down abruptly, staring up at her.
“That is not a master, but a champion.”
“Dobby, why do you think there is danger?” Harry instantly regretted the question, because Dobby started banging his head against the walls of the house.
“Dobby cannot say. He must be punished for his disloyalty. He is a bad elf.”
Summer sat down with one knee raised and her arms loosely clasped around it. “How the yoke of inauspicious stars wearies.”
Little hairs raised in waves over Harry’s skin. He chose to let Summer’s words hang in the air. Drawing Dobby away from the wall, he could see the scars visible on the spindly body. Only a handful of Hogwarts elves had such scars and they had arrived at Hogwarts after the families they had worked for had died out or given them clothes. So whatever danger would be at Hogwarts this year, Dobby’s wealthy family had something to do with it and Dobby had heard about it. In spite of the powerful bond between house-elf and family, he had decided to warn Harry.
“Please don’t hurt yourself. You’ve been very brave and I deeply appreciate you trying to protect me. Do you understand that I have to go back?”
Dobby skewed a glance at Summer. The same faint smile on her lips, she had not moved towards him since she let him go. “Yes, Harry Potter, sir. Dobby understands and will no longer block Harry Potter’s mail.”
An owl appeared and dropped letters on Harry’s head. By the time he’d collected himself and the letters, Dobby and Summer were gone. Harry finished his yard chores and went in to study and read his mail. Also, he had some leftovers he was permitted to finish off. They weren’t quite bad yet.