Chapter Text
“You're haunted by the things that you've seen
I know they give you terrible dreams
We all know you'll wake up soon and rattle off that dust”
Rip Van Winkle - Shannon & The Clams
“Troubled souls unite
We got ourselves tonight
I am fuel, you are friends
We got the means to make amends
I am lost, I'm no guide
But I'm by your side
I am right by your side”
Leash - Pearl Jam
“What ya gonna do, child
When your mommy goes away?
She won't take you
Hm, she'll leave you astray”
Train - 4 Non Blondes
The train from London to Surrey took only about forty-five minutes, leaving Eleanor Capulet with just enough time to get a start on her essay for History of Magic.
The topic was on Witch Burning in seventeenth-century America and how young Salem witches used to compete to see who could be set to fire the most in a single week. As the train rolled along, leaving behind the tall buildings of London for the sparse suburban landscape, Eleanor read about one witch, a young girl named Rosalie Fier, who managed to get burned at the stake thirty-two times during a particularly rainy October. More interestingly though, were the varying reports as to why she had gone for such a lofty attempt. One historian speculated that it was in an attempt to woo a lover of hers named Sam Miller, the whole thing some sort of dastardly attempt at showing off. But another historian said this couldn’t possibly be true, despite the historical evidentiary support of Sam Miller’s diary, because Sam Miller was both not a wizard and not a man. Sam Miller was nothing more than a muggle woman.
Eleanor’s thoughts were yanked out of the 1600s and away from Rosalie Fier and Sam Miller when she heard the train conductor over the speaker announcing the stop they’d be arriving to shortly. It was Eleanor’s stop, Little Whinging, the neighborhood where Harry Potter, one of Eleanor’s friends from Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, lived with his muggle family. Harry Potter, who had absolutely no idea she was on the way to see him that morning for his birthday.
Eleanor gathered up the various debris that had accumulated around her during her short trip, a result of her trying to work on her wizarding homework, wrap Harry’s presents, and eat breakfast all in the space of about two seats. She stuffed it all back into her bag unceremoniously, gathered up the empty crisps packets, the apple-core, and the empty cup of hot cocoa, before shoving them into a nearby rubbish bin. Just as she forced the lid shut, the dinging sound of the train announced their arrival.
With the map of Little Whinging stuffed into the back pocket of her overall-shorts and her patched backpack slung over her shoulder, Eleanor exited the train, walked out onto the brick platform, and pressed play on the walkman tucked into her front pocket.
4 Non Blondes’s Bigger, Better, Faster, More! crackled to life, Eleanor’s most recent obsession, and she pulled the map out to check again for Number 4 Privet Drive. With a deep breath and a slight volume adjustment to block out the sounds of the chattering people around her, Eleanor set off.
It didn’t take long for her to find the small neighborhood tucked away in a small little nook of Surrey. Rows and rows of perfectly matching houses with unnaturally clean lawns spread out before her like some sort of eerie replicating pattern, making Eleanor remember a movie she had seen with her father last summer called The Stepford Wives. A horror film from the seventies, it was about a group of men in suburban America who turned their wives into robots, rendering them unable to argue or stand up for themselves, all acting out some horrible idea of the perfect American dream, identical and lifeless.
Something about Little Whinging’s rows and rows of perfect lawns and identical brick facades made Nell think the inhabitants of Privet Drive might view the movie as a happy little aspirational story.
Nell had planned the next part of her plan quite carefully. Though she had never been known for her detailed thinking, she felt quite confident in this one. Afterall, she had been practicing.
After only a few blocks of confused wandering, she found Number 4, a house that looked just the same as all the others except for its shiny brand new car sitting in the driveway, gleaming in the hot morning sun. Glancing around to see if anyone was watching, finding nobody immediately visible, hopefully due to the early hour, Nell stole away along the side of the house, trying to make as little noise as possible, despite the heavy pack swinging from her shoulders.
She reached the back of Number 4 and looked up at the windows on the second floor. This part of the plan relied on her distant memory of Fred Weasley's story about when he and his brothers had picked Harry up in a flying car through this very same window last year. She scanned the glass panes until she found what she was looking for. A snowy owl, perched in a cage, just behind one of the windows. Jackpot.
Holding on to the straps of her pack, stealing one more glance around to make sure nobody was looking, and finding, with relief, that the hedges in the backyard provided a sort of cover, Eleanor jumped.
She fell back to the ground.
She took another deep breath and focused on the feeling of the wind around her, quietly tousseling her hair against her cheek.
She jumped again.
A moment, just barely, where her feet caught against the air, her trainers sliding as she tried to get purchase.
Not enough. She fell again, this time on her bum, her pride hurting more than the impact. Again, she righted herself, allowed the music from her headphones to center her, and jumped so hard that her thighs ached with the effort.
A quick scramble, her hands waving out against the air, slowly becoming pliant, and finally, finally , she was airborne. Flying. She rose to the window, unlatched it the second her hands made landfall, and climbed through, tumbling to the carpeted floor of Harry’s bedroom.
Immediately, the blanketed lump in the bed against the wall shot up, smacking at the bedside table for the pair of glasses that sat on it. Eleanor watched with an amused grin she couldn’t help as the legs of the lump kicked out against the bundled blankets. With a last disjointed scramble, the lump finally fell away to reveal Harry, his normally messy hair even more wild than usual, and his face a mix of confusion and, well, maybe a bit of fear.
“Surprise!”
Immediately, Harry was up and shoving Eleanor into the wardrobe on the other side of the wall, his hand over her mouth as he did so. When she stumbled in, nearly falling to her bum again, her head knocked against the wire hangers, and Happy slammed the door shut, locking her in.
Eleanor listened, trying not to move much as to not jostle the hangers now catching in her hair, as she heard the sound of another door bursting open from the other side.
A gruff man’s voice was shouting at once.
“What on earth? Who’s here? What was that?!”
“Nothing! I… er– I was dreaming,” Harry said. “Sorry. It was just me.”
“Dreaming? You were dreaming ?!”
“Er—yes.”
“Well, no more of that! Keep it down! You’ll wake the neighborhood!” barked the voice that must have come from Harry’s uncle, a man Eleanor had only met once. It had been a short meeting, unpleasant for several reasons, one of those being the way the man had looked at Eleanor’s father, William Capulet, with loathing in his eyes. Not for any sort of Wizarding reason, but for the much simpler and centuries old prejudice that came from the realization that Eleanor and her father were very poor.
“Alright,” Harry said. “Sorry.”
After a moment of silence where Eleanor suspected Vernon Dursley was waiting for the true source of the noise to reveal itself, Eleanor finally heard the door slam.
After another moment Harry opened the door to the closet, and fresh air met Eleanor in a lovely cool rush. It was quite the contradiction to the expression on Harry’s face, as he looked rather put-out.
“Happy Birthday?” Eleanor tried again, her voice much quieter now.
“Are you mad?”
“Probably. Er— Draco says I am all the time.”
“What on earth are you doing here?” Harry demanded, his voice quiet but harsh as he moved aside to let Eleanor emerge from the closet.
“I’ve got your presents. Not everyday you turn thirteen, ya know. Thought I’d surprise you.”
“You couldn’t have sent them by owl?” Harry asked. “That’s what Hermione and Ron did.”
“Where’s the fun in that?” Eleanor asked. “Can’t see you open them if I send them by owl, now, can I?”
“You’re mad.”
“You’ve said that already.”
“Is one of your presents getting me murdered by my uncle?”
“Oh, hush. You never responded to my letters last year, alright? I wanted to make sure you got these this time.”
“I didn’t get any of your letters last year. Because of Dobby,” Harry argued.
Eleanor stared at him for a moment. “Dobby? D’you mean Draco’s house elf, Dobby?”
Harry nodded.
“Are you messing with me?” Eleanor asked, eyes narrowing. “How could he have anything to do with my letters?”
“It’s a long story, alright?” Harry said, walking back to his bed and sitting down, brushing his hand through the mess of black hair as though it might help somehow. Eleanor took in the sight of his baggy pajamas, consisting of some sort of old stained t-shirt and bottoms that were entirely too big, held up by several safety pins that couldn’t have been very comfortable to sleep in.
“Don’t you want your presents?” she asked.
Harry sighed, a last resigned attempt at his hair, before he looked back up and finally let himself smile.
Eleanor fell to her knees on the carpet and dug into the rucksack. First, she extracted tupperware, probably unnecessarily wrapped in golden paper, inside containing ten slightly melted chocolate cupcakes, each with the number “13” written poorly in gold shimmery icing. She had made them the night prior with her father as she wasn’t sure if Harry had ever had a birthday cake from how Hermione and Ron had described his aunt and uncle. A worry that was feeling all the more true by the second.
She handed over the tupperware and watched with delight as a smile crept on Harry’s face as he ripped apart the packaging. He grabbed a cupcake from the top and devoured it hungrily, chocolate icing smearing across his face in a way that kind of reminded Eleanor of a little kid. Or of how she ate, if she were being honest.
“These are really good,” Harry said through a mouth of chocolate, wiping off his lips with the back of his hand.
“Thanks. I made them out of a box,” Eleanor said, ignoring the slight dread she felt at how hungry Harry seemed. Maybe his eagerness was more than just excitement.
The next thing she pulled out was a very tightly packed plastic bag that she couldn’t wrap in wrapping paper since she’d be shoving it in her rucksack anyway, and it would surely be crushed by the time she reached Surrey. She handed it over with a quick apology for how it looked.
“I don’t care,” Harry said, still smiling.
She watched him open the plastic bag, several t-shirts, jeans, flannels, and jumpers all falling out in a heap onto his lap.
She began to explain. “So, I’ve not got much money, as you know. But , I’ve noticed at the start of year that your muggle clothing looks like it never fits right. I asked Ron, and he said that it’s because you only ever wear the Dursley’s old stuff. I couldn’t afford to buy you anything new, but I figured you might like to have some clothing that fits you at least a little bit better. It’s my dad’s stuff, so it will probably still be a little loose; he’s pretty tall, but I wear his old stuff all the time, and I dunno. Thought you just might like having some clothing that wasn’t from the Dursley’s,” Eleanor rambled.
One of the biggest downsides to her lack of money, in Eleanor’s opinion, was how much it restricted her gift-buying ability. Eleanor had resumed her paper route of the year prior, but still ended up spending quite a bit on the birthday gift she had bought for Draco. A cassette for an album that had only been released a few days prior, which made her gift late technically, but, in her opinion, it was worth it. She had bought one for herself too, which made her dig into the savings she had been slowly building over the years for the pet she was determined to finally be able to afford.
But, instead of looking disappointed with the gifts like Eleanor had feared, Harry’s smile had broken even wider as he parsed through the pile of clothing with the sort of delicacy that was probably unnecessary with how her father had treated them over the years.
“I love it. Really. Cheers,” Harry said, as he went to chuck off the shirt he was already wearing so he could replace it with one of the ones that Eleanor had brought.
Eleanor felt her face heat uncomfortably as her eyes shot down to her hands. She had seen boys shirtless before, obviously, but it never failed to embarrass her somehow. Especially nowadays, the embarrassment seemed to reach new heights. Even with the fact that Harry was nothing more than a friend and the fact that she still harbored a ginormous crush on Ron’s older brother, Fred Weasley, Eleanor still felt weird to see Harry without his shirt on. If it weren’t his birthday, she might have told him off for his lack of manners, as if she were some authority on the subject.
When she suspected him done, she looked back up and found him admiring down at the front of the shirt. It was still large on his bony frame, but it did fit a bit better than the one he had been wearing. At least, she thought, it was definitely a lot cooler, the front detailed with the logo of one of Eleanor and William’s favorite record stores in London. William had given it to her earlier in the summer during his annual closet cleanout, which he spent the whole time complaining that she allowed him to buy too many record store t-shirts. She had responded by telling him it was actually just a part of her secret evil plan to inherit them all one day. She called it an investment and he called her a dork.
“I’ve also got Draco’s gift for you,” Eleanor said, pulling out the box wrapped messily in green paper that still looked far better than her own gift had.
“ Malfoy got me something?” Harry asked, incredulity on his face reaching a new height.
Eleanor rolled her eyes as she handed over the present. “You say that as if you two didn’t save each other’s lives, what, a few months ago? Yes, he got you something.”
Harry shrugged. “I didn’t get him anything.”
“Sounds like a failure on your end.”
Harry rolled his eyes and unwrapped the present.
Out fell a hairbrush.
Eleanor couldn’t help herself. She snorted, then covered her mouth with her hand to keep herself from laughing too loudly.
Harry held it up, then stole a glare at Eleanor. “Funny.”
“I had no idea, I swear,” Eleanor said, hand still over her face.
Harry chucked it aside on his bed, then looked through the rest of the package. He pulled out a whole carton of Chocolate Frogs, at least ten packages within the crinkly plastic.
“Oh, wow,” Harry said, looking it over. “That’s… actually quite nice of him.”
“Draco being nice? What a shock,” Eleanor said sarcastically. “It’s only what I’ve been trying to convince you all of for about a year or so.”
“Yeah okay. Ten chocolate frogs against two years of being a prat. Sounds like easy math to me.”
“Do I have to bring up the whole saving-your-life thing again?”
“It went both ways,” Harry said while he gathered up the various gifts around him, tucking them all into the plastic bag that Eleanor had given the clothing in before he shoved it all under his bed behind a few plastic storage boxes.
“I can’t believe you came here,” Harry said once he was done. “I can’t believe you flew into my bloody window. That is how you got in, isn’t it? I was too busy panicking to see.”
Eleanor nodded, ignoring the jab. “I can jump to fly now. Er– sometimes.”
“That’s good,” Harry said with a small nod. “Better than watching you fling yourself down towers,” he added, referencing another one of their misadventures from their first year.
“Dumbledore said I’d get better at it over time,” Eleanor explained.
“I heard you were practicing at the Burrow last month. After you came back from Malfoy’s.”
Eleanor nodded.
“Ron said you wouldn’t tell him what happened in the pensieve.”
Eleanor felt her stomach drop. She had expected this, knew Harry was going to ask. Didn’t mean she had been looking forward to it. “Er– yeah.”
“Do you want to talk about it?” he asked, eyeing her.
She sighed. “Yes. I suppose I ought to get it over with. Not here, though. Can you get out of the house? We can go around the neighborhood or something. It’s a bit of a long story and I’d rather not get you killed by your uncle in the process of telling it.”
Harry pondered for a moment before he nodded. “Meet me down the street. Er– are you going to be able to go out the way you came?”
Eleanor looked over at the window. “Would your aunt and uncle hear if I jumped around in your room for a few minutes?”
“Yes.”
Eleanor paused before standing up and climbing onto Harry’s bed while he stared at her. She left her pack off, as all it had now was her summer work, and she didn’t want to deal with the extra weight holding her down.
She jumped on the bed.
Missed.
Harry’s eyes went wide, shooting back and forth to the door as the springs creaked under her weight.
She jumped again. Got lucky this time and caught it on the second swing.
“You look ridiculous,” Harry said finally as he walked over to the window to open it, while Eleanor floated awkwardly behind.
“Oh, shut up.”
Eleanor flew immediately down to the ground, landed, and retraced the path she had taken to enter, skimming along the side until she got back around front. Trying her best at nonchalance, she resumed a casual stroll along the pavement, as if there was nothing at all strange about her whatsoever. She walked down to the end of the street, noticing how the sun had gotten even hotter as the day had wore on, warming her skin and perhaps threatening to burn.
After what felt like far longer than it should have taken, Harry finally appeared at the other end of the street. He spotted her and walked over, still wearing her father’s shirt, but now also wearing an old pair of his jeans, rolled at the ankles and held up with a belt. It wasn’t so much better than the clothing she’d seen him in before, but it was something, she guessed.
“So–”
“Wait,” Harry said. “Let’s keep going.”
They walked further away from the Dursleys, rounding the many identical streets that Eleanor would have needed her map to navigate. Luckily, Harry seemed to know where he was going, tracing paths with a determined set to his eye. After a moment of tense silence, Eleanor noticed a grimace underlying his features.
“You alright?” she asked.
Harry sighed. “No. Vernon’s just told me my Aunt Marge is coming for the week. He’s picking her up later today.”
“And… this Aunt Marge is a bad thing?”
“She’s awful. Last time I saw her, I accidentally stepped on her dog, Ripper’s, foot. Bloody thing chased me up a tree. And she didn’t call him off until midnight. Thought I was going to have to sleep up there.”
“Jesus Christ.”
Harry laughed in a sort of self-deprecating way. “Yeah. Well– I’m going to use it to get Vernon to sign my Hogsmeade letter. You know, the permission form we got. He’s told her I go to some school called St. Brutus’s for Incurably Criminal Boys.”
Eleanor snorted. “Well… you do break about a hundred school rules every year.”
“Alright, McGonagall .”
“Oh shut up. How are you going to use that for the form?”
“Told Vernon if he wants me keeping up with his story, then he has to sign the form.”
“Not bad,” Nell said.
“Cheers.”
They walked in silence for a moment, passing by identical house after identical house.
“I can’t wait for Hogsmeade. I don’t know very much about it, but it all sounds very cool. I asked Draco and he said there’s loads to do there like a sweets shop and a joke shop and a haunted shack.”
“Yeah, well,” Harry said, looking a bit conflicted. “I hope I get to go.”
“I’m sorry your family’s so rotten,” Eleanor said after a moment.
On this, at least, she could relate.
Finally, they reached a little park, and Harry led them behind a large children’s climbing structure that would block them from the view of passersby neighbors. They sat amongst the wood chips, backs to red plastic, and Eleanor began fidgeting with the hem of her overalls as she tried to think about where to start. Harry watched her, and, to her relief, didn’t try to hurry her along. He seemed content to wait for her to be ready.
“I watched the memories,” she said finally, after a few minutes of quiet, the only sound coming from the occasional dog-walker or passing automobile.
Harry nodded.
Nell continued. “My mum… she wasn’t a good person. She… I was wrong when I thought she might have been innocent.”
Harry sighed. “I’m sorry.”
And Eleanor began in earnest.
She told him all about the plan she had made with Draco Malfoy last year. She told him how she went to the Burrow where Fred let her in, and how she used their Floo to travel to Malfoy Manor. She explained the pensieve, the memories she poured into it, and how she and Draco dunked their heads in to watch them and how it felt as though they were there, actually back in the past.
It wasn’t so bad of a story at first. She didn’t mind describing seeing her mum get her Hogwarts letter, or the inherited wand, Sickersnapper . She didn’t even get hung up telling him about the Gryffindors that bullied Ottilie, or how Lucius Malfoy had defended her.
It was a sharp downhill after that, though.
She described watching her mother come home to her parents, Nell’s grandparents, sometime later in her years at Hogwarts. She told him how they saw the dead dragons at the Hemlock home, poached for their hearts for wand-cores. Eleanor began crying again when she explained to Harry that they watched Ottilie murder them for it, her own parents, still wearing her Slytherin robes.
“ Merlin ,” Harry said, his eyes wide. He reached an arm out to awkwardly pat Nell on the shoulder while she sniffled. It wasn’t much, but it was nice. It made her feel a little less alone, at least.
Eleanor rushed through the rest. Explained how her mum started murdering other people soon after that, other poachers. Then how Lucius Malfoy recruited her for the Death Eaters.
She explained seeing Voldemort.
Wiping away the tears, she said, “I don’t know how you’ve done it twice now. Seeing him… it was awful. He’s horrifying. Even though it was just a memory. It’s like I could still feel his power.”
“I haven’t ever seen him at his full strength,” Harry explained. “Both times I saw Voldemort–”
Eleanor flinched, but Harry ignored it.
“-- he was weakened. First time was on Quirrell’s head. Then from that diary– but that version of him was from when he was still a student, and he was still confined within the book, mostly just a memory.”
“Oh,” Eleanor said. “Well, he wasn’t weakened in my mum’s memory. Not at all.”
“What did... what did he look like?”
“Awful. Really really awful. His face was all flat and his eyes were red. Like a snake or something,” Eleanor said, before faltering. “I dunno. It’s not about what he looked like… it’s more so what it felt like to be near him. He was so… so powerful. Kind of like being around Dumbledore, I guess, but worse, obviously. With Dumbledore— you never feel like he’s going to kill you just for the sake of it, you know?”
Harry grimaced. “That’s… that’s horrible.”
“Yeah.”
Eleanor continued. She described watching her mother meet him, watching the spell he cast over her that neither she or Draco recognized, described the horrible moment she watched her mother take the Dark Mark. How Lucius and Theodore Nott’s father had to hold Ottilie down because of how painful it was.
The tears began again after that. With as few words as possible, she explained how her mother had killed Edgar Bones and his wife on Voldemort’s orders. And their two young children.
“Susan Bones has a right to hate me,” she said as she finished through the lingering tears.
“What?” Harry asked.
“The girl in Hufflepuff. In our year. She hates me. For good reason,” Eleanor said. “She was his niece. Those kids were her cousins.”
“That’s not your fault. You didn’t even know your mum had done all that,” Harry said.
Eleanor shrugged. It was the same thing Draco had said to her in a letter that summer, though perhaps a bit nicer, as Harry hadn’t called Susan Bones a blithering idiot who can’t tell a thirteen-year-old from her dead Death Eater mother.
Eleanor finished the story, describing her mother meeting William in muggle London, then the final memory of Ottilie in New York City, receiving the note warning her that you-know-who had found her and was coming.
“And that was the end?” Harry asked, his voice soft.
Nell nodded, rubbing her knuckles against her eyes.
Harry’s mouth went thin. “I’m really sorry. I know… I know it wasn’t what you were expecting.”
“I should have though, shouldn’t I? It’s what I’d known my whole life,” Eleanor said.
“It’s different to actually seeing it,” Harry said. “And you didn’t know about your grandparents. How, er– what your mum did.”
Nell sighed, dropping her teary eyes again to the edge of her overalls. “It doesn’t explain things, though. I still have no idea what any of it is meant to mean.”
“You think it has to mean something?”
Nell nodded. “Or else… Why leave it? Why leave any of it? Why leave those memories for me to watch?”
Harry sighed. “She still defected, didn’t she? Wasn’t that part of it?”
“Yeah, but I already knew that. Basically everyone does. She met my dad and defected for true love or whatever rubbish. The memories only said as much.”
“What about that note?” Harry asked.
Eleanor looked up. “What about it?”
“Who sent it?”
Eleanor’s eyes dropped again. She hadn’t even thought about that. She had never considered that the note had to have someone on the other end. “It was signed from ‘L’. Maybe… maybe Draco’s dad? Lucius.”
“Why him?”
“They were friends. Or, um, coworkers, at least.”
“That’s so weird,” Harry said.
“Trust me, I know.”
After a moment of silence, Harry looked back up. “You didn’t… you didn’t happen to see my parents there at all? They were, um, only a few years younger than Lucius Malfoy. Might have been first years when he was in seventh, I think.”
Nell shook her head. “I’m sorry. The only Gryffindors I saw were those two— Natalie and Christopher, I think. That was the only memory of Ottilie at Hogwarts.”
Harry gave her a weak smile. “Just thought I’d ask.”
Nell nodded. She understood. If anyone here deserved to have been left memories by their dead parents, it certainly was Harry. But instead, they had these. Horrible memories from a horrible person.
“What are you going to do?” Harry asked.
“Is there anything I can do?” Nell said. “I s’pose I could turn them in to the Ministry. Officially tie my mother to the crimes if I wanted and get Draco’s dad sent away in the process,” she said, sighing.
She had already gone over the thought and decided against it immediately when she had. Draco’s dad was never pleasant, but she thought sending him away to Azkaban wouldn’t really do anyone any favors right now. Ultimately, she told Draco it was his choice. If he wanted him sent away, then she’d give him the memories to do so.
They hadn’t brought it up since.
Harry sighed. “You still have those notebooks, don’t you? From the, er— Pandorette.”
“Yeah. Been looking up loads of spells to try and figure them out. Going to try again when we’re back at school,” she explained. “Draco has been too, I think.”
“What do you thinks in there?”
“Hopefully not the sentient memory of my mother trapped within,” Nell said with a small laugh. “Think it would be a bit redundant to open the chamber all over again now that you’ve killed the basilisk.”
Harry chuckled. “Maybe there’s a whole other chamber. Whole other basilisk.”
“Hope you still got that sword.”
They laughed again, the breeze around them gentle.
“How is, erm… Malfoy, by the way?”
Nell’s head shot up. “You’re asking about Draco?”
“Nevermind.”
Nell laughed. “No, sorry. Just surprising, I guess. He’s fine. His dad has been better this summer, apparently. He said his mum was really really mad when she heard what had happened at the end of last year. How he went missing and all. Apparently Lucius didn’t tell her when it happened.”
“Why not?”
Nell shrugged. “I think Dumbledore sent them the letter only a little bit before you and Draco got back up. Maybe Lucius just didn’t have time.”
Harry hummed, his eyebrows furrowed. “What about the whole, er, Dobby thing? How Malfoy freed him?”
“Draco was, as Ron put it, off-his-rocker . He barely remembers doing it at all. He told me that the only thing he does remember about why he gave Dobby that sock was because he thought he was down in the Chamber again or something. Said something about a phoenix and the sorting hat and wanting to make sure Dobby got the sock. I’ve got to be honest, it didn’t make much sense to me. Or even to him, I think.
“Anyway, Madam Pomfrey explained the spell and the concussion to his parents. Said he could have died, really. He was lucky to have woken up at all. Guess it was hard to stay mad at him after that. Besides, I think they have other house elves. So, well… yeah. Draco’s been alright.”
Harry grimaced for a moment before he smiled. “Malfoy was a lot nicer when he was concussed.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Eleanor laughed.
Harry glanced at his watch. “Oh, I really ought to get back. Aunt Marge and all.”
They stood up and walked back down the path. Eleanor felt lighter for having told the story, and for the fact that Harry didn’t take what she said as proof that Eleanor was somehow evil too. Even though Eleanor sometimes still feared that, laying in bed at night, the image of her mother haunting her. Or in her nightmares where she was the one getting the Dark Mark and screaming.
In the quiet of their steps, Harry spoke. “Did you hear about the escaped convict?” he asked.
“Escaped convict?”
Harry nodded. “On the news this morning. Bloke by the name of Sirius Black–”
Eleanor gasped, stopping short. “Sirius Black? On the muggle news? Did— did you really just say Sirius Black?”
“You know the name?” Harry asked.
“Yes! Oh god, he was a Death Eater. He’s in prison. Daphne— Daphne told me last year. Killed a bunch of people. My mum’s parents had tried to set up an arranged marriage with her and him when they were babies, was rejected, the form was in the Pandorette, like with the one for Draco’s dad… oh! And, um–”
“What?” Harry demanded.
“He’s Draco’s mum’s cousin.”
Harry’s eyes went wide.
“Does that mean he’s escaped Azkaban? If he’s on the muggle news?” Nell asked.
“I… I guess. Just said he was a convict escaped from prison.”
“The Ministry must have told them or something. If he’s a big murderer and the muggles are in danger… I guess it makes sense.”
Harry nodded. “I thought Azkaban was inescapable.”
Eleanor shrugged. Both having grown up in muggle worlds, they didn’t really have much to offer each other in the realm of speculation.
After a few more criss-crossing roads, they approached Number 4 Privet Drive. Harry ducked behind a shrub and extracted the rucksack Eleanor had left behind, handing it to her. As Eleanor took it, she dared a glance at the house that she was sad to know Harry would have to return to alone. The voice of his uncle was still in her mind.
Before they bid their goodbyes, Eleanor stopped him. “If anything… if anything goes wrong,” Eleanor tried with her best attempt at severity. “I mean with your family. Er– you know you’re always welcome ‘round mine, right? You’ll come to London if… if you need to?”
Harry nodded, but Eleanor didn’t feel like it was enough.
She reached out and grabbed him by the shoulder, staring into his eyes intently so he’d listen. They were about the same height, so it felt like it could work. “I’m serious. If they give you any trouble, you’ve got to come to London. The train was so simple, only like an hour, really. You can stay with us. My dad would love to have you, I promise. You’ve got my address, don’t you?”
“Yes,” Harry said before she made him repeat it back to her.
“Do you promise?” she asked.
“Okay, alright,” Harry said, matching her stare and nodding. “I promise.”
And, with that, Eleanor really shouldn’t have been surprised when, a week later, Harry Potter showed up on her doorstep, trunk in hand, in the middle of the night.