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He grows up in his grandmother’s house, surrounded by relics of the family he lost: his mother’s faded Weird Sisters t-shirt hangs in the closet beside a tatty Muggle army jacket that belonged to his grandfather; his father’s shabby old professor briefcase is under his bed, filled with more ephemera than photographs. His parents’ Chocolate Frog cards. A yellowed bit of parchment with his mother’s first performance review as an Auror, chiding her for an incident involving an ill-timed Switching Spell. A curled butterbeer label that served as a memento of their wedding, with some unintelligible well-wishes scrawled on the back. There is only one photo of his parents together, at their wedding, in some dank no-name tavern outside Inverness, and the wizard who took it was obviously drunk—they are far off-center and tilting to the side. He wears a patched tweed coat and she a simple pink dress with hair to match, and carries no flowers, but they are smiling nonetheless.
His room is filled with other treasures, from other loved ones, all the gifts bestowed on him over the years: the galaxy model globe from Hermione, the solid pewter wizard chess set from Ron; a drawer full of Canary Creams and Puking Pastilles that George can’t help but slip in his bag every time he stops by WWW; another drawer full of hand-knit sweaters from Molly, some with an “E”, some with a “T” (“I don’t know which one you’d prefer, so I made both”); the autographed Holyhead Harpies banners from Ginny (despite the fact that he much prefers Puddlemere United). There is the Marauder’s Map that Harry gave him the day before he left for Hogwarts, that all-knowing, all-seeing bit of parchment that their fathers had forged together as boys. This is dear to him, but not more than the paper detritus in the worn leather case beneath his bed.
They’d all assumed he’d be a Gryffindor, naturally, and so he had assumed it as well—after all, his father had been one too. But his grandmother was a Slytherin—even if she was the rebellious sort, the type to run off and marry a handsome, stocky Muggle-born Hufflepuff who loved whacking Bludgers out of the air and sneaking into Muggle cinemas, and had earned nothing but a scorchmark on the Black tapestry in return. His mother had been a Hufflepuff, too, maybe not prefect material, but she’d become an Auror and died a hero. Would it have been so bad to be like them? He’d studied his parents’ wedding photo again, trying to imagine their advice, trying to imagine voices he had never heard telling him things like “just be yourself” and “It doesn’t matter, we love you all the same.”
Be yourself. That was part of the problem. When your hair turned black along with your mood, or sometimes brilliant turquoise when you were particularly excited, and when you could change your face to match the ones that passed you on the street or winked up at you from a photograph, it was hard to know, sometimes, who you really were.
He didn’t know anyone else like him. His mother had been like him, but she was gone now, had never bothered keeping a diary—we bought her one once, when she turned thirteen, his grandmother had said while passing him a dish of buttered peas one evening, but she said it was too much like school. The other Blacks were gone as well, but she thought it more likely it was a recessive trait from Ted’s side, a mutation that had lain dormant for who knew how long. The Tonkses were no more help either, all buried in some weedy obscure plot in Putney Vale, whatever secrets they might have kept lost to the ages.
On the Hogwarts Express, he knows nobody. He selects an empty compartment, a seat by the window, and pulls out the brand-new copy of Hogwarts, a History gifted him by Hermione, and pretends to read; but in reality he is staring at the photo of his parents again, carefully nested for safekeeping between its pages.
When the Sorting Hat hems and haws for a bit, his stomach ices over, and he can feel, rather than see, his hair turning some odd, bilious hue beneath its brim. When it finally shouts HUFFLEPUFF! he exhales, and the tension drains out of his limbs. He is not part of the massive Potter-Weasley fraternity of proud Gryffindors, but part of a line of tradition all the same, of badgers who fought as bravely and ferociously as any lion could, til the very end.
The Hat’s selection of house will not prickle at his consciousness until his later years in school, when Victoire, and her siblings, and Fred, and Roxanne, and James, and Rose, all become Gryffindors, too. Molly, Percy’s daughter, is the sole Ravenclaw, yet she never seems bothered by being the odd one out. But then again, she is already a Weasley by blood; he is not.
The issue of blood should not matter to him; he knows it doesn’t matter. He spends the better part of his time at the Potters’, going with them to the seaside, to the Quidditch pitch, even out into the Muggle world when Harry goes on those excruciating formal visits to his cousin Dudley’s—Harry always makes it up to them by taking them to a film and maybe McDonald’s afterward, although those outings became more infrequent after the time two-year-old Al threw a tantrum over chicken nuggets and caused all the plastic balls in the Playplace to spontaneously levitate. Harry takes his role of godfather seriously, as much as Sirius Black did with him; he buys Teddy his first broom, teaches him the rules, takes him to his first big Quidditch game—Puddlemere vs. Ballycastle, 190-80—after which the great keeper Oliver Wood hoists Teddy onto his burly shoulders and zooms around the stadium, earning his loyalty for life.
Harry was once like him, he reminds himself; once all alone, left to put together the mystery of his parents’ lives with the scraps their friends provided, like piecing together a quilt. But Harry can only provide so much insight; he is not of the same generation as either of his parents, and does not know them on the level of their true contemporaries. He finds himself sitting up nights in the dormitory long after the other boys have gone to sleep, closing the butter-yellow drapes of his bed to conceal his wand glow as he stares at his parents’ image again, looking for answers that do not present themselves.
An owl arrives from the Minister for Magic—a single photograph and a note, written in the swooping purple script of Kingsley Shacklebolt. I’m thankful we were able to manage this, as we had little time for picture-taking back then. I have some other candids if you’re interested, although they are mostly of your mother mugging for the camera, as she never could resist an opportunity to do her best duck-billed platypus impersonation.
It is of the Order of the Phoenix, circa 1995; not a formal portrait as its prior incarnation had posed for, but a grouping of faces clustered around the dining table at Grimmauld Place, some of them nursing tankards of ale and boasting tipsy grins, while Mad-Eye Moody tilts his head back to catch the dregs of his flask. His father looks healthy, of normal color, though perhaps it is due to the goblet of wine in his hand. His mother, pink-cheeked and violet-haired, winks, wrinkles her nose, and turns it into a pig snout. Smiling at the image, he tries to do the same, and finds he can with some ease.