Chapter Text
The occupants of number 4 Privet Drive had a reputation; the reputation they wanted to have was that of normal, rich, and, above all, better than everyone else around them. The Joneses next door were these two women who Petunia kept referring to as sisters, and they appeared to constantly be annoyed by that, while all the neighbours saw the Dursleys as the extremely weird, obsessively clean, and put-together family with a loud, obnoxious child. They did have two children, and no one really knew much about their nephew.
They called him Harry Potter, and up until he turned five, that is the only name he knew. Then, on his fifth birthday, he started having dreams. Locked in his cupboard for the night, he saw the snakes, remembered them, heard them, and understood them. The snakes had a different name for him, though he couldn’t translate it to English, but they were there and told it to him, and when he awoke, he knew something that Dudley didn’t: he knew magic.
Dudley left the house with his friends and parents and went to the park in a fruitless attempt to get them to exercise. Petunia Dursley was caught between a rock and a hard place; on one hand, she didn’t want her precious boy to be so unhealthy, on the other hand, she didn’t want Harry to at any point think she liked him as much as Dudley, and so she fed him as much as he wanted, he played the games he wanted, and luckily, he wanted to go to the park and hopefully get some exercise.
As Dudley and the others went to the sandpit and kicked sandcastles down, they saw Harry Potter, who was currently lying in a tree about eight feet high. He was carving something into a rock with a pocket knife.
“Oi, Freak,” Dudley called from under the tree.
Harry ignored him; he was nearly done.
“I’m talking to you, freak!”
Done with carving, he placed his hand on it, and the rune glowed brightly. After that, he put it on and looked down.
“What?” Harry called.
“How’d you get up there?” Dudley asked. He sounded genuinely curious under his brutishness, not that Harry cared; he had been dealing with him for five years now and had his memories for one year. He’d spent the entire year learning what the images meant. Arabella Figg, his go-to babysitter, said they were runes and each had a symbolic meaning. He needed to test his new stone, so he placed it in his pocket and jumped down.
“I’m not now. What do you want?”
Dudley looked really put off by the boredom and lack of fear in Harry’s eyes. That didn’t really matter; he only wanted to hit him. There really wasn’t any other point to it. He was seven and had spent his entire life hurting Harry; it wasn’t going to stop just because his cousin was used to it. He punched Harry in the nose and heard bones break—he’d actually managed to break Harry’s nose this time, he was so proud—but no, this time he felt it, felt pain on his hand as the fingers that made contact had snapped, the hand mutilated, and Dudley doubled over in pain, crying.
“Ooooo, that looks like it hurt.” Harry looked down at him. “My turn.”
Then he hissed, and twelve snakes from every angle of the park, hiding in grass, bushes, the sandpit, everywhere, approached Dudley and his friends, and Harry simply said, “Watch them.”
He then watched as Dudley’s first friends ever ran away from Harry’s snakes. He smiled as Dudley ran back to his mummy, and dismissed the snakes before going home.
Harry was trapped in the cupboard under the stairs after being yelled at by Vernon for a solid ten minutes while Petunia was getting Dudley ready to go to the hospital. The small blessing of already being in the cupboard was that the sound was somewhat blocked out so he wouldn’t go deaf.
When they were ready, there was a brief argument about Harry’s sleeping situation. On one hand, Dudley’s hand was broken so badly he needed to go to the hospital; on the other hand, if Arabella Figg found out, they’d probably be reported to child welfare. He was dragged out of the cupboard by his hair and thrown into Dudley’s second bedroom.
"You listen here, boy!" Vernon got very close to him. "Dudley will have to be in hospital for a few days because of you and your freakiness, so Mrs Figg will be watching you." Harry found it curious; freakishness was magic, he kept getting punished for magic, but at no point did they think he could or would actually fight Dudley.
Harry groaned in anguish, childish sorrow.
"I didn’t do anything," he said, hiding his stone in his back pocket. "She smells bad, and I hate cats."
"Good. Now stay here, and she will make sure you get what you deserve." With that, he slammed the door.
He heard the elderly woman downstairs assure the Dursleys that the boy would be disciplined.
"I won’t have this namby-pamby, wishy-washy nonsense about not hitting people who deserve it. A good thrashing is what’s needed!" she said.
After she assured them that Harry would be beaten enough to make up for hurting Dudley, they left for the hospital. As she stood in the door of Dudley’s second bedroom, Harry was lying on a mattress on the floor drawing some symbols.
“Harry, do you want to talk about it?” she asked in a sweet, kind voice.
“He’s such an insolent child,” Harry said, and Arabella nodded.
“Pointless, repetitious, and extremely dull,” she agreed, thinking of the only three things Dudley said to her. “What about his hand?”
“He punched me and his hand got broken.” Harry turned the paper around, showing an image of a simple diamond shape with the bottom of the diamond extending to form a triangle without the bottom.
“It looks like Othala,” she said.
“You’re very smart, Ms Figg,” Harry said.
“My sister studied Ancient Runes. I just read her textbook when she wasn’t looking.” Arabella Figg gave him a conspiratorial smile. “I think a good enough punishment for this little accident with your cousin’s hand would be taking care of the cats your aunt claims you hate so much.”
“Sounds dreadful.” Harry flicked open his stolen pocket knife—it was stolen from this bedroom, so borrowed would be a better description. “Give me like ten minutes to do this carving and I’ll be right over,” Harry said, taking a chair and standing on it.
His babysitter waited just in case as he carved the symbol above the door; it glowed after he finished carving it.
“Harry, don’t do that too many times in a row. You’re very young, you’ll burn yourself out.” Arabella had reported a lot of accidental magic to Dumbledore over the years—whether the accident was an accident or not was hard for her to tell or admit to.
“They will be coming back in a day or two, so I’ll wait until tomorrow to do the one on the cupboard under the stairs,” Harry promised. “Now, let’s help your awful cats whom I hate.”
“Fantastic!” Arabella said. “One of them just had kittens.” She sounded so happy, and so was Harry. Cats were his second favourite animal; sure, he’d only known three animals in his life: a dog, which his Aunt Marge had caused to bite him and chase him around until last year when it accidentally ended up locked in the shed after it chased Harry in there. Nothing they could do would get the door open, so they had to rip the shed apart to get the dog out. Arabella’s cats, who were perfectly pleasant, and snakes, which he could talk to.
Of course Arabella, the Dursleys' favourite babysitter for Harry, didn’t really work for them, though she did accept their money for babysitting. She actually worked for Albus Dumbledore, who paid way better than the Dursleys, whom she had called cheap multiple times in various letters. She had three jobs to do on Privet Drive: the first was to make sure Harry was safe, the second was to make sure he was happy, and the third was to write to Dumbledore about it.
Albus sat at his desk reading the latest letter about Harry and called Minerva McGonagall to his office to talk about it.
“I told you so,” McGonagall said when she read the report. “Has he been harmed?”
“Perhaps more than we know. This is not even all of it, just what my contact has observed: shouting, fighting, and controlled magic. I need you to check in on him.” Albus looked worried as McGonagall made her way to the most boring street in Europe.
Harry sat on a swing, not swinging the way children would, but the way someone would if they were thinking carefully about something beyond a child’s understanding; this is what the tabby cat had noticed as she watched him. Amongst Harry’s inherited magical abilities was a general sense of magic, so he knew this cat was magic.
“You one of Arabella’s?” he asked, watching, but the cat did nothing and said nothing, so he led her away.
“My name is Harry. Nice to meet you, cat.”
When he faced the cat again, she stretched in a way that could be considered a bow, if you were inclined to believe this wasn’t a normal cat. Harry reached out to touch not the cat, but the surrounding magic; the cat shuddered at the influence.
This was a very strange amount of control over magic, and McGonagall didn’t know what to make of the boy—abused, quiet, and underfed obviously, but also brave, powerful, and full of potential. She was afraid he was suppressing his magic; this clearly wasn’t the case.
As far as anyone who may have seen the pair could tell, all they would see was a boy leading a cat through Little Whinging, idly chatting about this and that for about ten minutes. As Minerva continued to listen to him, he appeared to be a very talkative animal lover. The ability to sense magical signatures was not entirely unheard of, though rare these days; it might just be that this was a coincidence. She supposed he might just be a lonely child talking to a cat; apparently, the Squib here liked cats. Loneliness could be fixed with companionship; she could help with that.
Harry faced the cat and took a deep breath. "Okay, we are alone now. Who are you?"
The cat tilted her head, and a moment later, a tall, middle-aged woman with fine enough robes appeared in front of him.
“How did you know I was a magic cat?”
"I knew you were a magic cat because of the magic." Harry thought it was obvious; the magic was everywhere, and other mages should be able to sense it.
"I could have been a familiar," she considered.
"Perhaps, but a non-mage called Arabella Figg has cat familiars and you felt different; in retrospect, it must have been transfiguration magic," Harry said with all the enthusiasm of someone who had known this all his life.
"Fascinating." And it was fascinating. She had sat on a wall watching the Dursleys for a day and got the reports; they were very mean to Harry at a minimum, and abusive at most. "How did you learn all this?"
How had he learned it? Arabella taught him about cats and explained runes he already knew about; he knew about magic in general ever since he turned five and dreamed about snakes.
“I had a dream about it when I was five. Something in me lit up with fire and I felt strong, powerful, and knew things, could do things, felt magic inside me, around me, everywhere.”
McGonagall looked around and, when she couldn’t see anyone, she knelt down and said, “May I buy you some lunch, Harry? We can discuss this—anything you would like to know.” She held out her hand and Harry took it. She was a very nice, powerful witch; a far better ally than the non-mage. No matter how useful she was, there was still the lack of power, of training, and experience.
There were secrets of the magical world that he didn’t know, secrets he needed to find out himself, but for right now, today in this burger shop, he just needed the basics. She waited until she had cast a spell around them.
"Quietus," she waved her wand around.
“Where did you get that wand? Can I get one?” Harry asked, and she let him hold it.
“When you turn eleven, you will be able to buy one, not before then. Right now, we would like you to only follow instincts,” she said. Eleven was a little less than four years, but still, four years could be excruciating.
“How were you a cat? I thought you were a talking cat, not a person."
McGonagall laughed at that—not much, but enough to put Harry at ease. He sensed the wand: Dragon Heartstring. Majestic creatures. Gryffindor always claimed he’d ride one into battle one day. How did he know that?
"It is a long process, but with time and the right conditions, anyone can become an animal they are bonded with. I can teach you; I am a Transfiguration Professor." McGonagall had finished, but Harry was still staring at her wand. There was a test: magic was real, so his dreams tapped into something—memory or imagination. There was only one way to find out for sure, subtly.
"Where do you teach?" Harry asked, hoping for the name he knew.
"Hogwarts. It’s a castle in Scotland," she explained, and Salazar Slytherin finally confirmed who he was. The snakes had called him that, the hissing called him that, magic was real, the school was real, his life—this life—was real, Harry Potter was new, a reincarnation, and now he knew for sure that all his dreams, memories, and everything were real! He started crying; it was too much.
“Are you okay, Mr Potter? Is it too much? I’m sorry.”
"What are they like? The teachers, the school, the students?" Salazar needed to know what his and his friends’ legacies were.
"Well, you have four houses, all with their strengths and weaknesses," she went on, explaining it simply enough for a seven-year-old to understand. But in her explanation, there was something missing. He played with his straw in the too-sweet strawberry milkshake until it hit him after a few minutes of idle chit-chat.
"Wait, don’t students from each house spend time together? Go to each other’s common rooms? Eat together?" Harry was shocked and appalled.
"The students have classes together, but no. There are rules about going to other people’s common rooms, and they just don't spend much time together." Minerva McGonagall didn’t have the appropriately horrified reaction that Harry had expected.
"No, no, no, no! That’s awful! What does unfettered ambition lead to without the wisdom of Ravenclaw to guide you? What are Gryffindor’s brass heroics without Hufflepuff’s humility? A school based on the friendship of four very different people, and the students don’t talk to each other!"
Harry lost his appetite, and McGonagall was very surprised at the small child who could feel so strongly about this. Harry only later would regret his outburst, as that level of insight was not common for a seven-year-old.
"I’m sorry, Mr Potter, but the world isn't always the way you think it should be."
She sounded as though this were a justification for her actions; no, worse, it was only an explanation for inaction. Perhaps when he was older again and more powerful, he could fix this school. He would get it back to the way he wanted it but for now he had to wait.
As they made their way back to his home, Harry, in his best 'I’m seven and I’ve never gotten a present ever' voice, asked for a notebook to write down his thoughts. McGonagall, for her part, thought it was a great idea and could help with his obvious fears. She bought him a simple black notebook and brought him back home to number 4. She glanced at the stairs as he made his way to the overly cleaned kitchen where Arabella Figg was having a cup of tea, waiting for them. The stairs, she could have sworn, had a cupboard under them, but looking at it, there was just a solid wall. She felt the wall and found the rune carved into it. A very curious boy indeed.
“I bid you adieu, Mr Potter. Take care of him, Bella,” she said, and turned into a cat and walked away, ready for the fallout and just hoping that the effects Harry Potter had on her life would wait until he was eleven.