Chapter Text
Chapter One: A Perfectly Normal Neighbourhood
Everything about the sitting room of Number Four, Privet Drive had been arranged to announce that nothing interesting had ever happened there, and that the owners intended to keep it that way. The settee matched the armchairs, which matched the curtains, which matched a carpet so aggressively beige that Lily suspected it had been chosen specifically to give offence to no one. A carriage clock ticked on the mantelpiece between two framed photographs of a large, pink baby, angled just so toward the window, in case any passing neighbour should care to be impressed. The net curtains were drawn against the street, where a row of identical houses sat behind identical hedges, each one quietly insisting that it was the most normal house in England.
Lily knew this kind of room. She had grown up a lifetime away from one exactly like it, in a smaller house with a louder kettle, and she had once believed that the polish and the matching cushions were what love looked like when it grew up. She had been wrong about a great many things in those days. She had been wrong, most of all, about the woman now standing on the beige carpet with her hands clenched at her sides, shaking.
"—I DON'T WANT ANY OF YOU FREAKS NEAR ME OR MY FAMILY!"
Petunia's voice cracked on the last word, the way it always had when she was frightened rather than angry, though Lily doubted Petunia knew the difference any more. Beside her, half-risen out of the largest armchair, sat a thickset young man gone the colour of corned beef. This, Lily had gathered over the past quarter of an hour, was Vernon — Vernon Dursley, of Grunnings, of the Residents' Association, of strong opinions on a great many subjects he had clearly never examined. He held against his chest a baby very nearly the size and shape of himself, who regarded the room with the placid contempt of the extremely well-fed.
There had been a time — Lily kept returning to it, helplessly, the way the tongue returns to a sore tooth — when Petunia would not have raised her voice in front of a stranger for anything in the world. There had been a time when a younger Petunia, all elbows and earnestness, had climbed into Lily's bed during a thunderstorm and built a fort of blankets over both their heads and promised, with enormous nine-year-old authority, that there were no such things as monsters and that she would not let anything frightening get in. Lily had believed her completely. She had come to Privet Drive that morning carrying the small, foolish hope that some splinter of that girl was still buried under all the net curtains, and that two years of silence might be undone with a cup of tea and a careful word.
Watching her sister's face now, white and pinched and absolutely closed against her, Lily understood that she had been hoping for a ghost.
James, who had been sitting beside her with Harry on his knee and who was finding the whole performance very much more entertaining than the situation strictly warranted, raised both eyebrows in mild, courteous interest.
"And how," he asked pleasantly, "were you planning to stop us?"
He was moving carefully, Lily noticed — too carefully, one arm held close against the side where the curse had torn through him not eighteen hours ago. Madam Pomfrey had let him out of the hospital wing only after extracting three separate promises, all of which he had broken before lunch. But there was nothing careful at all about the lazy challenge in his voice, and Vernon, who had spent his whole life among men who lowered their eyes when he raised his, plainly did not know what to do with it.
His face deepened from corned beef to something closer to brick.
"You — you FREAKS are too — too unnatural for a decent neighbourhood!" he spluttered. "We have standards here! The Residents' Association will have you out within the week — there'll be letters — there'll be a petition —"
"Mm," said James, as though this were a genuinely interesting problem and he was turning it over for the man's benefit. He shifted Harry to his good arm. "I expect there will. The trouble is, you see, that we can simply remove the memory of having objected to us from every person who signs it." He smiled — that bright, untroubled, infuriating smile that Lily had spent seven years pretending not to find charming. "And the perception that anything here is unnatural, I'm afraid, we'd have to relocate. Onto your own very capable shoulders, most likely. Wouldn't that be a shame."
The colour drained out of Vernon Dursley's face so quickly that Lily half expected to hear it pour onto the carpet. His mouth opened. It shut. It opened again, and what came out of it was no longer sentences but the raw materials of sentences, scattered: "—freaks—threats—I'll have the police—the neighbours will—"
It was, Lily thought, entirely too easy. She really ought to tell James that what he had just described was not only impossible to do to an entire street but punishable by a quite serious stretch in Azkaban, and that bluffing the Statute of Secrecy at a terrified Muggle was precisely the sort of thing that gave the Marauders their reputation. She opened her mouth to do it.
Then she looked at Petunia's face, and at the way her sister had moved a half-step in front of the armchair and the baby in it without seeming to notice she had done so, and she found she did not have the heart.
So instead she bent her head over her own son, and busied herself with the wild dark mop of his hair.
Harry was the only person in the room having a thoroughly pleasant time. He sat in the crook of his father's arm, fat little legs swinging, entirely oblivious to the shouting — Lily had wrapped a silencing ward around him before they so much as knocked on the door, partly to spare his ears and partly because she did not trust herself to keep her wand hand idle if Petunia raised her voice within range of him. Behind the ward, in his own small private quiet, Harry was conducting urgent business with a stuffed grey wolf, which Sirius had pressed upon him in the hospital wing with the air of a man bestowing a family heirloom. At present the wolf was being introduced, repeatedly and with great ceremony, to the buckle of James's watch. The two had not yet reached an understanding.
The thin mark above Harry's right eye showed pale through the dark fringe whenever he turned his head, and Lily felt her stomach tighten at the sight of it, as it had every time since the night before. She smoothed the hair down over it, gently, and Harry permitted this with the gracious patience of a king allowing a courtier to adjust his crown.
She made herself look up.
"Tuney." It came out softer than she meant it to. "We didn't come here to frighten you. We need somewhere quiet, just for a little while — somewhere no one would think to look. That's all. We'll be round the corner, on Wisteria Walk. You needn't even —" She stopped. She had been going to say you needn't even see us, and the words turned to ash before she could finish them, because once, a very long time ago, seeing each other had been the whole substance of her sister's days. "You needn't do anything," she finished quietly.
For one instant — one single instant — something moved behind Petunia's eyes. Lily knew that flicker. She had spent the first eleven years of her life learning to read it. It was the look Petunia got when she wanted, badly, to say yes to something and was already constructing the reasons she could not.
Then Petunia's mouth thinned to a hard white line, and the moment closed over like water over a stone.
"You always," she said, very low, "you always bring it. The strangeness. The — the not-being-right. You can't even come into a normal house without —" Her hand made a small, helpless, hateful gesture at James, at Harry, at the wand Lily had not even drawn. "We are normal here. Do you understand? We are perfectly, perfectly normal. And I will not have it dragged into my home."
It should not have hurt. After two years of returned letters and one disastrous wedding and a silence Lily had told herself she no longer felt, it had no right to hurt. It hurt anyway, with a clean and specific ache, like the bone-deep cold of the curse still lingering in her leg.
She might have answered. She would never know what she would have said, because at that moment the doorbell rang — a long, brash, thoroughly un-self-conscious peal that was so completely the wrong sound for Number Four, Privet Drive that all three Dursleys flinched as one.
Lily got to her feet, steadying herself on the arm of the settee.
"That'll be the rest of us," she said, with as much composure as she could find. "Try not to faint, Vernon. It's only paperwork."
Through the frosted glass of the front door, two figures were visible on the step: one tall and stooped and unmistakably ancient even in silhouette, the other lounging against the doorframe in a way that managed to make a perfectly respectable Muggle overcoat look like a costume he was wearing for a joke. As Lily crossed the hall, Sirius Black caught sight of her through the glass and raised a thick sheaf of documents over his head in triumph, his grin visible even through the warping.
"Wisteria Walk," he announced, the moment the door opened, loudly enough to carry up and down the entire street, "is ours. Well. Number Three is. There was a frankly heroic amount of signing involved, and I have committed several crimes against a man called an estate agent —"
"Indoors," said Lily, and pulled him in by the sleeve before the net curtains of all of Privet Drive could begin to twitch.
Dumbledore stepped over the threshold behind him, half-moon spectacles catching the hall light, and inclined his head with grave courtesy toward the petrified Dursleys clustered in their sitting-room doorway.
"Good afternoon," he said, as pleasantly as if he called every day. "I do apologise for the intrusion. We shan't keep you long."
Vernon Dursley looked at the ancient, brilliantly dressed wizard standing in his hall, looked at the man's sweeping plum-coloured travelling cloak — which he had quite forgotten to disguise as anything else — and made a sound like a kettle going off in another room.
Sirius, meanwhile, had wandered uninvited into the sitting room and was surveying it with the frank, fascinated horror of a man visiting a museum of objects he had never imagined could exist.
"Merlin," he said reverently. "It's so matching. James, look at it. The chairs go with the curtains. The curtains go with the carpet. Do you suppose they had it all made at the same time, or did they have to hunt for years?" He picked up a small china shepherdess from the windowsill, examined it, and set it down a half-inch to the left of where it had been. Petunia made a strangled noise. "And the photographs. Is that the baby? It's an enormous baby. Vernon, what are you feeding him?"
"Other children, by the look of it," James murmured.
"That's what I said." Sirius beamed at Dudley, who beamed wetly back. "Good lad. Hold on to that confidence."
"GET — OUT — OF — MY — HOUSE!" Vernon had found his voice at last, and it came out in four separate explosions, each one shaking the carriage clock. "I'll call the police! I'll have the lot of you taken away! You — you people —"
"Oh, please do call the police," said Sirius, with the air of a man being handed an unexpected gift. "I should so love to meet one. Do they really have those little hats? James says they have little hats. I've a bet riding on the hats."
"They have hats," James confirmed gravely.
"There. Now I'm invested." Sirius leaned companionably against the doorframe, entirely at home, and Lily could see exactly how badly he wanted Vernon to keep going, because as long as Vernon was shouting, neither of them had to think about Godric's Hollow, or the night before, or the silver thread of a Patronus carrying the words Harry is alive across a burning lawn. Sirius hid the way some men hide a wound, by performing very loudly somewhere nearby.
Lily knew the trick because she used it herself.
"That's enough," she said. Not loudly. She did not need to be loud; she had learnt long ago that a quiet voice in a roomful of shouting men did more work than any of them. James and Sirius both turned. "We've what we came for. Let's go."
She gathered Harry up from James's arm — careful of his bad side, though he pretended not to need her to be — and settled the warm weight of her son against her shoulder. Then she looked, one last time, at Petunia.
There was so much she might have said. She had rehearsed some of it, on the long sleepless edges of the night before, in a hospital bed she had refused to lie down in. She let all of it go.
"Goodbye, Tuney," she said. That was all. And the terrible thing, the thing she carried out of that beige and matching room and did not speak of for a long while afterward, was that her sister did not say it back.
Number Three, Wisteria Walk stood at the curve of the road where the houses grew a little larger and the gardens a little wilder, two streets and one decisive corner away from Privet Drive. How they came to be standing in front of it without a single curtain twitching, Lily was not entirely sure; she only knew that Dumbledore had murmured something under his breath as they left the Dursleys' drive, and that for the length of the walk the whole of Little Whinging had seemed to find them deeply, profoundly uninteresting. Eyes slid off them. A man washing his car looked up, frowned faintly, and went back to his bonnet. Even Harry, fretting in the chill, had quietened, as though the world had been turned down a notch.
The garden had not been touched in a year. Grass stood knee-high and gone to seed; a rose had thrown itself across the path in a thorny tangle; the gate hung from one hinge and complained bitterly when Sirius pushed it open.
He took one look and grinned over his shoulder.
"Now this," he said, "I like. Plenty of raw material out here, Prongs. Hedges. A water butt. Is that a spade? Say the word and I'll have the whole thing weaponised by teatime."
"Don't tempt him," Lily said.
"I'm not tempting him, I'm offering a service."
But James was not laughing. He had stopped at the broken gate and was looking up at the house, and Lily, following his gaze, understood what he was seeing, because she was seeing it too. Number Three was tall and blank and dead. The windows were grey with the dust of an empty year. Nothing about it had ever been loved. It was the precise opposite of the cottage in Godric's Hollow, which had been small and crooked and untidy and so full of life that you tripped over the life on the stairs — and which now stood with half its wall blown out onto a flooded lawn, smelling of smoke and lightning.
She found James's hand without looking, and held it.
"It has four bedrooms," Dumbledore offered, into the silence. He had produced a great iron key from somewhere within his cloak and was turning it in the lock with both hands. "Which I confess influenced my choice rather more than the state of the roses. There is room for all of you, and to spare." The door swung inward on a held breath of cold, stale air. "Mind the second stair. It will want seeing to."
Inside was worse and better at once. Worse, because the house was utterly bare — bare boards, bare walls, a hallway that gave their footsteps back to them flat and echoing, a kitchen with a deep stone sink and a cooker of intimidating Muggle complexity and not so much as a single chair. Better, because it was empty in the way of a thing waiting rather than a thing ended. Dust lay over everything like a dropcloth, soft and grey, undisturbed. Lily wrote her name in it on the windowsill with one finger, the way she had as a child, and then rubbed it out, because some habits felt indecent in a house this quiet.
Sirius clapped his hands together, briskly, the sound enormous in the empty hall.
"Right. I'll fetch the furniture." He was already shrugging his good Muggle coat back onto his shoulders. "There's a fair bit left at the Hollow that's worth saving — your books survived, Lily, most of them, and the cot's whole, and the kitchen's somehow untouched. Half the sitting room's a write-off." A pause, only a beat, but Lily caught it. "The vase didn't make it."
"Petunia's wedding vase?" James said.
"Comprehensively not."
"Thank Merlin for small mercies."
"I thought you'd feel that way." The lightness held, just. Sirius did not look at the stairs of the empty house, or at Harry, or at James's hand still wrapped in Lily's. He pulled his collar straight instead and said, more steadily, "Frank and Alice are packing now. They'll be a few hours yet — Alice won't leave without Neville's entire nursery, and frankly I respect her for it. They'll Floo through to me at the Hollow and I'll bring them across the last bit by hand, quietly, so there's nothing to trace. Augusta's gone to stop with old Algie for the present."
Lily raised an eyebrow despite herself. "Augusta agreed to that?"
"Augusta agreed to nothing. Augusta announced that she would be supervising Algie, which Algie has not yet been told." For a moment the old wickedness flickered back into Sirius's face, and he looked, briefly, like a man who had once been twenty and untouched. "I'd pay good gold to be a fly on that wall. Right. Wolf." He crossed the hall, dropped into a crouch in front of Harry, and tapped the stuffed grey toy where it dangled from the child's fist. "Mind the fort, Prongslet. I'll be back before you've had your tea."
Harry regarded him solemnly, then offered him the wolf.
Sirius's throat worked. He folded the small hand carefully back around it. "No, that's yours. You keep it." He stood, too fast, and was gone through the broken gate before any of them could say a word, his shape blurring out of true between one streetlamp and the next.
Dumbledore warded the house as the afternoon dimmed toward evening.
Lily watched him do it, because watching was a thing she could not help; she had spent her school years and most of the war taking magic apart to see how it worked, and there was no spectacle in the world she would sooner study than Albus Dumbledore laying wards on a quiet house. He moved through the bare rooms without hurry, touching nothing, his wand describing slow shapes in the dust-soft air. Where it passed, the light changed — not visibly, exactly, but the way a room changes when someone you trust comes to stand at your back. The cold draught under the front door thinned and stopped. The echo went out of the hall. By the time he reached the kitchen the whole house had stopped feeling abandoned and begun, faintly, to feel held.
"There," he said at last, lowering his wand, and for a moment he looked his age, and more. "It is not what I would wish. Understand that. I have set the essentials, and the essentials only — concealment against magical sight, a deterrent against Apparition within the walls, and an alarm that will wake the dead, and you, should anyone with unfriendly intent so much as look hard at the gate. It will hold against a curious wizard. It will hold for a time against a determined one. It is not Godric's Hollow." He did not say and look what became of that, but it stood in the room with them all the same.
"It's more than we had an hour ago," Lily said.
"It is a beginning." He turned to James, and his manner changed, became almost businesslike. "The lasting work must be yours, James, and it must wait until you are well enough to give it. Proper wards — the kind that root into a place and a family and grow stronger for being lived behind — cannot be laid by a visitor in an afternoon. They want the blood of the house's own, and they want time, and they want a steadier hand than mine to anchor them year on year. When you are mended, engage a warding firm. Discreet, expensive, and the more discreet the more expensive — I shall give you a name. Let them tie the protections to you and Lily directly. Then this will not merely be a house you are hiding in." He glanced about the bare kitchen, and something almost gentle came into his face. "It will be a home that hides you. There is a difference, and your son will feel it, even if he never knows its name."
James was quiet for a moment. Then he said, "You think we'll need it. All of it. For a long time."
It was not really a question. Dumbledore did not pretend it was.
"I think," he said, "that the world is about to spend a great many years believing the war is over. I should like, very much, to be among the few who remember that we are merely standing in the eye of it." His blue eyes moved, just for a moment, to the sleeping weight of Harry on Lily's shoulder, and to the thin mark half-hidden beneath the dark fringe — and there it was again, that grave and searching wonder she had seen the night before, the look that frightened her more than any plain bad news could have. Then it was gone, folded away behind the spectacles, and he was only a tired old man taking his leave. "Rest. Eat, when Sirius brings something to eat upon. I will send word in the morning."
He paused at the door.
"You did a remarkable thing last night, the two of you," he said, not turning round. "I should be failing in my duty as well as my affection if I did not also say that remarkable things have a way of asking a price, and of asking it later, when one has stopped expecting the bill." He set his hand to the latch. "Goodnight, Lily. James. Mind the second stair."
And then the hall was empty, and the door had closed without a sound, and the house was theirs.
For a while none of them moved.
The light went slowly out of the windows, that thick blue November dusk that comes down early and all at once, and Lily did not light her wand, because there was something in the dark that felt necessary, like the silence after a great noise when your ears are still ringing and you are only beginning to understand that you are alive. They had no chairs. So in the end they did the only thing there was to do, which was to sit down together on the bare boards of the empty front room, the three of them, with their backs against the wall and Harry settled in the warm space between his parents. Lily lowered herself down gratefully; she had been on her feet far too long, and the cursed muscle in her leg had been singing a low cold note this past hour that she had been careful to let no one hear — least of all, an hour ago, her sister, in front of whom she would have crawled before she would have limped.
James let out a long breath, and Lily heard the catch in it, the place where his chest still would not open all the way.
"Sore?" she asked.
"Spectacularly." He tipped his head back against the wall. In the dimness she could just make out the line of his profile, the soot still ghosting his jaw that no amount of Madam Pomfrey's scrubbing had quite reached. "Lily."
"Mm."
"We won."
He said it the way a man says a word in a foreign language, carefully, testing whether it means what he has been told it means. Lily understood completely. Somewhere out beyond the wards, beyond Little Whinging, the wizarding world was lighting its windows. There would be owls crossing the dark in their hundreds. There would be strangers weeping in the streets of villages they had never seen, and bottles opened that had been kept back for years against exactly this, and her son's deeds being shaped already, in a thousand mouths, into a story that did not have her son in it. The war was over. Everyone said so. It would be in the morning papers.
She looked down at the small dark head against her arm, at the mark that did not bleed and did not heal and looked, in the last of the light, like a fork of lightning that had been caught and pinned and kept. Remarkable things have a way of asking a price. She thought of Dumbledore's face when he looked at it. She thought of I know too little, and I suspect too much. She thought of the Lestranges, unaccounted for; of Barty Crouch's son; of a man she would not name even in her own head, who had once been small and frightened and theirs, and who had sold them for whatever frightened men are paid.
"Yes," she said. "We won."
And because it was true, she let herself believe it, for as long as the dark would let her. James found her hand in the space behind Harry's back and held it, and his thumb moved once over her knuckles, the way it had in the Pensieve, the way it always did. Harry sighed in his sleep and turned his face into her side, the grey wolf crushed beneath his cheek, and above them the four empty bedrooms of a house no one had ever loved waited, patient, in the dark, to be filled.
Tomorrow there would be furniture, and Longbottoms, and the long, strange beginning of pretending to be ordinary. Tonight there was only this: the three of them, breathing, in a place where no one would think to look.
It was not safety. Lily had stopped believing in safety somewhere around her twentieth birthday, and last night had not given the belief back to her.
But it was, for now, enough.