Chapter Text
Harry’s pretty sure dying isn’t supposed to take this long.
Not that… not that he’s got some vast expertise on the subject or anything, but by singular consensus – voting count numero uno – he’s willing to admit that perhaps something went wrong.
Again, he doesn’t have any substantial experience beyond watching as a third-party member, but he’d always assumed dying would be easy. Kind of. Of course, he’s not under some naive notion that death via anything other than the good old Avada or literally sleeping off life could be completely painless, but the actual transition should surely be seamless, right? One second, alive, the next, it’s lights out. And Harry got the Avada! He literally got the easiest out! What the hell is taking so long!
He’s been drifting in this aimless existence for what’s felt like eternity. It’s literally nothing as far as the eye can see. Not that Harry’s confident he even has eyes right now. He doesn’t seem to have a body, or if he does, it’s numbed to the bone. He can’t feel anything. Not the slightest brush of air or the tiniest wisp of hot or cold. Nothing. He can’t see, he can’t hear, he can’t even feel his bloody tongue.
There’s this strange thrumming pulse, barely substantial, that rhythms through the very fabric of this place, but that’s about it. And it’s been going on and on for ages. It’s ridiculous. It’s boring. It’s borderline terrifying and Harry’s sure that if he did have a body, it’d be splitting at the seams with his fear.
But he can’t think like that for too long because, by the looks of it, he doesn’t have a body, and being frightened beyond his wits grew dull half a century ago.
So he sits. Floats. Exists. Doesn’t exist? It’s all so confusing. Couldn’t dying have taken his ability to think as well? Make him some sort of unresponsive vegetable? Harry thinks about how that’d be so much more preferable to whatever the hell he’s experiencing right now. If he’d known he would end up stuck in this hellhole he’d have turned around and abandoned his dumb fuck plan without a second thought.
Well, not that that particular thought offers much comfort, seeing as he did commit to his dumb fuck plan and now he’s here. With this whole world of nothing, and a faraway heartbeat to keep him company.
Bump-ba.
Bump-ba.
Bump-ba.
Some layover this turned out to be, Harry thinks. He thinks that at this point, death couldn't come any sooner to finish the job.
Bump-ba.
Bump-ba.
Bump-ba.
It’s as if Harry’s been holding his breath his entire life, because when he finally opens his mouth he breathes.
Air. Actual, real, thick musty air rushes down his windpipe and into his chest. It feels like he’s never drawn a breath before. A foreign sensation where he’s met with this abundance of oxygen and his lungs have no idea what to do with it all. He gasps, and he can hear the noise in his head, the way it echoes around him like it’s someone else’s ugly rasping and not his own.
Harry claws at his mouth, his neck, his chest, trying to get it to slow down, oh my god, I’m totally dying like a fish in water but it’s not a very effective strategy considering he’s still, well, choking. And choking on nothing at that. If he wasn’t so busy trying not to die a second time, he’d muse on the nuanced humour of all this.
Breathe, breathe, you know how to breathe, Harry tries to command his uncooperating lungs. You know how to do this. This is supposed to be a subconscious thing. Start doing it subconsciously.
Harry clamps his hands around his mouth and doesn’t let go until his ears start to ring.
Okay, okay, second round of breathing isn’t all that bad. It still hurts – to fuck all with why it’s hurting so much – but at least it’s a semi-functional process now. Sure, it still sounds gutteral and borderline inhuman, but it’s just him in this dusty bubble of black. And anyway, he’s got more important matters to address. Namely…
What in the ever loving fuck is he even breathing for in the first place.
Some ass-itch afterlife this is turning out to be. He’s supposed to be dead! Gone! Nada! The dead don’t need to breathe, because breathing is an alive-person thing to do and, last Harry checked, an uncontested Avada Kedavra to the head should pretty much dash any hope of being an alive-person.
His senses come back to him not unlike how a limb will rekindle after falling asleep. Beneath his ragged breathing he registers a lumpy surface against his back, like lying on a pile of rocks blanketed by nothing but, well, a blanket. The air is thick, a standstill sort of quality that comes with poor ventilation, or perhaps a complete lackoff it. He can’t see anything, but it’s not the same sort of nothing that he’d become well acquainted with during his limbo between life and death. There’s a sort of depth to this darkness, like he knows there’s an end instead of stretching on forever and ever.
He coughs, regretting the action when his head seems to split open and stitch itself back together. His ears ring like they're afraid of going deaf. Okay, this is fine. No coughing. Preferably, it’d be no breathing on the roster too, but he doesn’t fancy suffocating himself. Which brings him back to the most prevalent question, now that his mind has circled back to it.
Why isn’t he dead?!
He slowly gets up, and it takes an unaccountable amount of will power to do so. It’s like he’s being pressed down by the hands of a troll, pushing him against the floor and squeezing his chest. Dying was supposed to be easy. It wasn’t supposed to hurt, according to certain soon-to-be-fellow dead people. Soon-to-have-been? Oh Merlin's fucking balls...
Despite the abundance of evidence that seems to suggest otherwise, Harry doesn’t actually like being in pain. He’s not a weirdo. He hates the mere fact that he’s gotten used to it. Who in their right mind likes to hurt? Certainly not him. If he’s being honest with himself – which can’t hurt more than whatever the hell is going on with him anyway – if Avada Kedavra had an element of unbearable pain like its torturous triplet, Harry wouldn’t have been so keen to follow his sacrificial lamb act as he had.
“What the hell…” He chokes out. He freezes. And then he starts choking some more. This time it’s intentional though. He’s choosing to choke. Or at least start the process. He’s grabbing at his throat with renewed vigour, but it’s not the mindless feral quality that laced him before. Now he’s gripping his neck with newfound terror, and he’s gasping not because of the surplus of air, but because now he can’t seem to swallow enough of it.
“Oh my god…” He rasps, his heart clenching so painfully tight that Harry is sure it’ll give out right in his chest, between his desperate half-empty lungs.
(It’s probably midnight somewhere over Surrey, some kind of moon hanging in the sky. There’s probably a snoring family of three unable to appreciate this fact, because they are asleep, and why wouldn’t they be? Everything is normal and since everything is normal the family of three are sleeping. Without an ounce of awareness for anything otherworldly. Nothing out of the ordinary. No worries. Which they shouldn’t need to have anyway. They are normal. This is all normal. Nothing is wrong.
Harry Potter is very small where sits inside the cupboard under the stairs, and he tries very hard to remember how to breathe.)
Harry Potter is The Boy Who Lived.
It’s a rancid title that he abhors, because Harry feels it doesn’t truly encompass the making of his fame. Sure, he lived, but really, he ought to be called The Boy Who Can’t Stay Dead.
It’s a subtle difference that makes all the difference. Harry’s no nutcase, but even he had seen the appeal in it all being over and done. It’s hard being The Boy Who Lived when all he’s really accomplished while living is making everyone else’s lives so much more difficult. He’s the boy who lived, surrounded by those who died. It’s a tedious line to walk, and Harry’s not quite sure how he’d managed to make it so far.
Avada Kedavra is a poetic way to go. He’d been the last horcrux, or, at least, he hoped he was. With Harry out of the picture and Voldemort on the last dregs of sanity, it surely won’t take too long for the collective force of the Wizarding World to take him down. At least, that's what he hopes. It... it hadn't been a pretty sight, the world that Harry chose to leave behind. Truthfully, there's wasn't much left to it to save, in the end. A desperate bid to perserve what little remained. For who remained.
Harry had tried counting who had been left, while he’d walked the miles between himself and his executioner. Or, well, he’d tried not to think about those who hadn’t gotten as far as Harry had hoped.
There weren’t a lot of numbers. Back then, Harry had walked through the Forbidden Forest in a nightmarish haze, where the ghosts of his friends and family haunted his heels with every step.
He remembers thinking, with a strange sense of awareness, that Ron’s visage lost his freckles in his translucent palour.
It’s a stark contrast to now, in this fraction of time where Harry is no longer the Boy Who Walked to His Death. He’s The Boy Who Lived. The Boy Who Can’t Stay Dead.
The Boy Who Lived in the Cupboard Under the Stairs.
And there’s the door of his pitiful cupboard, yawning wide open and letting in a thick stream of golden orange light from the hallway. For a moment, Harry wonders if he’s dreaming. If this replica of his childhood mornings now plays in his mind as some sort of twisted reprieve. He remembers, as a child, wondering about why his aunt had always favoured warm lights in the hallway and bedrooms, and white light in the kitchen and bathrooms, and how the difference when walking between them used to give Harry headaches.
It was always orange light in the mornings, where Harry would wake up and make breakfast. White light in the afternoon when he’d make himself sparse by squirrelling away, and then orange light in the evening, right before the cupboard door enclosed him in darkness.
It’s so strange, Harry thinks distantly, how something as trivial as his childhood home’s internal lighting situation is pushing him towards losing his mind.
Well, it’s that, but it’s probably also the sight of his aunt leering over him from the lip of the cupboard entrance, lips pressed together in obvious disdain and familiar dark eyes squinted, as if to minimise the amount of Harry she has to witness.
Aunt Petunia is supposed to be dead.
It’s strange, how the memory of her lifeless body overlaps with this very real, very solid version of Aunt Petunia before him. She’s always been pale, blonde, with skin stretched over her face because skinny has always been the new black. Harry remembers thinking about how thin his aunt looked while watching her body burn with the plethora of others. Thin and pale, too pale, like a corpse. And he had caught himself thinking, oh wait, right before the pier was set ablaze.
Aunt Petunia is thin and pale, but there are signs of life that are so obvious, from the light in her eyes, the flush of her lips and nose and cheeks, her fingers curling around the wood of the cupboard door, skin whitening under the pressure, the proof of blood pumping through her veins. She’s alive, and Harry can’t find it in himself to do anything but stare.
“–hear me, boy?” Her voice meanders into his ears and finally sticks above the ringing in his head. He tries to remember to blink and breathe at the same time. Aunt Petunia’s lips curl slightly, not enough to be considered undignified, God forbid, but with just enough of a curve that Harry can read the disgust between the lines.
“Don’t tell me you’re sick again,” his aunt mutters, peering at him with a curiously nasty look. “For Christ’s sake, it’s a never-ending cycle with you.”
Harry tries to speak, to say something. What can he even say? What’s going on? His head is spinning and he can barely think straight, can barely form a thought beyond I watched you die. I watched you die within the wards of your home and I’m–I’m–...
“Ah-Aunt Petunia…?” Harry whispers, and if he had the facilities he’d wince at how horrid he sounds. Like he hasn’t had a sip of water since the day he was born. His aunt must be thinking along similar lines, because her lips purse even more, the barely-there wrinkles around her mouth that she’s always complained about deepening in her distaste.
“Unbelievable,” she hisses. She walks away then, even though Harry has the strangest urge to call her back. Which is stupid. He doesn’t love his aunt. She’s never loved him. Which doesn’t even matter. She’s dead. She’s supposed to be dead. She’s been dead for months now, and Harry hadn’t bothered to spread the ashes because his aunt would have come back from the grave to strangle him if she found out he’d made a mess of her remains.
His aunt is alive, and she’s thrusting a glass of water in his face and saying something, her mouth is moving and she’s waving her hand – but she’d never hit him, Aunt Petunia rarely got her hands dirty and hit him – and then as suddenly as she had appeared, she’s gone, and the door closes in on him again.
It’s weird how relieved he is to be alone in his cupboard again.
The glass is wet, with rivulets of water dripping from the sides and onto his lap. It’s lukewarm water, probably hastily filled. The glass shakes in tune with his hands. What in the ever-loving fuck is going on? He tries to keep up, tries to get his scrambled brain in order to think, but all that comes up when he tries is you’re dead you’re dead you’re supposed to be dead why aren’t you dead–
Harry takes a small sip of his water for something to do, and then when his parched throat renews his discomfort with a vengeance, drains the rest of the glass.
He then sets his cup down, rubs his wet hands together, and tries not to scream.
He’s The Boy Who Can’t Stay Dead.
More accuretly, he’s the Boy Who Lived Once A-Fucking-Gain.
There’s no other explanation. Harry knows he’s not delusional. He knows he walked right up to Voldemort on that fateful night, surrounded by the silent dead. He knows he died, got shot right in the head by an Avada Kedavra so powerful that he can still see the aftershocks behind his eyelids.
He’s supposed to have died. Another body to burn come morning, clutching Voldemort’s final horcrux and dragging it down with him.
Harry Potter died at seventeen.
But that’s not quite right, is it? Because Harry is neither dead, nor seventeen.
The revelation is slow growing, like grains of sand filling up his head until he can’t ignore it any longer. Something’s happened. Something strange and otherworldy, because of course, he’s Harry Fucking Potter, nothing can ever go right, even his godforsaken blanket statement death. What the geniuine hell? Can he not catch a fucking break?
He spends what he assumes is the rest of the day hyperventilating in his cupboard, under the flimsy protection of his ratty threadbaren blanket. Then he panics, spirals, hyperventilates some more. Sometime between zilch and fuck-all, this cycle grows boring, and Harry unwraps his head so he can stare at the silhouette of his staircase ceiling in some semblance of calm.
Okay, okay, he thinks to himself. Okay. Peachy. What the fuck? Am I immune to the Avada? Fucking bloody fuck, I can’t believe this shite.
He may not be physically seventeen – for one, his cupboard is just his size, and his blanket still covers his toes – but he’s still mentally all there. Mostly. Obviously, being immune to the killing curse wouldn’t force him into the body of a… a toddler? A child? Just how old is he? And really, it doesn’t even matter that much, in the grand scheme of things, but now that it’s in his head he can’t shake it out. He can speak, he can hold a glass of water all on his own. Surely he’s not a toddler? He hopes he’s not a toddler.
Focus, you stupid fucking idiot.
Alright, so the killing curse isn’t secretly an age-reducing curse. Obviously. Harry disdainfully thinks of his previously hashed out plans for the Auror Corps. Definitely not. His deduction skills are ass. Okay, okay, so no tampered-with Avada Kedavra. For good fucking reason. Avada Kedavra is supposed to kill you, not bring your bloody relatives back to life. It isn’t supposed to put you back in your childhood cupboard.
The work of a Time-Turner? Surely not. Professor McGonagall confiscated Hermione’s Time-Turner after that disaster with Lupin in third year. Locked it up somewhere without a word, and Hermione hadn’t been the happiest to learn; she’d just had to settle for a regular student schedule. She’d tried to complain, and she’d…
Well, it doesn’t matter now.
No Time-Turner, no other spell beyond the blasted useless Avada Kedavra…
Aunt Petunia opens his cupboard door sometime in the evening; the smell of something with ginger and garlic permeates through the hallway and Harry’s stomach cramps like it’s never known food a day in his life. He’s more prepared to see her this time, even though it still makes his heart skip a beat to see her standing like this, alive and healthy, looking at him like she’s always done. The familiarity is kind of like balm. He can handle Aunt Petunia’s scorn. It’s what he’s grown up with.
There had been times, in the months following the raid of Little Whinging, where he’d actually missed it in a detached sort of way. Like wanting to pick a scab knowing it’d hurt.
Well, not that he has to miss it now. It fills something in his chest, right alongside the perpetual dread of everything. She’s alive. And if she’s alive, then so must… so must…
“Stop gawking, you rude boy,” she sniffs. Harry tears his eyes away from her face to land on her polished baby-heel shoes. “You’re feeling better. Since I cooked, you can clean our room before Vernon get’s home to make up for it.”
He’s feeling… better is a good enough word for it. Petunia is right, of course, in that he’s leagues better than how she’d found him. He’s not gasping for breath, and his body has relearned how to blink off-command. His hands aren’t shaking, his heart has slowed; really, he’s the pinnacle of health.
So he crawls out from under his blanket, hands his aunt his empty cup and makes his way upstairs.
It’s like a twisted version of deja-vu. Harry climbs the stairs like he’s done hundreds of times, the wood-rug familiar beneath his socked feet. The orange light transitions into harsh white, and his head aches distantly, and it’s all so familiar. Like he’s reliving his hazy dreams where magic isn’t real and horcruxes aren’t real and he isn’t real, just playing house in a reality far preferred to his own.
His aunt and uncle’s room is furthest from the stairwell, the hall going down the opposite way. He passes the bathroom (white light) Dudley’s two rooms (swatched in muted orange) before entering the last room at the far wall. It’s white light again, bright and harsh, because Aunt Petunia does her make-up at her vanity across the bed. The bed is unmade, and there’s nightclothes laid out on the desk, and there are small cardboard boxes pushed under the window that feel off.
He lets himself fall into the rhythm of a life almost forgotten; after all, he’d spent so much time praying for something like this to happen. He makes the bed and folds the clothes and organises his aunt’s vanity and closes the closet door and rearranges his uncle's desk full of documents until the only thing left is the boxes under the window.
They’re pushed under a low mudroom stool, as if trying to hide them away. But in the stark neatness of the room, they stand out as other. Harry watches himself – through his eyes like a passenger, placid and stringless – as his body moves forward on autopilot. He stops by the boxes, no more than a handful. He crouches, pushing them together, trying to shape them into some vaguely neat stack.
Somewhere far in the back of his mind, Harry replays this moment from a lifetime ago. He’s cleaned this room as many times as he’s been in it, which is to say, countless instances painted over his childhood. He remembers the months when he’d been… four? Five? Six? Where his aunt had scoured through their attic and brought down these moth-bitten boxes with a pained expression on her face. Old rubbish, she’d called them, whatever was hidden inside. She’d avoided them for months, and then on one fateful evening, she’d burned them all to ash.
Harry supposes he should feel curious. Aunt Petunia hates extra things littering her home; old furniture, old clothes, old pots, odd boys dropped at her doorstep. These were relics of something or the other, completely out of place in her pristine room where nothing is old and outdated and unwanted.
Harry remembers how he’d been mad curious when he’d seen the boxes sitting innocently in Aunt Petunia’s room. He’d tried going through them before learning exactly what happened to snooping little boys with dirty fingers.
Maybe in another life, Harry musters enough curiosity to go through the boxes he never got the chance to peep in. In another life, Harry aged four-five-six would look over his shoulder, finger nail digging into the duct tape, heart hammering in his chest. A mystery, he’d call it. A game.
The Harry of Present looks at the odd boxes, sees Cokeworth written in neat handwriting, thick black sharper marker against water-stained cardboard, pushes them against the wall, then turns around and leaves.
Harry’s mind is despondent, which is annoying, considering his chipper body is more than willing to complain at its mistreatment. Not that Harry would label his treatment as mis-treatment. His aunt is wary of his lack of… well, everything, and his uncle seems content to follow his wife’s lead and leave Harry well enough alone.
It’d been a right shock seeing his uncle come home from work. Alive, just like his aunt, with ruddy cheeks and eyes swimming, some complaint or the other echoing through the hall as he lumbered over for dinner.
Harry doesn’t remember how his uncle had died. He hadn’t gotten to see the body, considering what was left of it hadn’t been… charitable enough to show the public. His mangled remains had been burned alongside the rest of the residents of Little Whinging, arms and legs mixed with countless other disconnected body parts.
Harry’s kind of glad, now, to have been spared the sight. It’s not as much of a jarring experience, seeing as the last time Harry saw the man, he’d been storming out of the house, very much alive.
His family thinks he’s sick, so they leave him in his cupboard, another glass of water at his feet. He’s not stupid enough to drink it all in one swoop like last time; his aunt’s charitable mood reached its threshold when Harry started shivering in Dudley’s presence.
He’d gotten to see Dudley’s body too. It hadn’t been a pretty sight.
So he sits, and he panics a little before remembering that he can’t really panic all night, that’s not helpful or efficient, and it doesn’t even feel good. Instead he lies wide awake on his thin lumpy cot and stares at his staircase ceiling and lets his mind drift the way it’s been begging to since he woke up.
Voldemort hadn’t laughed when he’d cast the spell. Harry idly wonders if he’d feel a bit better if he had.
That’s the thread of memory his brain wishes to visit tonight.
It had been eerily silent, despite the number of people around. The army of dead at Harry’s back; the dark-clad Death Eaters squirming like restless ants behind Voldemort’s. Maybe in some faraway image, it’d have been a poetic sight. Harry’s no dark lord, but he’s got the body count of several. How does that even work?
Harry hadn’t laughed, hadn’t really said a thing as he’d stopped meters away from Voldemort. Voldemort hadn’t said anything either. Or maybe he had. Harry can’t really remember the moment all too well. It had been as if his soul had already drifted from his body, already floating away as Voldemort slowly levelled his wand and cast–
He’s sure he’d heard Avada Kedavra. He’s not losing his mind. He’s not. He knows what he heard. He hadn’t had bloodwards, protections, or even a wand in hand. Like a lamb begging for slaughter, his death really had been a pathetic ordeal. Sixteen years of suffering just for that? Real shit show, is what Harry thinks. An utter waste of time and resources. Like a snake eating its own tail.
And now he’s here. Back in his cupboard. Back here, in his childhood home. Back with his relatives; alive and well and sleeping soundly in their rooms.
He’s back. Back. Back.
Back.
Back…?
Harry sits up. He’s small enough that he can do that. He can even crouch and crawl around and stand, if he doesn’t go on his tiptoes. But that’s not really important, is it, you blasted fucking idiot? He’s back. He’s fucking back. Back in his cupboard, back in his home, his childhood home, back where nothing happened because his relatives are still alive and Harry is still alive – evidently fucking enough – and nothing’s gone wrong and nothing’s even happened, holy fucking shit–
He’s… he’s back.
Somehow, by fuck all… something must have gone wrong. Gone right? Had Dumbledore known, when he’d revealed the truth of Voldemort’s seeming immortality? Had he predicted all of this, in some manifestation of true seer-sight, that Harry would be sent back? That the Avada would fail, somehow, and push him God-knows how many years into the past? Is he… is he not done yet?
Oh my god…
I’m not fucking done yet.
Something like despair swarms up Harry’s belly and cascades upon his chest like an ocean swell, clawing at his lungs and whispering you’re not done you’re not done of-fucking-course you’re not done, you idiot, you blithering idiot, you thought it’d be that easy? Despair, if Harry had the energy to name it, creeping along his back, down his spine, resettling into his stomach like a weighted pit of coal.
Of course, Harry thinks absentmindedly, rubbing a trembling hand over the soft baby skin of his stomach. It’s a foreign feeling, because Harry’s body – the body of a seventeen year old, the body of a fighter, of a lamb with its innards hanging out, waiting for the chopping block – was full of scars. Had been full of scars. Criss-crossing over his skin like cruel brushstrokes; magic was clean and cruel, and one didn’t need to get their hands dirty to commit to a job well done. Not that magic had been the limit of cruelty or anything.
His friends all had their fair share of scars. He remembers Ron, who had boasted about his dragon burn marks, who’d lost an eye days before he…
He remembers Hermione, who had born a deep carving of missing flesh between her collarbones, where the horcrux had eaten away at her. He remembers seeing it, as she…
Well, Harry’s skin is smooth now. An entire history, and entire future, erased from existence. A second chance. He’s been given a second chance.
His heart races something fierce, something scared, trying to escape his ribs. He rubs his belly, over and over and over, until the feeling of his skin beneath his fingers feels numb and wrong and as foreign as it should.
Aunt Petunia leaves with Uncle Vernon that morning. He’s going to drop her off to God-knows-where to do God-knows-what. Dudley’s at his aunt’s house, to keep away from whatever sickly disease Harry’s supposedly been infected with. Uncle Vernon wants the weeds gone by dinner, and Aunt Petunia wants the floors spotless, and they both want him out of sight and out of mind.
The front door slams shut with a finalising thud, and suddenly, Harry is well and truly alone.
He stares at the tall front door for a long time, waiting for his brain to catch up to speed, but it’s like watching a turtle swim through molasses. He stares and stares, and then his eyes burn and he remembers to blink. The door is taller than he remembered. Looming above him, with a bolt-slide lock that sits far out of reach.
After a while, Harry eventually turns around.
He does the floor like a mindless robot, because the motions are familiar even after months on the run. He doesn’t have to think too hard about this task, because it’s easy, familiar, and anything that doesn’t require his fickle brain’s fickle energy is all the better, in Harry’s opinion.
He scrubs the floors, then goes outside and pulls the weeds and shears the grass and thinks, distantly, that this is sort of a paradise, in its own way. No thinking. No feeling. Just work. Work that doesn’t involve magic. Work that doesn’t involve dying, or rather, watching people die and being unable to die yourself.
He’s done sooner than he’d like. He’s tempted to lock himself in his cupboard and wait the rest of the day out. Harry of four-five-six might have, once upon a time, been tempted to steal a bite of leftovers from the fridge, or make himself a sandwich, or simply sit and watch the telly in a bid of rebellion.
But the Harry of Present does none of those things. He looks around, tries to think, fails tremendously, and then crawls back into his cupboard.
He settles into a listless routine. Somewhere in the back of his mind, Harry notes that he’s glad he’s not in school yet, or at the very least outside of school times. Summer break, he recalls idly. He’s never been more grateful.
He sleeps all night, the kind of sleep that feels shallow and dreamless, like blinking at night and blinking again and it’s morning. He gets to leave his cupboard to help with breakfast, then kind of stands around until Dudley grows bored of him and his aunt and uncle find his presence unsettling. He’s usually sent outside to work, out of sight, which is fine by him. He eats whatever he’s given, he doesn’t complain, and really, he doesn’t do much of anything because this is paradise. This is what he’d wanted for fucks sake.
He spends long swatches of time in his cupboard, both because he wants to and because his relatives want him to too. Hours go by like wisps of a breeze, and then he blinks, and it’s night, and then he blinks, and it’s morning, and he gets to do it all over again,
Nothing bad happens.
No magic happens.
Nobody dies.
A perfect second chance.
Because that is what this is. A second chance where magic doesn’t exist, where Harry barely exists; a remedy where nothing bad can happen if everything is normal, if Harry’s normal, so he’ll be so fucking normal that nothing bad can ever happen ever again. It’s perfect. It’s paradise.
It shatters like a piece of ceramic.
It falls apart one day when Harry’s standing around again, unsure of what to do with himself, as usual, but uncaring to put in more effort to remedy this, as usual. He’s standing in a corner within the kitchen, right beside the stove, waiting for Aunt Petunia to tell him what to do. His brain is taking a vacation, and Harry idly wonders if it’s going to send him postcards.
Someone gasps.
Something bangs into something.
Harry sees, like a passenger in his own fucking head, as a swath of boiling oil come rushing down to meet him.
Harry waits patiently for the pain to register. Boiling oil is a right pain in the ass, quite literally, but it’s not like it’ll kill him. Probably. He doesn’t even bother blinking. Or maybe he does. Because in one second, the oil is flying toward him in slow motion, and in the next, it’s splattered over the floor, sizzling cuts of chips spread all around, and he’s untouched. There’s maybe an inch of clear floor all around him, where his feet are planted, unable to move, safe from the harm of oil burns and fried potatoes.
He looks up. He sees Aunt Petunia with her arms raised toward him and covered in baby blue oven mitts, a big black pot sitting at her feet. She must have dropped it. Had she told Harry to do something? He can’t quite remember. There are swatches of dark pink on her legs where the oil must have splashed onto her.
But she doesn’t seem to feel it. Or maybe she doesn’t care. Right now she’s looking at Harry with wide eyes, her jaw falling further than Harry’s ever seen it. She’s trembling a bit. Harry wonders what happened.
Oh, wait. Right. Oil spill.
“By the Lord,” Aunt Petunia hisses, yanking her oven mitts off and throwing them on the counter, where a pile of finished chips sit neatly in a bowl. “You… how many times have I told you, you insolent brat?”
Harry doesn’t really know what she wants.
“What?”
“Oh, I knew you were up to something,” she marches through the cooled oil despite the mess it’ll leave her shoes in. She comes right up to him, but doesn’t touch him, because Aunt Petunia hates touching him. “I just knew it. Vernon told me not to let myself believe you’d let go of that freakish behaviour.” She scoffs, high and stressed, like something grave has just happened.
It takes Harry’s brain a long time to catch up and realise that she’s right.
Something has happened.
His eyes widen, and he takes in the oil around him, the abandoned half-fried chips, the furious expression on his aunt’s face. He takes in the splotches of burnt skin on his aunt’s shins. His own shirt, dry and untouched. His skin void of anything.
Blood drains down his face and coagulates into his stomach.
Magic.
“Out!” She shrieks, batting him away like a dirty street urchin, a starved dog trying to bite her. “Out, you filthy boy! Get OUT!”
Harry stumbles back when she advances, which is stupid, because Aunt Petunia has nothing in hand, and she would rather die than touch him. He backs up anyway, socks soaking up warm oil. She’s so much bigger than he remembers. Her corpse had seemed thin and pale and small laid upon the pier.
“Back in the cupboard!” Her voice echoes in the house like a banshee, and it hurts his already pounding head. He scrambles around her swinging arms and makes for the hallway, heart a petrified rabbit in his chest. Aunt Petunia’s screams follow after him. Icy claws worse than any Dementor, because she’s real and magic is real and the world is ending and his aunt is screaming “I don’t want to see you– I don’t–! Get out! GET OUT!”
Harry launches himself into his cupboard and slams the door shut behind him.
Magic is real.
Magic is real, and Harry is magical. He’s a wizard.
For the first time in a long, long time, Harry feels a small curl of contempt wrap itself into a knot in his heart.
And it’s so stupid, and he really never should have considered a career as an Auror, because really? He’d assumed a week of laying low and playing nice and not having a wand meant he’d be normal? That he’d be reborn as the perfect visage his aunt had always wanted?
He feels like a right moron. Why hadn’t he tried any magic? What’s wrong with him? Is he stupid? What the fuck? You spent a week cleaning floors and pulling weeds with your bare hands and suddenly Harry Fucking Potter is a muggle.
Harry sits up – he’d curled underneath his flimsy blanket again, because even though he’s seventeen, there’s this instinctual need to hide that he can’t seem to tamp down, even though everyone knows a blanket made of thread will do fuck all in the protection department – and squints at his hands in the grey darkness. They’re small, and foreign, even though a sliver of his brain whispers that these are his hands, his, and they are familiar because they have always been his hands, and were just as much his hands now as they had been over a decade ago.
Good fucking shit fuck, a decade…
Focussing, Harry traces the blurry plains of his palms, the lines that trace over the soft skin. His fingers look so… stubby. Small. Useless. How had he ever managed to survive with a body like this? He pushes past those swirling thoughts because they are useless right now, and he needs to concentrate.
He’s been able to cast a flicker of Lumos wandlessly for a little over a year now. Nothing too powerful, because wandless magic is tricky and requires a lot of focus which Harry has always struggled to maintain. Or, well, he had been able to cast it. When he’d been seventeen and fighting a war.
Ever since he’s woken up, he hasn’t been able to feel his magic. It’s always been a subtle thing deep inside him, like a little candle, a teeny tiny ball of fire that would never leave him alone. Harry’s been stupid these past few days, living life the way he has, like a mindless puppet unable to think past do this, do that. He doesn’t know why it hadn’t occured to him to simply check if he still had magic.
Harry closes his eyes, and breathes deeply, and searches for that familiar feeling. A candle. A teeny tiny ball of fire, barely big enough to light a thing, but enough. Always enough. Harry doesn’t remember if he’d ever felt it as a child, before Hogwarts, but surely now… surely with everything he’s been through…?
Nothing.
He doesn’t know how long he waits, begging and pleading with his forhead pressed to the floor and hands clutching his stomach as he tries to find that little flicker of warmth. It could have been minutes. It could have been hours. It could have been another lifetime whizzing by.
But it’s pointless. It’s useless. Accidental magic all but confirmed he wasn’t a muggle, that he still had a signature, but…
Harry shakes his head.
This is stupid. This whole thought process is so fucking stupid. Of course he still has magic. Evidently, he’s not covered head-to-toe in nasty oil burns, so clearly his magic is still with him. Who the fuck cares if he can’t feel it? He’s being a damned bloody moron, and he needs to stop whimpering like the child he’s been sent back to imitate.
Fucking hell, but this revelation changes a few things. Or a lot of things. This isn’t some paradise where Harry is normal and the fate of the world hinges on him staying normal.
He really was sent back in time.
Harry feels laughter bubble up his throat. He clamps his hands over his mouth.
Okay. He thinks. Okay. Good. Great, even! Fan-fucking-tastic! So he’s been sent back in time, at least ten years into the past. He’s reliving a life he’s already had the pleasure of seeing through. He knows exactly what’s going to happen. Or, well, the general idea of it, anyway. Some things are fuzzy and others are blank, but the important bits are there. The… the deaths are all there. The things they had done wrong. The things he had done wrong.
He can fix this. I can fix this. All of it. Every single mistake he’d ever made. He can fix it all.
Harry’s forehead thuds back to the dusty floor on his cupboard. He laughs.
Of course, the moment Harry finally manages to screw his head on tight enough, he runs into practical problems.
For one, he forgot just how exhausting an existence being a child in the Dursely family had been. He’s barely fed, which he’s usually fine with, because most nights he can barely keep the food down anyway. But the lack of options is kind of annoying. His energy depletes hours into being awake, and the plethora of chores he’s made to do don’t really help.
His aunt, seeing his renewed state of mind, easily snaps back into her usual character, snapping at him and ignoring him when he’s not being useful in equal parts. He tries to stay out of trouble to avoid his uncle, but being a kid sucks shit, because everything feels ten times more, and being dragged by his hair hurts like the fucking Cruciatus.
There is, obviously, his inability to perform any magic of any kind. If there’s no flying bouts of boiling oil, it seems his magic is more than happy to skip off and refuse to show face. He can’t even manage to find the flicker of it anywhere. What the fuck is it even on about?
Harry’s tried other things, of course, because accidental magic is innate and responds to the need of its conduit. He tried banging his head against the floor of his cupboard for a while, but that didn’t achieve anything more than a blistering headache and a heavy hand slamming against the door telling him to quit making a ruckus. Hazardously cutting his hair proved futile, especially since he’d only gotten through a few ragged tufts before being caught with his scissors and then being sent to bed without dinner for making a mess in the bathroom. He even went so far as to try and fall off the backyard tree, because surely his magic would save him from becoming a pancake stain in the Dursely lawn.
Except apparently he’s four-five-six years old and his motor functions suck ass and he falls from the lowest branch before gaining any substantial height.
Aunt Petunia eyes him strangely after that partuclar incident, but he ignores her.
So no energy, no magic, and he’s just trying to figure out what else could possibly be so horrible in his situation when the sight of a crow – hidden partially behind the shed, ducked under a loose plane of the fence to fend against the sun – catches his eye.
Harry’s never figured out why the Wizarding World hasn’t utlised crows or ravens or other birds to carry their messages. He’d done a project on ravens, once, in primary school. They’re intelligent, far more intelligent than the standard owl. They’d make excellent service animals, and even better companions. Sure, he’d read about how finicky and proud they were, prone to stealing and petty revenge, but all that seems moot when considering they liked shiny things, and could hunt down a pretty penny.
Or a pretty message.
And then it hits him, sitting in the shade of the bushes and trying not to pass out from the heat of the sun beating down his back. He watches the crow watch him, and then he watches it turn around and hop through the loose panelling and fly away, because Harry is apparently too boring to stick around for, and it fucking hits him like a sledgehammer sent from hell.
He’s four-five-six years old. He can’t do anything. Not a sliver of light.
He’s a child in the Muggle World.
A second chance with no way to enact, no way to warn anybody, to start setting parameters and righting wrongs and saving lives because–
He has no way of reaching out. To anyone.
He’s alone.
Dumbledore is the first person that comes to mind, despite the hopelessness of his situation.
He’s four-five-six – he hasn’t bothered asking about it the specifics; it’d raise too many questions, and he’s in no mood to be stuffed into a shrink box – and he only has to wait, what, five more years for his Hogwarts letter? Seven at most? Maybe? Only, when he thinks about all that time stuck like this, in the body of a child, parading around and playing pretend for seven whole years; he thinks about how he’ll probably go mad. Or he’ll start to forget. Honestly, he doesn’t know which fate is worse.
Already, details are beginning to blur over. Memory lapses when he tries to sort through important dates and times and places. Is it because he’s got the brains the size of a four-five-six year old too? Bloody fucking hell, but this situation just seems to be getting worse and worse.
He finds comfort in between his fraying memories and lack of physical energy in imagining the what-ifs. Or the soon-to-be’s, if Harry has anything to say about it. It’s good to be prepared, as Moody had always liked to say. Being prepared closes the doors of death down each hallway, or something along those cryptic lines. Right. Fuck. Constant vigilance or some shit.
Dumbledore is the obvious first choice, even though Harry has no idea how he’d ever manage to contact the Headmaster in his current state. Dumbledore had most likely planned for this whole sequence of events to occur; he’d have a whole contingency, a whole back-up plan to stop Voldemort for real.
Or maybe Professor McGonagall? As a means to reach Dumbledore? But that seems equally as unlikely. How in God’s name is he supposed to reach out to Hogwarts in his current state? He’s basically as useful as Filch, but then again, Filch is a fully grown man, and Harry is stuck as a useless stubby child.
No one from Hogwarts then. He goes through a list of his friends next.
Hermione? No, that would never work. Based on what he’s learned through his relatives, Harry’s the only one with any sort of recollection about the future-that-hasn’t-happened-yet. Unless he comes across someone magical, he can’t say for sure, but he highly doubts it. His relatives, buckets of empty ballsacks as they were when it came to anything magic, were still heavily intertwined in the Wizarding World (much to their chagrin, which always manages to bring Harry a special sort of delight).
Hermione would not only be a child, but equally if not more useless in matters of magic than him. She’s as muggle-born as muggle-born’s come. And anyway, Harry has no idea where she lives. How would he even get a hold of her?
(He doesn’t think about how he’s pretty sure he used to know her address. They’d been avid penpals over his lonely summers. He remembers having her street memorised like it was his own, imagining visiting for a weekend, maybe. He doesn’t think about how he has these vague color-shaped memories, but can’t seem to remember anything about them.)
Ron is also a bit of a lost cause. Harry never travelled to the Burrow on his own; he’s got no idea where it is, and without Apparition, he’s – as mentioned so delicately before – got about Filch-level expertise in the area. He does entertain the thought that if he somehow manages to reach Ron, or any of the Weasley’s, he’d be able to get to Dumbledore. It’s an avenue he leaves simmering at the back of his mind, because right now, it’s the best idea he’s got.
He considers the other off collection of friends, but they all turn up with zilch reality. He has to face the music; he’s stuck here in 4 Privet Drive until he gets his Hogwarts letter and is once again introduced to the Wizarding World.
If he doesn’t go crazy and explode before that happens, anyway.
He considers the future spread before him. It’s so weird that he knows what’s going to happen. Like rewatching a film and reciting all the lines. His uncle will throw a right fit at his Hogwarts letters, and if all works the way it did and Harry doesn’t manage to snag a letter, Hagrid will find them in a little shack out in the middle of nowhere.
His heart squeezes as he thinks of Hagrid. He pointedly stops thinking about him a moment later. Because if he keeps thinking about his half-giant friend, and what had happened to him, he’s going to throw up the precious dredges of bile left in his stomach.
Okay, so Hagrid will find him. He’ll take him to Diagon Alley and they’ll buy all of his things. He’ll wait another month. He’ll take a train to Kings Cross.
He’ll find Ron. Or, well, Ron will find him. It’s going to be so strange. If Harry’s the only person in the entire world that remembers what had happened – or hadn’t happened yet, anyway – then will he have to pretend to grow up all over again? He’s seventeen, for fucks sake. He’d probably scare every child in his near vicinity with his smile. How do kids even smile? Full of teeth, surely.
Harry tries it out, and the movement feels stiff and weird. He then remembers that he hasn’t actually smiled in a very long time. Longer than he’s been four-five-six. Longer than he’s been seventeen.
He thinks about the sorting, and how he’ll have to pretend to be a stupid kid for that stupid hat to sort. Would it put him back in Gryffindor? Would it see right through him? A terrifying thought suddenly occurs to him. Would it cast him away? He’s already technically seventeen. He’s in his last year. Would the hat rat him out and have him sent away? Would he even be able to attend Hogwarts anymore?
Binning his spiralling thoughts, Harry straightens his train of imagination once more.
No, there’s no reality here where anything bad happens, remember? Harry will be sorted into Gryffindor, and then he’ll attend all his classes and sleep in his comfortable four-poster bed up in towers and he’ll be surrounded by all his friends – young and alive and free of anything wrong, because Harry’s going to fix everything, don’t worry, he will – and nothing bad will ever happen.
One benefit through this whole fuck assery is that he’ll probably ace all his classes. He’s leagues above first year Charms and Transfiguration. He’ll be scoring O’s in his sleep! Hermione’s going to be so jealous. So will that twat, Draco. Oh, how satisfying it’ll be to wipe his smirk off his face when Harry clears through Potions like a certified… Master…
Harry’s eyes widen. His heart skips a beat before thundering forward in a bruising pace, set to tear his ribs apart.
He can barely breathe.
Oh my God, he thinks, nearly hysterical. Distantly, he hears someone laughing. It sounds half-crazed and parched and scary. It takes a moment to realise it’s him.
Potions Master. How could he have forgotten?
(Long black hair splayed over the floor, like blood, there’s so much blood, oh God. It’s hot and sticky and fresh, and Harry is alone and he doesn’t know what to do. Except someone does. Someone reaches up and taps the glowing trickle of tears running down their face, and Harry– Look at me–)
Harry Potter had found out his piece to play in the war through the silvery magic of a pensieve.
It hadn’t been Albus Dumbledore who had told him. Nor Professor McGonagall, or anything other Professor. It hadn’t been anyone he’d trusted in the Order. Not Lupin. Not his friends.
Harry had poured silver into the pensieve – coaoted with tacky old blood and tears and Harry doesn’t want to think about it – and dipped his head into the memories of Severus Snape.
For the first time in seventeen years, he’d heard his mother laugh.
He’d watched her, and he’d watched Snape, and he’d watched them grow up and grow apart. He’d watched Snape join the Dark Lord. He’d watched Snape bow at Dumbledore’s robes and beg. He’d watched Dumbledore wither away, slowly, a disease eating away at his magic, at his body. He’d watched as Dumbledore spoke to Snape, as if he’d been speaking to Harry. Horcruxes, they had talked about. Harry Potter, he had mentioned, must die.
(Harry tries not to think about the fact that it hadn’t been Dumbledore who had tried to question their twisted reality, of the pieces that needed to be played, those many nights ago. It hadn’t been the Headmaster who said his name and then questioned why. Why him. Why is it always him?)
Vernon is driving Aunt Petunia out again today. To God-knows-where. To do God-knows-what.
It’s just Dudley and Harry in the house, hiding away from the blistering summer heat. Or, well, Dudley is hiding, moaning and groaning while eagle-spread beneath the fan. Harry feels sweat trickle along his back and soak through his five-sizes-too-big shirt – where his body is hosting that extra water is beyond him – but instead of laying prone on the floor, he’s creeping upstairs on all fours to minimise the noise he makes.
Last night, he heard Aunt Petunia complain about the boxes. She doesn’t make it a habit to complain quietly, and Harry’s cupboard walls are thin. I’m going to burn this pile of junk, she had sneered. You should, Vernon had replied, sounding proud.
And Harry knows deep down that today will relapse alongside an old memory he’d practically forgotten about. An old memory where The Boy Who Hadn’t Known a Thing watched from afar as Aunt Petunia burned everything stuffed in those ancient boxes before his very eyes.
He knows that when his aunt and uncle get home, it’s going to be much of the same scene. Harry will be told to stand faraway, and be told to watch as remnants of his family turned to ash. Not that he’d known that, ten years ago.
He knows now, of course, because he’s seventeen and he’s watched the world end before his very eyes. He tries to imagine how vindictive it must have felt for his aunt, to make him watch as she burned her late sister’s things in front of her equally freakish and deformed nephew. .
The only thing Harry can think about is how stupid it had been to do so without telling him. He’d been so confused back then, and kind of grateful to avoid the heat of the fire.
He creeps up the stairs, one hand and foot at a time, avoiding the middle of the stairs because that’s where the wood is all worn and creaky. He clambers to the second floor and tiptoes to the furthest room in the hallway. The door is slightly ajar and the lights are closed.
Harry slides his body through without making a sound. He doesn’t open the lights. He doesn’t really need to. It’s mid-morning and the sun filters through the half-closed curtains. Enough light to illuminate the room in full.
Just enough light to see the boxes still stuffed away under the stool, to be burned and forgotten.
Harry hastily plunges forward. He’s suddenly, ravenously desperate, and he can’t help but want his hands on these things now, wants to look at it all now. He outright ignores the dates that don’t matter, ignores the names he doesn’t know and the thick envelopes addressed to those that don’t concern him.
His hands latch onto the box labelled Cokeworth.
It rings in his head like a bell, Cokeworth, Cokeworth, Cokeworth. He’s fucking– he’s been to Cokeworth! How had he not connected the dots before? He surely must be stupid. Forget the Aurors, Potter; you’re a right fucking moron. Cokeworth, where his mum grew up. Where his aunt grew up. Vernon drove them down there when Harry had been eleven, to escape his Hogwart’s letters. He’d driven down there because he knows the route, because– because–
Aunt Petunia used to live there.
Lily Potter used to live there.
And Lily Potter knew– holy fucking shit, oh my God, oh my God – Lily Potter had been best fucking friends with Severus fucking Snape.
Harry tears through the box like a starved gutter rat, ripping his nails against the tape until he can peel it away and scramble for the content inside. It’s mostly paper. Pictures. Letters. Documents. Files. It’s all here, his mother’s life, all that’s left of her, all in this small box labelled Cokeworth.
He goes through the pictures like a madman, barely looking at one before trying to sear the next one into his brain. He can’t go through them fast enough. It’s his mother, over and over and over; bright, curly auburn hair, sun-kissed skin, a crooked smile where one side of her mouth hitches higher than the other, making her nose scrunch. It’s Lily Potter – or Lily Evans, according to the files full of legal jargon – in all her youthful glory; sitting at a bench, ducked down examining some bush, swimming in a glittering lake. It’s all here. All of her.
Harry doesn’t spend time noticing how Aunt Petunia shows up every now and then, or how two likened adults will sometimes stand beside them and pose. He doesn’t let himself spend too much time looking at the way the two would hold hands sometimes, more often than not, really, Petunia and Lily. He doesn’t let himself ponder how lost love can change something like that.
Instead he pays attention to the dates. The months and years written in inconsisten hand-writing, from smudged pencil to vivid coloured marker. It’s all Cokeworth, he knows, and not just because all these pictures and papers are coming from the box labelled Cokeworth. Maybe a career as an Auror isn’t completely lost to him.
In the back of his mind, Snape’s memories play in vivid detail, like a film on loop. He sees Cokeworth in his mind’s eye, a distant background grey, because Snape’s memories had focussed on Lily too much to have paid attention to anything else. He sees two kids, younger than first years, for sure, but older than Harry is now, meet up at each other’s front yards, or at the local park, trotting along the sloping hills on the outskirts of the small town, playing by the river.
He sees it now, in his hands, a limp, faded square picture where two kids stand by stand. The girl is taller, which is funny, in some faraway sort of way, and she’s got her arm wrapped around her friend. She’s beaming up at him, sundress the same colour as her hair.
Her friend is clothed in an outfit fit for Dudley at that age, anchored to his body with a belt that sticks out like a tail from underneath the boy’s overhanging shirt. His hair is dishevlled and black and choppy, like someone cut it blind. Or drunk. Perhaps both. He stands by his friend, the auburn-haired girl, and he’s not smiling, not quite. It’s a little thing, the happiness on his face. Softening his sharp eyes so there’s no lines on his face.
Harry knows that the little boy had felt more than he’d been capable of showing.
Because this is Severus Snape. This is the true fucking saviour of the Wizarding World. The one who deserves the praise beyond anything Harry has received. Harry clutches the picture until his fingers – already shaky, but that might just be from sweating out in this stove-of-a-house – turn a stark white, and the picture threatens to tear.
Harry hastily goes back into the file where he’d retrieved the picture, this time roaming over the documents, the papers, the legal stuff that he can barely understand. Four-five-six, seventeen, or otherwise, Harry isn’t any more versed in this stuff, especially muggle custody regulations. He doesn’t know what these things mean, and he’s getting frustrated. What the hell? Everything that could ever need labelling is labelled except for the one fucking thing–
Ah.
Found it.
Harry clutches at the property details listed meticulously on an innocuous spread of paper. The edges are worn and one corner definitely has what’s nearly a decade-old coffee stain, but it’s here. This has to be it. It’s the only thing he’s found with an address on it.
Eyes roving over it, he reads it again and again until he can practically see the words in the back of his mind, and then he rereads them still. He needs this. He can’t mess this up. This was his mother’s street, his mother’s original home, and it’s in Cokeworth, and it’s in the same small town Severus Snape lived – lives? – in. It may not be the same street, it may not even be the same damn neighborhood, but it’s a start. It has to be.
It’s then that Lady Luck seems to get bored, or maybe she doesn’t like the fact that he’s taking advantage of her after having been her favourite dog to beat for years, but suddenly she leans down to spit on his fingers. As he’s hastily ripping the address and slipping the piece of paper into his pocket – alongside as many photos as he can stash – the sound of a car door slamming shut echoes from outside, and Lady Luck starts laughing.
The front door opens.
Some ragged curses, keys jingling, footsteps rushing around as if Vernon had forgotten something, and was looking for it, and Harry is praying to Lady Luck that one glob of spit had been enough, please and thank you, go back to ignoring me–
The stairs creak. Evidently, Vernon isn’t crawling on all fours like Harry had, because he has no reason to creep around in his own home. And Harry has no reason to creep around either, he reckons watching the shadow in the corridor grow, because he has always been Lady Luck’s favourite losing dog.
Harry is let out of his cupboard three days later to watch Aunt Petunia burn the Cokeworth box one picture at a time. In this lifetime, he watches up close, kneeling along the hearth, watching the countless faces of his mother shrivel into embers.
Harry scrapes against the cupboard door until his fingernails bleed, until Aunt Petunia opens it to let him use the loo. Aunt Petunia is back in the kitchen when he comes back, and he silently creeps back in.
Lady Luck must be sleeping, because Aunt Petunia walks by and doesn’t remember to lock the door on her way upstairs.
Harry’s hand trembles as he wears three oversized shirts one atop the other and stuffs every pocket he can find with his meagre belongings. It’s not much. A few pictures. The crumpled piece of address. A small plastic vial that once held beads. A pen without a cap.
Harry’s hand trembles as he tiptoes out of the cupboard. As he holds his breath and crawls to the mudroom. As he climbs the wracks of shoes and clings to the coats until his fingers scrape against the top shelf, where the keys and the cane and his Uncle’s wallet lay.
His hand trembles when he nicks it, stuffs it into his second shirt’s breast pocket.
Harry trembles all over as he slips outside from the back door, tears at the little hole in the fence behind the shed with his bleeding fingers, and then crawls through like a mangy mutt.
Harry trembles as he runs all the way down Privet Drive without ever looking back.