Chapter Text
1989, childhood
It began like this:
On the night of the 1st of November, little Harry Potter was placed on the doorstep of Mr and Mrs Dursley’s house at Number 4, Privet Drive. The next morning, a scream woke little Harry when Mrs Dursley opened the front door to put out the milk bottles and found him lying there, a letter tucked into his blankets.
Had this been an ordinary baby, the poor thing would have died of hypothermia. But Harry was not an ordinary baby, nor would he grow up into an ordinary child, no matter how much the Dursleys tried to beat the freakishness out of him. Little Harry grew up knowing he was a freak and that he had to keep his freakishness hidden. It did not take long for Harry to figure out what the Dursleys were referring to when they punished him for his freakishness. To keep it hidden, he had to make sure no outbursts would happen, to suppress the strange power welling up within him whenever he was angry or afraid, to make sure he wouldn’t make unnatural things happen. The easiest way to do so, he found, was to keep his head down and his emotions in check. The anger stopped soon enough. The constant fear he managed to keep close to his chest.
Life was never good, but it got better. Harry would still be punished for burning the bacon or incorrectly trimming the flowerbeds, but those were mistakes easily avoided and the punishments for them were endurable for the most part. The truly severe punishments only followed after outbursts of freakishness and so Harry made sure to have no such outbursts.
It worked out, for the most part. Until Harry turned nine.
🗝
Harry woke up a little too warm to be comfortable, his legs feeling numb from the heavy weight draped across them and fur smothering him. He was surrounded by cats. He did not mind as much as he would have, before. Curled up on the side, one cat squished to his face, one lying on his lower legs, another curled up against his back – there was comfort to be found in the warm, breathing, living beings surrounding him, even if he did not feel comfortable physically.
He could hear voices coming from the living room, muffled by the door.
But that wasn’t right.
Mrs Figg only had her cats for company and her cats did not talk with human voices – at least as far as Harry was aware. He had heard snakes talking, on occasion. He had glimpsed snippets of documentaries about types of birds imitating human speech on the Dursleys’ television. Perhaps cats could talk, too.
But no. The voices sounded like human voices.
It should have terrified Harry. If the Dursleys had come to –
But no. The voices sounded nothing like the Dursleys. Harry would know. He had lived with them for as long as he could remember.
Harry kept still, choosing to remain in bed with the cats for as long as he would be allowed to. He couldn’t have moved, anyway – even if he dislodged the cats, his legs were still numb.
Mrs Figg’s guest room was on the ground floor. There was a bathroom right across the small hallway and the kitchen to the right. The living room was connected to the kitchen and Mrs Figg always left her doors open for the cats. The chances that Harry could leave this room without being seen were slim. The chances that he would be able to listen in on the conversation held in the living room without being noticed if he cracked the door open, on the other hand, were considerably higher.
He sighed.
He would have to regain feeling in his legs first.
Rolling over dislodged the cat on his legs and made three of the five cats piled around him jump off the bed in protest. They would have left the room, had the door not been closed. The door usually was not closed, always left ajar to allow the cats to come and go as they pleased. Mrs Figg must have closed it, so whoever was in the living room would not disturb his sleep. Had he slept through the doorbell ringing? He couldn’t have. The doorbell never meant good things.
The cats were getting impatient, one already scratching at the door, ready to meow at any moment.
Harry gave up on massaging his legs and wobbled over to let them out. He knew some would immediately run into the kitchen for food, others searching out their owner for cheek scratches.
“If the boy truly is on the verge of turning into an obscure real …”
Harry frowned, trying to make sense of the words.
“Albus, you cannot possibly –”
“Oh, who’s this?”
They must have noticed the cats. Harry wanted to open the door – there was no use in pretending to still be asleep, now – but his body wouldn’t move. He could hear someone moving closer and –
Soft fur brushing his legs interrupted his rising panic.
Harry looked down at the cat. The cat looked up at him, purring with an air of expectation. Harry bent down to pick it up. Armed with a fluffy mass of fur he could hide behind, Harry allowed himself to take a deep breath and a moment to let the soothing purring of the cat wash over him – only then did he open the door fully to step out.
There were three people in the living room. An old man with long, grey hair and an equally long beard stood in the doorway to the kitchen, slightly hunched over as if he had been reaching out to pet one of the cats, the long sleeves of his purple – dress? – trailing on the floor. Behind him, Harry could see Mrs Figg in her morning robe and a person whose face was hidden by a curtain of hair as black as the clothes they wore.
Harry ducked his head to hide behind the cat in his arms. The cat purred louder. He barely registered the words the old man said to him, his voice kind and gentle. He introduced himself as Albus Dumbledore, headmaster of a school with a rather weird name, and his colleague Severus Snape. He said a few more things, but Harry couldn’t quite manage to focus on the words, his eyes drawn to the person in black. Harry didn’t know how to interpret the expression on the person’s face. He didn’t know if it was directed at him or something else. Harry didn’t like it.
“Harry?”
Harry tore his gaze away to look back at the old man.
“Would you like to sit down with us?”
Harry looked at Mrs Figg, who gave him a kind, if strained smile and beckoned him closer.
The cat didn’t leave when he sat down on the sofa in Mrs Figg’s living room, instead getting comfortable on his lap. It wasn’t purring anymore.
“Can you tell us what happened, Harry?” Albus Dumbledore said in the same gentle tone he had used before.
Harry glanced at his kind-looking face, at the dour-looking Severus Snape in his pitch-black clothes, at Mrs Figg, still in her morning robe, who gave him an encouraging nod, all three of them standing around him, making him feel small. He averted his eyes to look back down at the cat in his lap.
He did not trust these two strange men. But he trusted Mrs Figg.
“Take your time.”
“What –” Harry tightened his grip on the cat, then loosened it when the cat gave him what appeared to be an irritated look. “What do you want to know?”
“We want to help you. We want to understand what happened.”
Harry did not look up at their faces again, but he did end up talking about the previous day. He didn’t want to. He knew what he had done was wrong. He knew he would be punished. But there was something in Albus Dumbledore’s voice that made Harry talk and Harry felt all the more afraid for it.
It was hard and it took too long. Harry knew it took too long for him to get to – to the – to what had brought him here, to Mrs Figg’s house.
“When Uncle Vernon grabbed my wrist, I – I just – I was terrified and I panicked and it – the – the fre– I mean, the … thing? that … that makes me a freak, the – what I must absolutely never do, it – it just lashed out and I – I don’t –”
Harry took a shaky breath. Held it. Took his anxiety and cradled it closer to his heart.
“Uncle Vernon was on the floor and he was bleeding from his nose and his mouth and his ears and – and the windows were broken and Aunt Petunia and Dudley were looking at me in horror and I knew I wasn’t supposed to do that, I knew I had done a bad thing, I knew they would punish me, I deserve to be punished, but I panicked and I –” He released what air he still held in his lungs, still shaky, breathed in again. “I was terrified. So I ran.”
His memories were blurry after that, but Harry remembered Mrs Figg ushering him inside and bundling him up in blankets and burying him under a pile of cats. He did not tell them that.
The room was silent for a long time. Harry didn’t dare to look up, to see the expressions on their faces. He didn’t know what he would do with whatever he would find there.
He took two more breaths, hand still buried in the cat’s fur, before he managed to quietly ask, “What will happen to me now?”
Out of the corner of his eyes, he saw them move in a way that indicated they were exchanging looks to communicate. Harry hunched over further, burying his face in soft cat fur. It grounded him.
“Harry,” the old man said kindly. “If you could leave us for a moment, so we may discuss this issue?”
Harry looked up. Whatever the old man saw in his face made him soften his voice. “Rest assured that we only want the best for you. No harm will be allowed to come to you.”
Harry did not believe him.
Still, Harry did as he was told, gently lifted the cat from his lap and stood up to leave. Several cats followed him out. He didn’t close the doors to the living room and the kitchen, yet no sound of the conversation they were supposedly having reached his ears as he went to change into fresh clothes and then to brush his teeth in the bathroom. He couldn’t even hear them when he settled at the kitchen table to eat a piece of buttered toast, watching the man called Severus Snape pace and gesture angrily while Albus Dumbledore listened gravely. He wondered what kind of expression Mrs Figg was making, but she was standing just out of sight.
One of the cats kept brushing against his legs. It was a different one from before. The cats were not allowed on the kitchen chairs, never mind the table, but Harry figured allowing one onto his lap would be fine under these circumstances. He had never been fond of Mrs Figg’s cats, truth be told, but he thought that might have been Mrs Figg’s fault rather than the cats’. The way she kept going on and on about them, always shoving pictures in Harry’s face whenever the Dursleys dumped him on her doorstep… The cats had also never been this friendly with him.
They said animals could sense your distress. That made sense. Their presence helped. It calmed Harry. It kept the panic at bay and lessened the constant fear gripping his heart. Like this, he could almost believe that he wasn’t just pretending to feel nothing at all.
Albus Dumbledore and Severus Snape were freaks, Harry thought as he cleaned his dishes in the sink. They were like him. It was the only explanation for the continued silence despite the obviously heated discussion happening in the living room – even Mrs Figg had seemingly lost her temper by now. It explained why they had believed his story so easily.
Harry didn’t know what to do with that revelation, so he stopped thinking about it altogether. He held no power here. (He held no power anywhere at all.) Whatever they decided, he would have to accept. Perhaps, if he was lucky, they wouldn’t allow the Dursleys to punish him too severely for something that these people were capable of, themselves. Perhaps they wouldn’t let the Dursleys punish him at all, but that was wishful thinking. Harry had been left with the Dursleys for a reason, even if he did not know the reason. The Dursleys had allowed him to sleep under their roof and eat their food despite being a freak. And Harry had done a terrible thing to them in return just because he had been afraid.
Albus Dumbledore had said it would only take a moment, but the adults ended up deep in discussion well into the evening. The two men declined to stay for dinner and promised to return the next day with a decision. Despite the reassurances Albus Dumbledore gave him, Harry did not feel any better about this.
Mrs Figg did not bury him under a pile of cats that night, but several cats cuddled up to Harry during the night anyway. He found that he did not mind their presence in the least. Come morning, Harry realised he did not have any new spare clothes to change into and was rather surprised when Mrs Figg provided him with a set that … seemed unused and … fit him … almost perfectly. Harry did not know what to do with that and so he put it in a corner of his mind, where he wouldn’t have to look too closely at it.
Albus Dumbledore and Severus Snape returned around midday, their expressions grim.
“The necessary arrangements have been made,” one of them told Mrs Figg.
Harry watched them warily. It should have been simple – Harry had made a terrible mistake and fled the scene, he should be punished accordingly and then life would go on as usual. He did not want to be punished, nor for life to go on as usual, but that was neither here nor there. It wasn’t like he actually had any choice in the matter. Harry did not understand why such a simple matter had taken a day and a half to be resolved.
“Harry.”
He looked up and into Albus Dumbledore’s kind face.
“We have spoken with your aunt and uncle. It has been decided that you shall not return to live with your relatives.”
Harry blinked. Albus Dumbledore looked at him expectantly. Harry’s eyes flickered to Severus Snape standing by the door.
“What – What does that mean?”
“It means that you will be placed in someone else’s care.” The old man gestured to Severus Snape. “Severus here has agreed to take you in for the time being.”
Severus Snape did not look like someone who had voluntarily agreed to anything. Thinking back, Harry couldn’t actually remember seeing any expression other than a sneer on the man’s face. Perhaps his face just was like that. But Harry didn’t dare to hope.
Severus Snape did not move from his spot by the door, not even when he finally addressed Harry. “Is there anything you wish to retrieve from your relatives’ house?”
Harry shook his head. It wasn’t as if he actually owned anything, after all.
Severus Snape’s expression remained unchanged, as did the drawl in his voice. “I thought as much.”
Harry was beginning to think that the man’s voice just naturally sounded like that – maybe it went hand in hand with the continuous sneer. Still, something told him the drawl was a conscious choice – a constant choice, finding everything and everyone lacking in whatever would make them worthy of a drawl-free tone in Severus Snape’s eyes.
“Come along then, we haven’t got all day,” he said and turned on his heel, his cloak billowing behind him as he swept from the room.
For some reason, the man reminded Harry of a bat.
Harry had never before in his life actually seen a bat, so he didn’t know where the thought came from. Harry blinked at the abruptness of it all. He would have hesitated, had there been anything to hesitate over – like belongings to collect, heartfelt farewells to be said. But for all that he had fled to Mrs Figg’s house in need of a safe place to stay, he was not actually close to the woman at all.
So, with a hasty goodbye to Mrs Figg and Albus Dumbledore, Harry followed Severus Snape out of the house.