Chapter Text
Remus isn’t there when they get off the Hogwarts Express. Harry feels numb, bumping between Ron and Hermione as they push their way through the crowd and out of the platform. Other, familiar adults from the Order are standing around the Durselys just outside the barrier, he notes with vague disinterest. His best friends tell him goodbye, the sound wavering towards his ears through water or maybe mud, which he cannot see but feels around him in a hovering cloud.
Moody and the others don’t explain Remus’s absence, but they don’t have to. Sirius’ death is his fault, and there’s nothing to be done about it. He doesn’t blame Remus for not wanting to see him.
“Have a good summer, lad,” Moody tells him as they walk past. Mrs. Weasley gives him a hug. Harry doesn’t look to see if the others—Tonks, Fred, George, and Mr. Weasley— have anything to greet him with. He just stares at Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia and his cousin Dudley, wondering if his life could possibly get any worse at this point.
Quite impossible, Harry thinks, looking at Vernon’s sneer.
They don’t ask Harry how his year was. Harry doesn’t ask them if they’ve got any fun summer plans. Instead, the little almost-family of four stands in the chilled interior of Kings Cross for a few long moments until Uncle Vernon gives a grunt of displeasure and glares down at his watch. They can all take a cue.
Harry leads the way out into the sunlit afternoon, Vernon, Petunia, and Dudley scrambling to keep up with him. He stops once he reaches the edge of the stairs, shouldering the weight of his trunk and glancing at Aunt Petunia.
“The car’s this way,” she mutters, taking off across the street towards the St. Judds parking.
They’ve parked at the opposite end of the car park, which makes the walk hotter and slightly irritating.
“Paid for bloody parking to bloody pick the useless boy up…” Uncle Vernon grumbles, rifling around in his pockets for the keys once they reach the car.
Harry’s magic shudders anxiously, flaring up the way it always does when he’s in danger. The tickles along his shoulders, tingling down his spine in tiny spikes and pricks, are familiar by now. His magic has done this for as long as he can remember when he prepares to get into the Dursley’s car and return to Privet Drive for the summer. Hermione theorizes that his magic doesn’t like being cooped up, because he doesn’t like being cooped up.
Harry rolls his shoulders and ignores the insistent fluttering. “There’s nothing there,” he whispers, wishing his magic would stop. Unfortunately, he isn’t as good at controlling it as most people, so despite his best efforts Harry’s rewarded with yet another cascade of prickles falling on his neck, like his hair standing up on end. His relatives don’t say anything about his mutterings as they finally start getting in the car, and he yanks the boot open himself, lifting his trunk to put it in.
Uncle Vernon starts the car, the engine turning over easily.
The world explodes, fire and blood and crispy, burning flesh, a smell that takes him back to being eleven, as Harry is thrown backward.
His trunk is launched to the side, and Harry lands against another car, the Dursley’s melting license plate flying at his face.
“Fuck!” Harry hisses, palming his wand and forcing his eyes to stay open. Everything hurts, and his ears are ringing, and there’s an oppressive weight on his mind like when he needs to take a nap. But he has to focus .
There, three meters in front of him, the Dursley’s country car is reduced to a melting pile of metal rubble. In the rising smoke, a snake writhes and twists, emerging from the thin guise of a skull. The Dark Mark.
Death Eaters.
He scrambles to cast a charm, a spell, anything, grip slippery from sweat. He can’t even get up from the ground.
“Stupefy! Stupefy! Expelliarmus!” Harry shouts, jabbing his wand at the black smoky figures around him.
And then Moody is there, vanishing the smoke, and Tonks is throwing obliviates left and right like they’re going out of style.
Fred and George are on his other side already, possibly having apparated to be next to him, and they’re throwing out some kind of powder that turns into a thick blackness, creating a wall around the mess, Harry and car included. They have to keep the muggles from seeing anything that can’t easily be explained away.
“Out of the way!” Shouts Mrs. Weasley, in a voice louder than the loudest Howler Harry has ever heard. “The car’s exploded! Out of the way!”
The muggles who hadn’t been obliviated scatter, vanishing away as the rest of the scene is surrounded by that wall of black. The ones who have are slumped on the ground, sleeping. He can’t focus on them, or really on anything.
The Dursley’s are… dead. They have to be. There’s nothing left of the car.
Mr. Weasley helps Harry stand from the front, Mrs. Weasley against his back, as they check him for injuries.
“Anything?” Moody calls out sharply, eye whirling in its socket so quickly that Harry can hear it over the ringing in his ears.
“Nothing. No sign of them,” Tonks calls back. She starts tossing out a series of warding spells, visible in pale blue and light yellow as he slowly blinks.
“Are you alright, Harry?” Mr. Weasley asks, after doing three full body scans and seeing he has nothing more than a few more bruises.
“What happened?” Moody barks, hobbling over.
“I don’t really know,” Harry pants, scanning the scene for his runaway trunk. “I was just putting my trunk in the boot when the car exploded. I landed over here, saw the Dark Mark in the smoke above the car, and then you all were here.”
“Right,” Tonks says, like his information wasn’t helpful. And she’s right.
“Let’s get everyone out of here and back to headquarters for now,” Mr. Weasley says, reaching for calm.
“Somebody contact Dumbledore,” Moody says sharply. He grabs Harry’s upper arm tightly, a little harsh, and then turns on his heel, pulling Harry with him. They didn’t even get an answer or confirmation from anyone at the station about what happened, and suddenly Harry is being compressed and stretched through a tube in the sky, and he can’t breathe-
They land, wobbling a little, on the front steps of Number 12, Harry gasping for breath and Moody already reaching for the handle to shove him inside, checking the street. If he didn’t know any better, Harry would think Padfoot was still on the other side.
Moody goes to open the door, still holding Harry, but Harry starts to step back. “No wait, I don’t want to go in there yet.” Until he does, Padfoot is still in there. He can’t kill him twice.
“Come on, lad-”
But Harry’s magic flares in response to being forced to do something he doesn’t want, and Moody flinches a little at its force and then grumbles to himself.
“Fine. Fine! We’ll take ye back, and ye can speak to the muggle coppers, and then we’ll come to headquarters, where it’s safe. Bloody softies, you kids.”
Before Harry can respond, they’re standing back in the smoky, dazzling sunlight of the car park outside King’s Cross. Mrs. Weasley is checking over Ginny, Mr. Weasley has Ron, and Tonks is standing over Hermione who looks a few milliseconds away from shouting her head off about something. Could be anything.
The twins have vanished, off to wherever they might be hiding.
Moody shoves Harry between his best friends, pushing Ron back by the shoulder a bit so that they’re bracketing him in, and then limps off into the crowd. It’s only then that Harry realizes it’s loud in the car park, alarms going off left and right and muggles and wizards alike screaming and panicking and trying to escape.
He loses himself in the mess for quite a while, just drifting.
Hermione brings him out of it, touching a hand to his cheek. “The police are here to speak to you, Harry. Ron and I will come with.”
He looks up, Ron taking one hand as he does so, and lays eyes on a short young police woman looking at him with some measure of pity. Harry doesn’t say anything, just blinks a few times and settles his gaze on Hermione.
She’ll know what to do.
And she does, taking her cue well and telling the officer that they’ll follow her. Harry’s hands are used to guide him forward through his stupor. He’s so, so tired. He just wants to lay down, really.
And he wants his Godfather back.
“Mr. Potter, can you confirm that information is correct?” A cold voice asks.
Harry blinks and looks up from his lap. He, Ron, and Hermione are sitting on a little bench outside Kings Cross station, three officers in front of them.
Hermione squeezes his hand.
“The information about who I am?” Harry croaks, assuming that’s what she’s told them.
“And about your previous guardians and residence.”
“Yes,” he says mechanically, “Everything she said was correct.” He didn’t hear what she said, but anything Hermione may have gotten wrong is sure to be something they should keep secret.
“Alright then. Thank you, Mr. Potter. For the sake of our social services records, we will need to contact your nearest living relatives. Do you have any idea of whose number that may be?”
Ron squeezes his hand this time, prompting him to shake his head a few seconds after the question has been asked. “No.”
“No?” The officer looks up from her clipboard.
“I don’t have any living relatives,” He forces himself to say. “They’re all dead.”
“Alright, then. In that case, only for our system, we’re required to do a DNA test. Please make use of this cotton swab and place a few hairs in this vial.” The officer on the right hands Hermione two plastic vials, one with a cotton piece inside. She grabs one of his hairs first, yanking it out with little fanfare. “Do you have a place you can stay for the next few days?”
“Yes,” he says, all by himself. Hermione shoves the stick in his mouth before he can say anything else or give any more of an explanation. He tugs his head back at first, a reflexive flinch from her jabbing the back of his throat with a dry piece of plant , and she tuts at him.
Harry grunts to make his displeasure known. “Nnn.”
“Stop being a baby and let me get it.”
“Mnn.”
Ron ducks his head in, resting his forehead on Harry’s shoulder. He can feel Ron shaking with contained laughter. Rude. Warmth starts to flood back into his fingers, though.
“Do you have a number on file for that residence?” The officer asks.
“Yeah,” Ron pipes in, sitting up a bit. He gives the number for the phone Mr. Weasley purchased and hid last summer.
Harry fades out again, drifting through time and space. It’s almost nice, to feel for just a few minutes like he doesn’t exist. Ron’s fingers, longer than Hermione’s, run through his hair a bit. Harry closes his eyes and tries to soak up the happy rays of the sun before this shit show really gets going.
He doesn’t even want to know what Dumbledore is going to say about it.