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lomonaaerenTitle: Casualties of Politics
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Harry/Theodore Nott; background Ron/Hermione, Lily/James, Ginny/Luna, OMC/Lavender, Draco/Astoria, and past Albus/Gellert
Content Notes: AU, Harry has a twin, child abuse, bullying, PTSD, social ostracism, minor character death, heavy angst, suicidal thoughts, gore, violence
Rating: R
Summary: AU. The Potter twins survive Voldemort’s attack. However, Albus Dumbledore knows that the root cause of the war, pureblood bigotry and hatred against Muggles and Muggleborns, will endure even if Voldemort never returns. He therefore asks Lily and James to send one of their sons to grow up in the Muggle world while training the other to battle Voldemort, so that together the twins can smooth over the differences between the magical and Muggle worlds in the political arena. And perhaps it might have worked, if not for abusive Dursleys, Harry’s inability to fit into the magical world or his family when he learns of his heritage, and a boy named Theodore Nott.
Author’s Notes: This fic is part of the “Harry Potter has a twin” genre, which means it will have a lot of tropes and will not be to everyone’s taste, although I hope to avoid character bashing. It will be irregularly updated. Please take heed of the content notes and tags; this is a very dark fic.
Casualties of Politics
Harry hid behind the corner of Number 6 and watched as Dudley and his gang went pounding by. He felt as though someone had filled his veins with lightning; he knew he was safe, but he wanted to run and run and run.
A small noise came from behind him, and Harry leaped and spun around, coming down with his heart pounding crazily. He was always doing that, no matter how much he tried to be normal. He didn’t react to anything normally, and jumped when people coughed or laughed or rustled papers or touched him.
The touching was the worst.
Harry swallowed loudly when he saw the bird sitting behind him on the pavement. It was an owl—he thought it was an owl. He could have been wrong. Dudley and Aunt Petunia were always saying he was wrong, and Uncle Vernon would just laugh if he tried to say something about being right.
The owl hooted and moved towards him. Something was attached to its leg. Harry flickered his eyes between the thing and the owl, wondering if it was injured and had come to him for help. If it had, it was probably just another thing that he would mess up.
But the owl kept moving towards him, and then halted decisively in front of him and stuck out its leg. Harry blinked. This time, he was able to see that the thing attached to the owl looked like…a folded piece of paper? Attached with twine, or something like that? Maybe the owl had flown through a garbage bin or something.
Keeping a careful eye on the owl, Harry removed the paper. The owl shook itself when he took it off, but it didn’t leave. It flew up to the top of the fence around Number 6 and settled on top of it, as if to wait.
Harry glanced cautiously at the piece of paper in his hand. It wasn’t crumpled, the way he’d assumed it would be if it was rubbish. Instead, it had a thick seal on it, and writing that drew his attention, because it was his name.
Mr. H. Potter
The Pavement
Behind the Hedge
Number 6 Privet Drive
Surrey
Harry’s breath caught in a whistling gasp. He stared up at the owl, who shifted back and forth and peered down at him in what looked like irritation. Keeping a careful ear out for Dudley’s gang, Harry slowly opened the letter.
He peered at it, and read it, and reread it, feeling a floating sensation of disbelief in him. It was an invitation to—Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry? And some kind of supply list? Harry shook his head.
It might make some freakish things he had done, like ending up on the roof of their school, make more sense, and at least he understood what “await your owl” meant. The owls were evidently like carrier pigeons that Harry had read about in a book once.
But he didn’t know who would invite him. He wasn’t someone who was posh or had money, like the Dursleys did, to go to a fancy school. Harry thought the only reason the Dursleys were paying to send him to Stonewall was that it would probably look abnormal if they didn’t.
“Sorry,” Harry whispered, trying to hand the letter back to the owl. “I can’t afford this.”
“There’s the freak!”
Harry immediately whipped around and began to run again, crumpling up the letter and stuffing it into the pocket of Dudley’s oversized trousers. He heard the owl screech angrily behind him as the fence made a bouncing noise, and he supposed some of Dudley’s gang must have slammed into it. He hoped they didn’t hurt the owl.
In the running and the cowering against a wall and wishing he was invisible that eventually made Dudley and his gang run right past him, Harry forgot all about the letter. He remembered it when he was lying in his cupboard that night nursing bruises and an aching, empty stomach, but he only shook his head.
Magic was real. But money was realer, and he couldn’t afford to go.
*
“Get OUT!”
Harry winced as he stood in front of the bacon, carefully trying to make sure that it didn’t burn. He had never heard Aunt Petunia sound like that before. Uncle Vernon was usually the one who did the yelling in the family.
He glanced over his shoulder, but of course, he couldn’t see anything from inside the kitchen, and Uncle Vernon was there to glare menacingly at him. Harry bowed his head and tried to tell himself that it was probably only Mrs. Number 7 come to nag Aunt Petunia about Harry’s clothes again, and how it was a disgrace to the neighborhood for a boy to run around like that.
“I will not, Tuney. Let me see Harry.”
The voice was one Harry didn’t know, a clear, ringing voice, definitely not Mrs. Number 7. Harry kept his attention on the bacon, but it was really difficult.
And someone asking after him? Harry couldn’t imagine who that could be. But he kept cooking until the point when someone came into the doorway of the kitchen behind him and gasped, making Harry spin around.
There was a pretty woman standing there. Harry noticed two things about her right away. One was that she had long, pretty red hair. The other was that she wore some kind of odd dress that seemed to flow about her and fall to the ground, bright green, with lots of buttons. It wasn’t like any dress Harry had seen before.
Then the woman whispered, “Harry?” and made Harry look into her face, and he realized something else. She had bright green eyes, the same as the ones he saw on the rare times he got to look into a mirror.
He stared at her. This had to be a relative of some kind, maybe an aunt or a cousin or something? But why had Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon never mentioned her?
“Get out!” Uncle Vernon yelled now, standing up, but not as loudly as Aunt Petunia had yelled. Maybe she was related to Aunt Petunia, then, Harry thought. “We don’t want your kind here!”
The woman didn’t even act like she’d heard Vernon, which was pretty impressive. She whispered, “Harry? I’m—I’m Lily Potter.” She swallowed. “Your mum.”
Harry stared at her. The letter was one thing, magic might be real, but this? “My parents are dead,” he said, eyes darting back and forth between her and Uncle Vernon.
The pretty woman looked like she might cry. “No,” she whispered. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know they would tell you that, they were supposed to explain—” She swallowed. “I’m Lily Potter, your mum. Your father, James? He’s alive, too. And your brother, Felix.” She looked sideways at Uncle Vernon as if she wanted to make him disappear. “You’re magical, Harry. A wizard, like your father and brother. I’m a witch. I didn’t… they said they would tell…” Her voice trailed off.
Something turned over, cold, deep in Harry’s stomach. He had a mum and dad, and a brother, but he was here.
It was just the way Aunt Petunia was always saying. Even his own family didn’t want him.
“Why would we tell him?” Aunt Petunia snapped, pushing past the pretty woman into the kitchen. “We thought he might be normal, and you just dumped him on the doorstep with a note that you couldn’t keep him. We thought you were dead. Or couldn’t keep him because he was normal.” She flicked Harry a glance that made him flinch. He hated that, he thought he should be used to it by now, but it always happened. “So, yes, we told him you were dead.”
Lily was weeping silently. Harry thought she would probably be one of those people who were pretty when they cried. Harry never was.
“Harry,” Lily whispered. “Please. I’ve come to take you away from here. We thought you would respond to the owl, but—”
“What owl?”
Aunt Petunia’s voice was sharp and suspicious, and Harry flinched again. Lily ignored her. She gave Harry a trembling smile and held out a hand. “Would you like to come with me, Harry? You’ll live with us from now on. I promise. Your father is waiting to meet you, and your brother Felix—he’s your twin. He’s so excited at the thought of having a brother. Please?”
A twin brother. I don’t know what that’s like.
But Harry was sure of one thing, at least. Lily talked nicer than Aunt Petunia. And maybe she would just cry and be upset instead of yell and swing frying pans at her head. Harry knew which one he preferred.
He stepped away from the stove and put his hand in hers.
*
Lily stared at her older son, feeling sick. He hadn’t raised his eyes to hers once since they left Privet Drive, and he had only answered with nods or shakes of his head, or other silent gestures like clutching her hand.
She had thought—
She had told Petunia in the letter to tell Harry about magic! To tell him where he came from! And she’d thought Petunia would do it. Lily knew Petunia had always resented Lily having magic and leaving her behind. Harry would be a little piece of magic in Petunia’s everyday life. Lily had thought it was the best return she could make, even though that wasn’t the actual or main reason she had left Harry with her sister.
Lily closed her eyes and drew Harry close to her. He was trembling, she realized. Inside the huge, ratty old clothes that were obviously the only ones he had, and he had been standing in front of the stove and cooking bacon as if he was a house-elf—
Lily shivered. Albus had talked about how a Muggle-raised twin to the Boy-Who-Lived could bring their worlds closer together, by being able and willing to talk about his positive experiences among Muggles. That obviously was not going to happen.
But somehow, it would have to. Preventing another war was a larger goal than any single life.
Her stomach still churning with sickness, Lily Apparated home with her son.
*
“Harry!”
There was a hand moving towards him. Harry pulled away from Lily, even though he was still dizzy from the disappearing they’d done, and whirled around so that he was in a corner of the big room they were suddenly in and away from the hand and his—
His mother.
“Harry?” The voice sounded a little like his own, but it was hurt, bewildered, small.
Harry blinked and looked up. Another boy who looked like he was his age, but was taller than Harry, stood there, staring at him. His hair had a redder tinge, Harry thought. And he didn’t wear glasses, and his eyes were a bright hazel.
But otherwise, they looked a lot alike.
“Why are you wearing those clothes?” the other boy asked slowly. He glanced back and forth between Lily and Harry. “I thought you’d be wearing—clothes with the name of some musicians on them. Or a film.” He pronounced the word proudly, like someone who was speaking a language he didn’t hear often. He looked again at Harry, then turned to Lily and asked in a loud whisper, “Are you sure you got the right one, Mum?”
Harry flinched again. Lily’s eyes closed, and she exhaled slowly. Then she said, “Yes, Felix, this is your brother, Harry. I’m afraid that your aunt and uncle weren’t—kind to him.”
“Oh. Oh.” Felix leaned forwards, his smile strained and anxious, and disappearing altogether as Harry stared at him. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “My friend, Neville, has a great-uncle who isn’t kind to him, either. He tried to throw Neville out the window and drown him to get his accidental magic to appear.”
Harry shuddered. At least Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia had never done that.
And that made him feel a little braver. He half-smiled at Felix and said, “They never did anything like that. Just made me do a lot of chores and. And they yelled at me and my cousin chased me a lot.”
“But you know that all Muggles aren’t like that, right, Harry?” Lily asked, sounding as anxious as Felix had a minute ago. “That there are plenty of people who are just nice and normal and not terrible?”
Harry hid his flinch, thinking of the neighbors who had sneered at him and the teachers who never believed him if he did well in school or said that Dudley had done something, not him, and Dudley and the other kids who had chased Harry with him.
But he could already see, looking into Lily’s eyes, that she was like one of the nicer teachers in primary. She didn’t want to hear that Harry had never met a good person except in the books he sometimes read. She wanted to believe that—Muggles?—were good people mostly, and the Dursleys were the exception.
So Harry just gave her a shy smile and shook his head and said, “I know there are plenty of people who are nice. What’s a Muggle?”
“Someone who’s non-magical.” Lily’s voice was a little brisker, and she smiled at him, although her eyes lingered on his clothes. Harry tugged on his sleeves self-consciously. He could see that Felix was wearing the non-dress dress like Lily was, too. “Well, that’s good that you know that, that you can’t judge all people by a few who are terrible. Come on, your father’s waiting to meet you.” She gripped Harry’s shoulder and steered him through the enormous, bright room, which seemed to have books all over the walls, towards a set of stairs.
“I’m glad not all the Muggles were mean to you,” Felix whispered, trotting beside Harry. “I’ve never met one, but some wizards are good, and some are polite, and some are rude, and some are funny but you wouldn’t want to spend all your time around them. Mum and Dad always told me that wizards and witches are just like Muggles that way.” He beamed at Harry. “I’m glad you don’t judge people just by a few. That’s wrong.”
I’m glad you don’t judge people just by a few. Harry carefully memorized that. It was obviously going to be one of the laws of his new life.
*
Lily was like one of the nicer teachers in primary, and Felix was like a mixture of her and Harry, but James, his father, was like a kid who’d never grown up. Maybe someone nicer than most of Dudley’s friends, but still.
“Hi, Harry!”
James had his arms held out. Harry steeled himself and went closer. James hugged him and patted him hard on the shoulder, and then a loud noise sounded in Harry’s ear and he promptly leaped backwards, out of James’s grasp, and came down in a position where he could defend himself.
“Harry, look! Look! It’s just a prank!” James was laughing and holding a long stick of wood, waving it back and forth. “I cast a charm that made a loud noise when you weren’t looking, that’s all!”
Harry managed a smile and a nod, but his heart was pounding wildly, and he didn’t like the way that he’d jumped, or the way that Felix stared at him, or the way that Lily strode over and whispered something to James. The words were sharp and hissing, and a second later, James’s face changed color.
“Oh,” he said, looking guiltily back and forth between Harry and Lily. “The Muggles weren’t—nice to you?”
“Just some of them, like the Dursleys,” Harry said, smiling the way he knew he should. James might be annoying, but these people were loads better than the Dursleys. Even if they had left him with the Dursleys for ten years. Well, James and Lily. Harry couldn’t really blame Felix for that. “I don’t like loud noises right close to me.”
“Right.” James nodded. “That kind of prank is out, then.”
But not others. Harry picked up on that, and his hands balled into fists under his long sleeves, where no one would notice them.
“But come on, we’ve got to show you your room!” James stepped back and waved his hand around the large room they were standing in, which Harry hadn’t even focused on because he’d been paying so much attention to the man with glasses and messy dark hair and even a face like his. “What do you think of the house so far?”
Harry thought it was huge, mostly. The entryway that they’d gone through downstairs with the books would have swallowed the Dursleys’ kitchen, and this was an even bigger room, floored and walled in bright, sparkling stone of creams and golds and pale browns, with huge windows that the sunlight came through. Harry looked around and decided that it must be a dining room, or maybe a combination dining room and drawing room, given the way that the huge table of dark wood with old-looking chairs around it stood right next to a fireplace with softer chairs and stools drawn up in front of it.
“I like it,” he said. “It looks brilliant.”
James’s smile widened. “Well, then, Flea, why don’t you show Harry to his room?”
“Don’t call me that, Dad, Merlin,” Felix said, but in the tone of someone who’d heard it so many times it didn’t really bother him anymore. “Come on, Harry, let’s go!” He ran towards a doorway off to the side of the room, next to a window so bright that Harry hadn’t even noticed the corridor.
Harry followed his brother, ignoring the way that he could hear James and Lily whispering behind him. Adults always whispered about him. At least right now, it probably wasn’t about how he was a freak or a thief.
“Why does he call you Flea?” Harry should probably call James Dad, but he wasn’t sure he could yet.
Felix’s cheeks turned bright red. “His dad—our granddad—was called Fleamont. And he decided a while ago that my name is enough like his, because they both start with F, to call me that.”
Harry supposed he should say something about that, but he was stuck on—“Fleamont? Why?”
“His mum’s family name, they didn’t want it to die out,” Felix said, and then flung open a door that could have been the second or third one in the corridor; Harry was so dazzled by the light in the huge room that he couldn’t have said for sure. “It’s awful, but if you show Dad that it bothers you, he just keeps doing it. Here’s your room!”
Harry decided to remember that about James, and then he stared around the room and his jaw just about fell off his face.
It was like a smaller version of the big room where James had pranked him, or at least it sort of looked like that. There was a small fireplace, and the floor and walls glowed with the same kind of stone. But there was a huge cupboard filled with the same kind of dress-like clothes that Lily and James and Felix were all wearing (robes?), and a cupboard that had a bunch of what looked like slowly moving toys on top of it, and a whole shelf of books, and—
A bed. A bed of his very own.
It was huge, and round, and had a canopy hovering over it that didn’t have any support that Harry could see. It was covered with small round golden pillows and a red blanket that looked like it was as heavy and warm as fire. Harry couldn’t care less about the colors. He hurled himself at it, and bounced on it, and laughed aloud as he rolled on his back, waving his feet in the air.
Felix was grinning at him when Harry looked his direction again. “Like it?”
“God, yes. It’s great.” Harry flipped himself over so that his feet were up near the pillows and his head and arms were dangling off the end.
“God? Oh, like Merlin?”
“You swear by Merlin?”
“Well, yeah. Merlin was the greatest wizard!” Felix leaned a little nearer and said in a loud whisper, “And Mum doesn’t like me to swear by him, which is even better.”
Harry nodded. He could remember that. All of it. He rolled over on his back and stretched his arms out so that his hands brushed the pillows, arching his spine. It felt like the bed was so soft that he would probably never get a backache from sleeping on it the way he did on the cot in cupboard.
“Harry?”
Harry sat up and blinked. That didn’t sound like Felix. And it wasn’t, although Harry hadn’t noticed before how much James’s voice sounded like Felix’s. And maybe like his, although Harry didn’t make a habit of listening to his own voice, really.
“Enjoying your new bedroom?” James’s grin was blinding, and pretty brilliant when he wasn’t smiling at Harry jumping like a rabbit.
“Yeah. Thank you!” Harry smiled, and did his best to keep the smile from slipping off his face, because something about the way James was standing in the door told him that things were going to change in a way he probably wasn’t going to like. “Is everything okay?”
“Well, actually…” James rubbed the back of his neck. “Albus Dumbledore is here, and he’d like to speak to you.”
“Who?”
“Family friend!” Felix said at once, bouncing around in front of Harry as if someone had attached kangaroo legs to him. “And the Headmaster of Hogwarts, where we’re going in a month! Come on!” He waved his hand at Harry and ran out of the room.
Harry met James’s eyes steadily, because it seemed odd that a Headmaster would come to speak to one student. Well, maybe not Felix, if he was a family friend, but it wasn’t like he knew Harry.
“Lily said the Muggles told you nothing.” James sighed. “Please come, Harry. He’ll explain to you some things you should know about our family, and…and why he thought it was a good idea to have you stay in the Muggle world.”
This, Harry definitely wanted to hear. He slid off the bed and followed James.
*
Dumbledore impressed Harry as a tall man, with a huge white beard, and a kind expression on his face. But as he began explaining—seated across from Harry and Felix on a squashy blue chair in front of the fireplace—Harry realized that the kindest person he’d ever met was also probably the most ruthless.
“Eleven years ago, Harry, our world was in the middle of a war. And although I don’t know how much Muggle history you may have studied, you can probably imagine how much worse wars can be with magic.”
Harry imagined something like people lighting each other on fire with magic, shuddered, and nodded.
“The leader of the Darker wizards was a man who called himself Lord Voldemort, and he was magically powerful enough to attract many followers.” Dumbledore peered at Harry over his glasses. “I don’t know if you’ve felt someone else’s magic radiate around them?”
“No, sir. I didn’t meet any other witches or wizards that I knew of until today.”
“All right, Harry. Let me concentrate a moment, and I’ll give you a demonstration.”
Dumbledore closed his eyes, his brow furrowed, and then the air in the room shifted. Harry gasped. It felt as if a heavy, warm snowfall was pressing down on him, and it was both constraining and welcoming. It seemed to whisper to him, the way Harry had sometimes heard the telly when just Aunt Petunia was watching, and tell him it would take care of everything, he could just stop thinking and give in…
Harry shook his head a little, and the sensation vanished. Dumbledore leaned back in his chair.
“Our culture as a whole has prized magical power over many, better qualities, including kindness, logic, intelligence, and justice.” Dumbledore shook his head wearily. “That means that many of our political structures, even though they seem different now, were founded on the idea that one wizard or witch who was magically powerful supposedly deserved to lead, and to receive all the benefits that came from that. We have a Minister for Magic now, but many people still defer to them the way they would to a Lord or Lady if they found one.”
“Sorry, sir? A Lord or Lady? Is that like the House of Lords?” Harry could only remember vague references to that right now, but he was sure that he’d heard of it.
“In a way, in a way!” Dumbledore chuckled, and his eyes twinkled. “But no, in practice there isn’t a magical aristocracy in the way that Muggles mean it. The title Lord or Lady is granted to those powerful wizards and witches I’m talking about. Unfortunately, we haven’t got rid of the idea that power means following someone else and not having to think. There are huge problems with corruption in the Ministry of Magic, and many departments where the members follow the Department Head without much thought of the consequences, political power substituting for magical power.” He clasped is hands in front of him. “I have had pressure put on me to declare myself a Light Lord, but I have resisted.”
Harry nodded slowly. “Because it would be a bad idea?”
“Exactly. Both for me, and for the people who would follow me.” Dumbledore leaned forwards intently. “Voldemort did not resist the temptation, and became a Dark Lord. He gathered so many people to him and kept so many others from fighting him out of fear that it seemed he would win the war.
“But then he attacked your family, Harry. He carefully chose a time when one of your parents’ closest friends, who turned out to be a traitor to our cause, was watching you and your brother, and would step aside to let him strike at you unimpeded.
“But then, the kind of tremendous magic that no one person can hope to understand washed through the room. When it faded, it had destroyed Voldemort’s body and left both you and your brother alive. Unmarked. Or almost unmarked.”
Dumbledore gestured at Harry’s forehead. Harry’s hand flew up and clasped the lightning bolt scar. He had wondered a bit about where that came from, but honestly, he had assumed it was from the car crash that the Dursleys claimed had killed his parents.
Who were sitting alive behind him. And had sent him to the Dursleys anyway. Harry breathed through that and listened to Dumbledore.
“From a reconstruction of what happened, I learned that Voldemort had unleashed the Darkest of magics against you and your brother, Harry. The Killing Curse.” Dumbledore’s expression was so serious that Harry shivered. “A spell which, while it does not kill as violently as some others, is considered Unforgivable because there is no counter to it, no shield that can stop it. But somehow, the two of you did.”
“The two of us?” Harry asked quietly, and glanced at Felix. His brother had a lightning bolt scar, too, he saw now, maybe not identical to his, poking out from beneath his dark red fringe.
“Yes. I don’t think it could be anything else, when both of you bear the scars.” Dumbledore smiled at him. “And that is the reason why Felix is known as the Boy-Who-Lived. While of course no one understood exactly what happened, of course they did notice that Voldemort was gone, and one of the two boys who did it was hailed as the one responsible for it.”
“One of the two,” Harry said flatly.
Dumbledore’s smile faded a little. “Yes. I—unfortunately, Harry, I must tell you that you became a casualty of politics, and I cannot emphasize enough how sorry I am.”
I’m sorrier, Harry thought savagely, and waited for the explanation.
“Lord Voldemort found a cause, and followers in the first place, because of the division between the magical and Muggle worlds.” Dumbledore spoke softly, his eyes fastened on Harry’s. It was probably the first time that an adult had ever spoken to Harry like an adult, but he was still angry. “We have a law, the Statute of Secrecy, that punishes people who perform magic in front of Muggles unless they are one of the very few permitted to know that magic exists. Some politicians do, for example, and the relatives of people like your mother, called Muggleborns, who come from non-magical families. But precisely because of that separation between our worlds, wizards and witches who call themselves purebloods—supposedly because they have no Muggle blood—hate and fear Muggles, whom they do not understand. Voldemort indicated that he would allow them to kill Muggles and Muggleborns without restraint, and practice magic in whatever form they liked, whenever and wherever they liked.
“Lord Voldemort fell, but that division only festered, especially as many of his followers pretended simply to have been coerced against their wills by his tremendous magic. I am afraid of what will happen if it continues.
“So I sent you to the Muggle world because I saw an opportunity to soften that division and bring our worlds closer together. A magically-powerful twin, one of the two who doomed Voldemort, growing up in the wizarding world, and one growing up with Muggles, would prove that we are not so different from each other after all, that we are all human. You two could speak from two different backgrounds, but still both building on the values of justice and compassion.
“I seek, too, to rid our world of Lords and Ladies, to rid it of constant, passive, helpless dependence on the magically-powerful to lead. As I mentioned, the powerful are not always intelligent or kind—in recent history, rather the opposite. If we could have two Lords who would, between them, work to dismantle the basis of the Lordship system and lead us towards a bright new day where we will need them no longer, I could not give up the chance.”
Harry lowered his head. He thought he was doing pretty well downplaying his emotions, but then the fire in the fireplace roared up the chimney and burning embers leaped out onto the carpet.
“Harry!” Lily kneeled in front of him, reaching out as if to place a hand on his arm, and then pulling it back. “Baby, are you okay?”
No one had ever called Harry a pet name like that, and he blinked and felt his anger slip away. “Yes,” he whispered. “I just—” He glanced up and made himself turn to look at Dumbledore. “They abused me.”
It wasn’t a sentence he had ever said aloud before. He had already known it himself, and what good would saying it to Muggles have done? The Dursleys knew and reveled in it. His primary school teachers and other kids would have probably thought he was lying.
Dumbledore sighed, a long sound that seemed like it was on the verge of tears. “I know, my dear boy, and for that, I owe you a debt I can never repay.”
But, Harry thought. There’s a but coming.
“But in the long struggle between our worlds, well—I hate to say it this way, but preventing the war is more important than any of our individual lives. Or our comfort levels.” Dumbledore gave Felix a somber look. “There have been people, mostly Voldemort’s former followers, seeking to kill your brother since the night Voldemort fell.”
Harry turned to stare at Felix. His brother nodded to him, eyes quiet and dark. “It’s mental, Harry. People follow me when I go out in public. People have cursed me and put me in St. Mungo’s—that’s magical hospital—five times. I basically can’t accept any post from anyone I don’t already know without casting detection charms on it. I get marriage proposals and death threats and everything in between on a daily basis. They write newspaper articles about me.” He shuddered. “I have to go to Ministry parties and smile at everyone, and I know some of them are the people writing those articles or sending those proposals or trying to kill me. It’s mental,” he repeated.
“I fought a Dark Lord several decades before the war with Voldemort,” Dumbledore said quietly. “At one point, I loved him and considered him closer than family. I had let him go out of sentiment. I know now that that was the wrong thing to do. The blood of the people he killed, the war he led, is on my hands. It is imperative that we end the mindless following of Lords and Ladies before we do anything else, Harry. If we have to sacrifice our own well-being, that’s what we’ll do.”
But you didn’t ask me or Felix if we wanted to sacrifice ours, Harry thought, feeling his mouth take on a hard twist.
As if answering his thoughts, Dumbledore nodded. “I appreciate that you were too young to be consulted,” he murmured. “But this—I would never have placed you in the home of Muggles I thought would abuse you, Harry. I wish you had had the safe and carefree childhood I thought I was acquiring for you, at the expense of your brother’s.”
Harry lowered his head and sat there again. He wondered if he would rather have had Felix’s childhood than his. At least he wasn’t in danger of his life from anyone other than Dudley or Uncle Vernon.
But then he thought about how he hadn’t known magic was real, and thought his parents were dead. He thought of the cupboard, and the frying pan, and the starvation, and the chores, and the way that he flinched whenever someone moved too loudly or too close to him. And he thought that, yes, actually, he would rather have grown up like Felix did.
“Now, however, that the past has occurred and cannot be changed,” Dumbledor said, sounding kind but ruthless again, “I must ask that you keep what happened with the Muggles as quiet as possible, Harry. There are people, again mostly former followers of Voldemort, who would seize on it if they knew of it and use it as propaganda, further excuses for why Muggles are beasts or worthless and our worlds must be separated.”
Harry shivered. Then he said, “So one way I’d be used to cause bad things, and the other way I’d be used to cause good ones?”
He saw Dumbledore flinch. But then he whispered, “Yes, Harry. That is the size of it. I’m sorry to ask it of you.”
But you’re asking it.
They sat there in silence for a moment. And Harry thought about it. He supposed in one way, it wasn’t such a big ask. Revealing that he’d been abused would probably make a lot of people laugh at him and think he was weak, anyway, the way kids at school laughed when Dudley and his gang beat Harry up.
But there was a much bigger consideration that made Harry nod and agree.
I have to do this or my parents won’t like me.
*
Harry lay in bed that night, the big, soft bed that he’d never thought he would have in his life, and squeezed his eyes shut to keep the tears from falling.
His parents had smiled and hugged him after he’d agreed that he wouldn’t tell anyone the truth about living at the Dursleys. Felix had smiled, too, and clapped him on the shoulder. Dumbledore had smiled and said that Harry was very mature for his age, and that he would arrange the right situation to introduce Harry to the public the next day, when they’d go to Diagon Alley for their wands and school supplies.
At least there wasn’t going to be a big public birthday party for them. Felix had said that James and Lily had always insisted on having a private day to celebrate with Felix and to supposedly mourn Harry, who’d been presented to the wizarding world as dead.
Harry had a lot. He had magic. He had the knowledge that there was a whole world of people out there like himself. He had a brother, and parents.
He even agreed with Dumbledore that it was stupid for people to just mindlessly follow along with Lords and Ladies because of their powerful magic and do whatever they were told. It would be a good thing if he could be part of ending that. Dumbledore thought he would be both powerful enough and good enough as a person to overcome his past and be a good leader, which was a compliment no adult had ever paid Harry before.
Harry had a lot.
And if all it meant was keeping a secret he probably would have wanted to keep anyway, what did that matter?
Why was he struggling not to cry? He didn’t even understand himself, and he lay there and breathed and forced the tears away and told himself it was stupid over and over and over and over again until he went to sleep.
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Harry/Theodore Nott; background Ron/Hermione, Lily/James, Ginny/Luna, OMC/Lavender, Draco/Astoria, and past Albus/Gellert
Content Notes: AU, Harry has a twin, child abuse, bullying, PTSD, social ostracism, minor character death, heavy angst, suicidal thoughts, gore, violence
Rating: R
Summary: AU. The Potter twins survive Voldemort’s attack. However, Albus Dumbledore knows that the root cause of the war, pureblood bigotry and hatred against Muggles and Muggleborns, will endure even if Voldemort never returns. He therefore asks Lily and James to send one of their sons to grow up in the Muggle world while training the other to battle Voldemort, so that together the twins can smooth over the differences between the magical and Muggle worlds in the political arena. And perhaps it might have worked, if not for abusive Dursleys, Harry’s inability to fit into the magical world or his family when he learns of his heritage, and a boy named Theodore Nott.
Author’s Notes: This fic is part of the “Harry Potter has a twin” genre, which means it will have a lot of tropes and will not be to everyone’s taste, although I hope to avoid character bashing. It will be irregularly updated. Please take heed of the content notes and tags; this is a very dark fic.
Casualties of Politics
Harry hid behind the corner of Number 6 and watched as Dudley and his gang went pounding by. He felt as though someone had filled his veins with lightning; he knew he was safe, but he wanted to run and run and run.
A small noise came from behind him, and Harry leaped and spun around, coming down with his heart pounding crazily. He was always doing that, no matter how much he tried to be normal. He didn’t react to anything normally, and jumped when people coughed or laughed or rustled papers or touched him.
The touching was the worst.
Harry swallowed loudly when he saw the bird sitting behind him on the pavement. It was an owl—he thought it was an owl. He could have been wrong. Dudley and Aunt Petunia were always saying he was wrong, and Uncle Vernon would just laugh if he tried to say something about being right.
The owl hooted and moved towards him. Something was attached to its leg. Harry flickered his eyes between the thing and the owl, wondering if it was injured and had come to him for help. If it had, it was probably just another thing that he would mess up.
But the owl kept moving towards him, and then halted decisively in front of him and stuck out its leg. Harry blinked. This time, he was able to see that the thing attached to the owl looked like…a folded piece of paper? Attached with twine, or something like that? Maybe the owl had flown through a garbage bin or something.
Keeping a careful eye on the owl, Harry removed the paper. The owl shook itself when he took it off, but it didn’t leave. It flew up to the top of the fence around Number 6 and settled on top of it, as if to wait.
Harry glanced cautiously at the piece of paper in his hand. It wasn’t crumpled, the way he’d assumed it would be if it was rubbish. Instead, it had a thick seal on it, and writing that drew his attention, because it was his name.
Mr. H. Potter
The Pavement
Behind the Hedge
Number 6 Privet Drive
Surrey
Harry’s breath caught in a whistling gasp. He stared up at the owl, who shifted back and forth and peered down at him in what looked like irritation. Keeping a careful ear out for Dudley’s gang, Harry slowly opened the letter.
He peered at it, and read it, and reread it, feeling a floating sensation of disbelief in him. It was an invitation to—Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry? And some kind of supply list? Harry shook his head.
It might make some freakish things he had done, like ending up on the roof of their school, make more sense, and at least he understood what “await your owl” meant. The owls were evidently like carrier pigeons that Harry had read about in a book once.
But he didn’t know who would invite him. He wasn’t someone who was posh or had money, like the Dursleys did, to go to a fancy school. Harry thought the only reason the Dursleys were paying to send him to Stonewall was that it would probably look abnormal if they didn’t.
“Sorry,” Harry whispered, trying to hand the letter back to the owl. “I can’t afford this.”
“There’s the freak!”
Harry immediately whipped around and began to run again, crumpling up the letter and stuffing it into the pocket of Dudley’s oversized trousers. He heard the owl screech angrily behind him as the fence made a bouncing noise, and he supposed some of Dudley’s gang must have slammed into it. He hoped they didn’t hurt the owl.
In the running and the cowering against a wall and wishing he was invisible that eventually made Dudley and his gang run right past him, Harry forgot all about the letter. He remembered it when he was lying in his cupboard that night nursing bruises and an aching, empty stomach, but he only shook his head.
Magic was real. But money was realer, and he couldn’t afford to go.
*
“Get OUT!”
Harry winced as he stood in front of the bacon, carefully trying to make sure that it didn’t burn. He had never heard Aunt Petunia sound like that before. Uncle Vernon was usually the one who did the yelling in the family.
He glanced over his shoulder, but of course, he couldn’t see anything from inside the kitchen, and Uncle Vernon was there to glare menacingly at him. Harry bowed his head and tried to tell himself that it was probably only Mrs. Number 7 come to nag Aunt Petunia about Harry’s clothes again, and how it was a disgrace to the neighborhood for a boy to run around like that.
“I will not, Tuney. Let me see Harry.”
The voice was one Harry didn’t know, a clear, ringing voice, definitely not Mrs. Number 7. Harry kept his attention on the bacon, but it was really difficult.
And someone asking after him? Harry couldn’t imagine who that could be. But he kept cooking until the point when someone came into the doorway of the kitchen behind him and gasped, making Harry spin around.
There was a pretty woman standing there. Harry noticed two things about her right away. One was that she had long, pretty red hair. The other was that she wore some kind of odd dress that seemed to flow about her and fall to the ground, bright green, with lots of buttons. It wasn’t like any dress Harry had seen before.
Then the woman whispered, “Harry?” and made Harry look into her face, and he realized something else. She had bright green eyes, the same as the ones he saw on the rare times he got to look into a mirror.
He stared at her. This had to be a relative of some kind, maybe an aunt or a cousin or something? But why had Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon never mentioned her?
“Get out!” Uncle Vernon yelled now, standing up, but not as loudly as Aunt Petunia had yelled. Maybe she was related to Aunt Petunia, then, Harry thought. “We don’t want your kind here!”
The woman didn’t even act like she’d heard Vernon, which was pretty impressive. She whispered, “Harry? I’m—I’m Lily Potter.” She swallowed. “Your mum.”
Harry stared at her. The letter was one thing, magic might be real, but this? “My parents are dead,” he said, eyes darting back and forth between her and Uncle Vernon.
The pretty woman looked like she might cry. “No,” she whispered. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know they would tell you that, they were supposed to explain—” She swallowed. “I’m Lily Potter, your mum. Your father, James? He’s alive, too. And your brother, Felix.” She looked sideways at Uncle Vernon as if she wanted to make him disappear. “You’re magical, Harry. A wizard, like your father and brother. I’m a witch. I didn’t… they said they would tell…” Her voice trailed off.
Something turned over, cold, deep in Harry’s stomach. He had a mum and dad, and a brother, but he was here.
It was just the way Aunt Petunia was always saying. Even his own family didn’t want him.
“Why would we tell him?” Aunt Petunia snapped, pushing past the pretty woman into the kitchen. “We thought he might be normal, and you just dumped him on the doorstep with a note that you couldn’t keep him. We thought you were dead. Or couldn’t keep him because he was normal.” She flicked Harry a glance that made him flinch. He hated that, he thought he should be used to it by now, but it always happened. “So, yes, we told him you were dead.”
Lily was weeping silently. Harry thought she would probably be one of those people who were pretty when they cried. Harry never was.
“Harry,” Lily whispered. “Please. I’ve come to take you away from here. We thought you would respond to the owl, but—”
“What owl?”
Aunt Petunia’s voice was sharp and suspicious, and Harry flinched again. Lily ignored her. She gave Harry a trembling smile and held out a hand. “Would you like to come with me, Harry? You’ll live with us from now on. I promise. Your father is waiting to meet you, and your brother Felix—he’s your twin. He’s so excited at the thought of having a brother. Please?”
A twin brother. I don’t know what that’s like.
But Harry was sure of one thing, at least. Lily talked nicer than Aunt Petunia. And maybe she would just cry and be upset instead of yell and swing frying pans at her head. Harry knew which one he preferred.
He stepped away from the stove and put his hand in hers.
*
Lily stared at her older son, feeling sick. He hadn’t raised his eyes to hers once since they left Privet Drive, and he had only answered with nods or shakes of his head, or other silent gestures like clutching her hand.
She had thought—
She had told Petunia in the letter to tell Harry about magic! To tell him where he came from! And she’d thought Petunia would do it. Lily knew Petunia had always resented Lily having magic and leaving her behind. Harry would be a little piece of magic in Petunia’s everyday life. Lily had thought it was the best return she could make, even though that wasn’t the actual or main reason she had left Harry with her sister.
Lily closed her eyes and drew Harry close to her. He was trembling, she realized. Inside the huge, ratty old clothes that were obviously the only ones he had, and he had been standing in front of the stove and cooking bacon as if he was a house-elf—
Lily shivered. Albus had talked about how a Muggle-raised twin to the Boy-Who-Lived could bring their worlds closer together, by being able and willing to talk about his positive experiences among Muggles. That obviously was not going to happen.
But somehow, it would have to. Preventing another war was a larger goal than any single life.
Her stomach still churning with sickness, Lily Apparated home with her son.
*
“Harry!”
There was a hand moving towards him. Harry pulled away from Lily, even though he was still dizzy from the disappearing they’d done, and whirled around so that he was in a corner of the big room they were suddenly in and away from the hand and his—
His mother.
“Harry?” The voice sounded a little like his own, but it was hurt, bewildered, small.
Harry blinked and looked up. Another boy who looked like he was his age, but was taller than Harry, stood there, staring at him. His hair had a redder tinge, Harry thought. And he didn’t wear glasses, and his eyes were a bright hazel.
But otherwise, they looked a lot alike.
“Why are you wearing those clothes?” the other boy asked slowly. He glanced back and forth between Lily and Harry. “I thought you’d be wearing—clothes with the name of some musicians on them. Or a film.” He pronounced the word proudly, like someone who was speaking a language he didn’t hear often. He looked again at Harry, then turned to Lily and asked in a loud whisper, “Are you sure you got the right one, Mum?”
Harry flinched again. Lily’s eyes closed, and she exhaled slowly. Then she said, “Yes, Felix, this is your brother, Harry. I’m afraid that your aunt and uncle weren’t—kind to him.”
“Oh. Oh.” Felix leaned forwards, his smile strained and anxious, and disappearing altogether as Harry stared at him. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “My friend, Neville, has a great-uncle who isn’t kind to him, either. He tried to throw Neville out the window and drown him to get his accidental magic to appear.”
Harry shuddered. At least Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia had never done that.
And that made him feel a little braver. He half-smiled at Felix and said, “They never did anything like that. Just made me do a lot of chores and. And they yelled at me and my cousin chased me a lot.”
“But you know that all Muggles aren’t like that, right, Harry?” Lily asked, sounding as anxious as Felix had a minute ago. “That there are plenty of people who are just nice and normal and not terrible?”
Harry hid his flinch, thinking of the neighbors who had sneered at him and the teachers who never believed him if he did well in school or said that Dudley had done something, not him, and Dudley and the other kids who had chased Harry with him.
But he could already see, looking into Lily’s eyes, that she was like one of the nicer teachers in primary. She didn’t want to hear that Harry had never met a good person except in the books he sometimes read. She wanted to believe that—Muggles?—were good people mostly, and the Dursleys were the exception.
So Harry just gave her a shy smile and shook his head and said, “I know there are plenty of people who are nice. What’s a Muggle?”
“Someone who’s non-magical.” Lily’s voice was a little brisker, and she smiled at him, although her eyes lingered on his clothes. Harry tugged on his sleeves self-consciously. He could see that Felix was wearing the non-dress dress like Lily was, too. “Well, that’s good that you know that, that you can’t judge all people by a few who are terrible. Come on, your father’s waiting to meet you.” She gripped Harry’s shoulder and steered him through the enormous, bright room, which seemed to have books all over the walls, towards a set of stairs.
“I’m glad not all the Muggles were mean to you,” Felix whispered, trotting beside Harry. “I’ve never met one, but some wizards are good, and some are polite, and some are rude, and some are funny but you wouldn’t want to spend all your time around them. Mum and Dad always told me that wizards and witches are just like Muggles that way.” He beamed at Harry. “I’m glad you don’t judge people just by a few. That’s wrong.”
I’m glad you don’t judge people just by a few. Harry carefully memorized that. It was obviously going to be one of the laws of his new life.
*
Lily was like one of the nicer teachers in primary, and Felix was like a mixture of her and Harry, but James, his father, was like a kid who’d never grown up. Maybe someone nicer than most of Dudley’s friends, but still.
“Hi, Harry!”
James had his arms held out. Harry steeled himself and went closer. James hugged him and patted him hard on the shoulder, and then a loud noise sounded in Harry’s ear and he promptly leaped backwards, out of James’s grasp, and came down in a position where he could defend himself.
“Harry, look! Look! It’s just a prank!” James was laughing and holding a long stick of wood, waving it back and forth. “I cast a charm that made a loud noise when you weren’t looking, that’s all!”
Harry managed a smile and a nod, but his heart was pounding wildly, and he didn’t like the way that he’d jumped, or the way that Felix stared at him, or the way that Lily strode over and whispered something to James. The words were sharp and hissing, and a second later, James’s face changed color.
“Oh,” he said, looking guiltily back and forth between Harry and Lily. “The Muggles weren’t—nice to you?”
“Just some of them, like the Dursleys,” Harry said, smiling the way he knew he should. James might be annoying, but these people were loads better than the Dursleys. Even if they had left him with the Dursleys for ten years. Well, James and Lily. Harry couldn’t really blame Felix for that. “I don’t like loud noises right close to me.”
“Right.” James nodded. “That kind of prank is out, then.”
But not others. Harry picked up on that, and his hands balled into fists under his long sleeves, where no one would notice them.
“But come on, we’ve got to show you your room!” James stepped back and waved his hand around the large room they were standing in, which Harry hadn’t even focused on because he’d been paying so much attention to the man with glasses and messy dark hair and even a face like his. “What do you think of the house so far?”
Harry thought it was huge, mostly. The entryway that they’d gone through downstairs with the books would have swallowed the Dursleys’ kitchen, and this was an even bigger room, floored and walled in bright, sparkling stone of creams and golds and pale browns, with huge windows that the sunlight came through. Harry looked around and decided that it must be a dining room, or maybe a combination dining room and drawing room, given the way that the huge table of dark wood with old-looking chairs around it stood right next to a fireplace with softer chairs and stools drawn up in front of it.
“I like it,” he said. “It looks brilliant.”
James’s smile widened. “Well, then, Flea, why don’t you show Harry to his room?”
“Don’t call me that, Dad, Merlin,” Felix said, but in the tone of someone who’d heard it so many times it didn’t really bother him anymore. “Come on, Harry, let’s go!” He ran towards a doorway off to the side of the room, next to a window so bright that Harry hadn’t even noticed the corridor.
Harry followed his brother, ignoring the way that he could hear James and Lily whispering behind him. Adults always whispered about him. At least right now, it probably wasn’t about how he was a freak or a thief.
“Why does he call you Flea?” Harry should probably call James Dad, but he wasn’t sure he could yet.
Felix’s cheeks turned bright red. “His dad—our granddad—was called Fleamont. And he decided a while ago that my name is enough like his, because they both start with F, to call me that.”
Harry supposed he should say something about that, but he was stuck on—“Fleamont? Why?”
“His mum’s family name, they didn’t want it to die out,” Felix said, and then flung open a door that could have been the second or third one in the corridor; Harry was so dazzled by the light in the huge room that he couldn’t have said for sure. “It’s awful, but if you show Dad that it bothers you, he just keeps doing it. Here’s your room!”
Harry decided to remember that about James, and then he stared around the room and his jaw just about fell off his face.
It was like a smaller version of the big room where James had pranked him, or at least it sort of looked like that. There was a small fireplace, and the floor and walls glowed with the same kind of stone. But there was a huge cupboard filled with the same kind of dress-like clothes that Lily and James and Felix were all wearing (robes?), and a cupboard that had a bunch of what looked like slowly moving toys on top of it, and a whole shelf of books, and—
A bed. A bed of his very own.
It was huge, and round, and had a canopy hovering over it that didn’t have any support that Harry could see. It was covered with small round golden pillows and a red blanket that looked like it was as heavy and warm as fire. Harry couldn’t care less about the colors. He hurled himself at it, and bounced on it, and laughed aloud as he rolled on his back, waving his feet in the air.
Felix was grinning at him when Harry looked his direction again. “Like it?”
“God, yes. It’s great.” Harry flipped himself over so that his feet were up near the pillows and his head and arms were dangling off the end.
“God? Oh, like Merlin?”
“You swear by Merlin?”
“Well, yeah. Merlin was the greatest wizard!” Felix leaned a little nearer and said in a loud whisper, “And Mum doesn’t like me to swear by him, which is even better.”
Harry nodded. He could remember that. All of it. He rolled over on his back and stretched his arms out so that his hands brushed the pillows, arching his spine. It felt like the bed was so soft that he would probably never get a backache from sleeping on it the way he did on the cot in cupboard.
“Harry?”
Harry sat up and blinked. That didn’t sound like Felix. And it wasn’t, although Harry hadn’t noticed before how much James’s voice sounded like Felix’s. And maybe like his, although Harry didn’t make a habit of listening to his own voice, really.
“Enjoying your new bedroom?” James’s grin was blinding, and pretty brilliant when he wasn’t smiling at Harry jumping like a rabbit.
“Yeah. Thank you!” Harry smiled, and did his best to keep the smile from slipping off his face, because something about the way James was standing in the door told him that things were going to change in a way he probably wasn’t going to like. “Is everything okay?”
“Well, actually…” James rubbed the back of his neck. “Albus Dumbledore is here, and he’d like to speak to you.”
“Who?”
“Family friend!” Felix said at once, bouncing around in front of Harry as if someone had attached kangaroo legs to him. “And the Headmaster of Hogwarts, where we’re going in a month! Come on!” He waved his hand at Harry and ran out of the room.
Harry met James’s eyes steadily, because it seemed odd that a Headmaster would come to speak to one student. Well, maybe not Felix, if he was a family friend, but it wasn’t like he knew Harry.
“Lily said the Muggles told you nothing.” James sighed. “Please come, Harry. He’ll explain to you some things you should know about our family, and…and why he thought it was a good idea to have you stay in the Muggle world.”
This, Harry definitely wanted to hear. He slid off the bed and followed James.
*
Dumbledore impressed Harry as a tall man, with a huge white beard, and a kind expression on his face. But as he began explaining—seated across from Harry and Felix on a squashy blue chair in front of the fireplace—Harry realized that the kindest person he’d ever met was also probably the most ruthless.
“Eleven years ago, Harry, our world was in the middle of a war. And although I don’t know how much Muggle history you may have studied, you can probably imagine how much worse wars can be with magic.”
Harry imagined something like people lighting each other on fire with magic, shuddered, and nodded.
“The leader of the Darker wizards was a man who called himself Lord Voldemort, and he was magically powerful enough to attract many followers.” Dumbledore peered at Harry over his glasses. “I don’t know if you’ve felt someone else’s magic radiate around them?”
“No, sir. I didn’t meet any other witches or wizards that I knew of until today.”
“All right, Harry. Let me concentrate a moment, and I’ll give you a demonstration.”
Dumbledore closed his eyes, his brow furrowed, and then the air in the room shifted. Harry gasped. It felt as if a heavy, warm snowfall was pressing down on him, and it was both constraining and welcoming. It seemed to whisper to him, the way Harry had sometimes heard the telly when just Aunt Petunia was watching, and tell him it would take care of everything, he could just stop thinking and give in…
Harry shook his head a little, and the sensation vanished. Dumbledore leaned back in his chair.
“Our culture as a whole has prized magical power over many, better qualities, including kindness, logic, intelligence, and justice.” Dumbledore shook his head wearily. “That means that many of our political structures, even though they seem different now, were founded on the idea that one wizard or witch who was magically powerful supposedly deserved to lead, and to receive all the benefits that came from that. We have a Minister for Magic now, but many people still defer to them the way they would to a Lord or Lady if they found one.”
“Sorry, sir? A Lord or Lady? Is that like the House of Lords?” Harry could only remember vague references to that right now, but he was sure that he’d heard of it.
“In a way, in a way!” Dumbledore chuckled, and his eyes twinkled. “But no, in practice there isn’t a magical aristocracy in the way that Muggles mean it. The title Lord or Lady is granted to those powerful wizards and witches I’m talking about. Unfortunately, we haven’t got rid of the idea that power means following someone else and not having to think. There are huge problems with corruption in the Ministry of Magic, and many departments where the members follow the Department Head without much thought of the consequences, political power substituting for magical power.” He clasped is hands in front of him. “I have had pressure put on me to declare myself a Light Lord, but I have resisted.”
Harry nodded slowly. “Because it would be a bad idea?”
“Exactly. Both for me, and for the people who would follow me.” Dumbledore leaned forwards intently. “Voldemort did not resist the temptation, and became a Dark Lord. He gathered so many people to him and kept so many others from fighting him out of fear that it seemed he would win the war.
“But then he attacked your family, Harry. He carefully chose a time when one of your parents’ closest friends, who turned out to be a traitor to our cause, was watching you and your brother, and would step aside to let him strike at you unimpeded.
“But then, the kind of tremendous magic that no one person can hope to understand washed through the room. When it faded, it had destroyed Voldemort’s body and left both you and your brother alive. Unmarked. Or almost unmarked.”
Dumbledore gestured at Harry’s forehead. Harry’s hand flew up and clasped the lightning bolt scar. He had wondered a bit about where that came from, but honestly, he had assumed it was from the car crash that the Dursleys claimed had killed his parents.
Who were sitting alive behind him. And had sent him to the Dursleys anyway. Harry breathed through that and listened to Dumbledore.
“From a reconstruction of what happened, I learned that Voldemort had unleashed the Darkest of magics against you and your brother, Harry. The Killing Curse.” Dumbledore’s expression was so serious that Harry shivered. “A spell which, while it does not kill as violently as some others, is considered Unforgivable because there is no counter to it, no shield that can stop it. But somehow, the two of you did.”
“The two of us?” Harry asked quietly, and glanced at Felix. His brother had a lightning bolt scar, too, he saw now, maybe not identical to his, poking out from beneath his dark red fringe.
“Yes. I don’t think it could be anything else, when both of you bear the scars.” Dumbledore smiled at him. “And that is the reason why Felix is known as the Boy-Who-Lived. While of course no one understood exactly what happened, of course they did notice that Voldemort was gone, and one of the two boys who did it was hailed as the one responsible for it.”
“One of the two,” Harry said flatly.
Dumbledore’s smile faded a little. “Yes. I—unfortunately, Harry, I must tell you that you became a casualty of politics, and I cannot emphasize enough how sorry I am.”
I’m sorrier, Harry thought savagely, and waited for the explanation.
“Lord Voldemort found a cause, and followers in the first place, because of the division between the magical and Muggle worlds.” Dumbledore spoke softly, his eyes fastened on Harry’s. It was probably the first time that an adult had ever spoken to Harry like an adult, but he was still angry. “We have a law, the Statute of Secrecy, that punishes people who perform magic in front of Muggles unless they are one of the very few permitted to know that magic exists. Some politicians do, for example, and the relatives of people like your mother, called Muggleborns, who come from non-magical families. But precisely because of that separation between our worlds, wizards and witches who call themselves purebloods—supposedly because they have no Muggle blood—hate and fear Muggles, whom they do not understand. Voldemort indicated that he would allow them to kill Muggles and Muggleborns without restraint, and practice magic in whatever form they liked, whenever and wherever they liked.
“Lord Voldemort fell, but that division only festered, especially as many of his followers pretended simply to have been coerced against their wills by his tremendous magic. I am afraid of what will happen if it continues.
“So I sent you to the Muggle world because I saw an opportunity to soften that division and bring our worlds closer together. A magically-powerful twin, one of the two who doomed Voldemort, growing up in the wizarding world, and one growing up with Muggles, would prove that we are not so different from each other after all, that we are all human. You two could speak from two different backgrounds, but still both building on the values of justice and compassion.
“I seek, too, to rid our world of Lords and Ladies, to rid it of constant, passive, helpless dependence on the magically-powerful to lead. As I mentioned, the powerful are not always intelligent or kind—in recent history, rather the opposite. If we could have two Lords who would, between them, work to dismantle the basis of the Lordship system and lead us towards a bright new day where we will need them no longer, I could not give up the chance.”
Harry lowered his head. He thought he was doing pretty well downplaying his emotions, but then the fire in the fireplace roared up the chimney and burning embers leaped out onto the carpet.
“Harry!” Lily kneeled in front of him, reaching out as if to place a hand on his arm, and then pulling it back. “Baby, are you okay?”
No one had ever called Harry a pet name like that, and he blinked and felt his anger slip away. “Yes,” he whispered. “I just—” He glanced up and made himself turn to look at Dumbledore. “They abused me.”
It wasn’t a sentence he had ever said aloud before. He had already known it himself, and what good would saying it to Muggles have done? The Dursleys knew and reveled in it. His primary school teachers and other kids would have probably thought he was lying.
Dumbledore sighed, a long sound that seemed like it was on the verge of tears. “I know, my dear boy, and for that, I owe you a debt I can never repay.”
But, Harry thought. There’s a but coming.
“But in the long struggle between our worlds, well—I hate to say it this way, but preventing the war is more important than any of our individual lives. Or our comfort levels.” Dumbledore gave Felix a somber look. “There have been people, mostly Voldemort’s former followers, seeking to kill your brother since the night Voldemort fell.”
Harry turned to stare at Felix. His brother nodded to him, eyes quiet and dark. “It’s mental, Harry. People follow me when I go out in public. People have cursed me and put me in St. Mungo’s—that’s magical hospital—five times. I basically can’t accept any post from anyone I don’t already know without casting detection charms on it. I get marriage proposals and death threats and everything in between on a daily basis. They write newspaper articles about me.” He shuddered. “I have to go to Ministry parties and smile at everyone, and I know some of them are the people writing those articles or sending those proposals or trying to kill me. It’s mental,” he repeated.
“I fought a Dark Lord several decades before the war with Voldemort,” Dumbledore said quietly. “At one point, I loved him and considered him closer than family. I had let him go out of sentiment. I know now that that was the wrong thing to do. The blood of the people he killed, the war he led, is on my hands. It is imperative that we end the mindless following of Lords and Ladies before we do anything else, Harry. If we have to sacrifice our own well-being, that’s what we’ll do.”
But you didn’t ask me or Felix if we wanted to sacrifice ours, Harry thought, feeling his mouth take on a hard twist.
As if answering his thoughts, Dumbledore nodded. “I appreciate that you were too young to be consulted,” he murmured. “But this—I would never have placed you in the home of Muggles I thought would abuse you, Harry. I wish you had had the safe and carefree childhood I thought I was acquiring for you, at the expense of your brother’s.”
Harry lowered his head and sat there again. He wondered if he would rather have had Felix’s childhood than his. At least he wasn’t in danger of his life from anyone other than Dudley or Uncle Vernon.
But then he thought about how he hadn’t known magic was real, and thought his parents were dead. He thought of the cupboard, and the frying pan, and the starvation, and the chores, and the way that he flinched whenever someone moved too loudly or too close to him. And he thought that, yes, actually, he would rather have grown up like Felix did.
“Now, however, that the past has occurred and cannot be changed,” Dumbledor said, sounding kind but ruthless again, “I must ask that you keep what happened with the Muggles as quiet as possible, Harry. There are people, again mostly former followers of Voldemort, who would seize on it if they knew of it and use it as propaganda, further excuses for why Muggles are beasts or worthless and our worlds must be separated.”
Harry shivered. Then he said, “So one way I’d be used to cause bad things, and the other way I’d be used to cause good ones?”
He saw Dumbledore flinch. But then he whispered, “Yes, Harry. That is the size of it. I’m sorry to ask it of you.”
But you’re asking it.
They sat there in silence for a moment. And Harry thought about it. He supposed in one way, it wasn’t such a big ask. Revealing that he’d been abused would probably make a lot of people laugh at him and think he was weak, anyway, the way kids at school laughed when Dudley and his gang beat Harry up.
But there was a much bigger consideration that made Harry nod and agree.
I have to do this or my parents won’t like me.
*
Harry lay in bed that night, the big, soft bed that he’d never thought he would have in his life, and squeezed his eyes shut to keep the tears from falling.
His parents had smiled and hugged him after he’d agreed that he wouldn’t tell anyone the truth about living at the Dursleys. Felix had smiled, too, and clapped him on the shoulder. Dumbledore had smiled and said that Harry was very mature for his age, and that he would arrange the right situation to introduce Harry to the public the next day, when they’d go to Diagon Alley for their wands and school supplies.
At least there wasn’t going to be a big public birthday party for them. Felix had said that James and Lily had always insisted on having a private day to celebrate with Felix and to supposedly mourn Harry, who’d been presented to the wizarding world as dead.
Harry had a lot. He had magic. He had the knowledge that there was a whole world of people out there like himself. He had a brother, and parents.
He even agreed with Dumbledore that it was stupid for people to just mindlessly follow along with Lords and Ladies because of their powerful magic and do whatever they were told. It would be a good thing if he could be part of ending that. Dumbledore thought he would be both powerful enough and good enough as a person to overcome his past and be a good leader, which was a compliment no adult had ever paid Harry before.
Harry had a lot.
And if all it meant was keeping a secret he probably would have wanted to keep anyway, what did that matter?
Why was he struggling not to cry? He didn’t even understand himself, and he lay there and breathed and forced the tears away and told himself it was stupid over and over and over and over again until he went to sleep.
