lomonaaeren (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
lomonaaeren) wrote2025-06-22 10:12 am
lomonaaeren) wrote2025-06-22 10:12 am
Entry tags:
[Songs of Summer]: Growing Up Grimmauld, 1/4
Title: Growing Up Grimmauld
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: None, gen
Content Notes: AU, child abuse and neglect, animal harm, slightly feral Harry, humor, angst, blood, gore, pureblood bigotry (not by Harry), unreliable narrator
Rating: PG-13
Summary: AU. Harry accidentally Apparates to an empty Grimmauld Place when he’s nine instead of to the top of the school roof when he escapes Dudley’s gang. The house is empty except for portraits and sometimes a speaking wooden face, and Harry has to kill his own food, and there’s something nasty in the cellars, and some of the portraits are mad. But this is still a vast improvement over the Dursleys.
Author’s Notes: This is one of my “Songs of Summer,” shorter fics being posted between the summer solstice and the first of August. Chobani asked for Harry accidentally Apparating to Grimmauld Place and surviving there on his own. It will have three or four parts.
Growing Up Grimmauld
It took it a long time to notice it was empty.
Number Twelve Grimmauld Place stirred slowly. Soft messages raced back and forth through the corridors, behind the doors, down into the floorboards. It creaked and swayed like a great tree. It remembered trees, although dimly.
Better, it remembered the wizards and witches who had lived here and cast spells and raced down the corridors and leaned against the walls and cooked in the kitchen.
It remembered.
And it wanted that back.
Shadows crawled along the walls like tree roots, and Grimmauld Place reached for the family tapestry that hung in one room brighter than the rest with the memory and promise of magic. It reached, and it reached, and it reached, and sparks sprang to life in its power and what passed for its mind.
Yes.
It knew, it remembered, and it felt the tie of magic that connected a child to one of its exiled sons. That son had not been the father of the child, which would have been better, but he had been the godfather.
And Grimmauld could use that tie to pull the child back to it. A child would be better. A child’s magic would fill the house with liveliness and life, and a child would be easier to protect since they would not insist on venturing outside the walls so often.
Grimmauld thought and pulsed and dwelled and turned with a slowness that a mountain might have envied, and reached.
*
“I’m gonna get you, freak!”
Harry lowered his head and ran as fast as he could. Dudley and his gang were right behind him, and Dudley’s threats sounded scarier than usual. And Harry would be the one in trouble if they caught him. He had to get away.
Get away, get away, get away! Please, someone help me!
It felt as though someone woke up and took notice, or maybe they were already awake and they took notice. Harry grabbed hold of the vision of an enormous hand, brown like wood, extending towards him, and—
And he was gone.
*
Harry looked around and stood up very slowly.
He was in a dark, dingy room of some kind. There was a mirror on the wall, and it showed him, his eyes wide with surprise and his mouth a little open. Because Aunt Petunia would have had something to say about it, Harry made an automatic effort to flatten his hair.
Then he looked around and his mouth dropped open further.
He was in a bedroom. One that sprawled so far he had trouble seeing the other wall through his broken and dirty glasses.
But right in front of him was a bed. It had dark green sheets on it and pillows that were so white Harry didn’t want to touch them. He looked around, worried that the person who the bedroom belonged to would come in and yell at him for doing freaky things.
There was a soft creak, and Harry looked around to see that a door he hadn’t noticed was opening. It looked like the doorway into a corridor, so he went over. He would have to find some way to apologize and leave as quickly as possible.
Then he stopped, because now that he was close enough, he could read the flowing handwriting on a piece of wood on the door.
Harry Potter’s Room.
“No way,” Harry breathed. “How can this be my room?”
No one answered him, but the floorboards creaked slightly in what sounded like a welcoming note, and then a light appeared on the ceiling. Harry yelped and scrambled backwards. It really had appeared, a huge golden old-timey chandelier! It was filled with brilliant white candles that shed a brilliant white light.
Harry stared around at the bedroom again, and realized it had mirrors on the other walls, a huge desk, lots of chairs, a door standing open that showed a glimpse of a white bathroom beyond, and a window seat. He’d always wanted a window seat.
“But why is this my room?” he asked the house, because he didn’t have anybody else to ask.
The wood on the wall stirred, and a face formed there. Harry jumped and stared, more than a bit worried about what this meant for his freakish sanity, but he supposed it wasn’t any different from the light forming on the ceiling.
The face had shut eyes and huge wooden eyebrows and a beard. It also had a big nose that looked as if it would poke Harry if he got too close. But he was going to stay back, because the mouth was huge, and the teeth looked like sharpened stakes.
The eyes opened.
Harry yelped. The eyes that stared back at him were more like glowing pools of water than eyes, with a light underneath them and a bright green color. They looked like his, if his had no pupil and glowed.
“Welcome, child,” the mouth breathed.
“Er. Hello?”
“Welcome to Number Twelve Grimmauld Place, the home of your godfather. Harry Potter, be welcome in the home of the Black family.”
“I don’t know who they are,” Harry said, feeling a little disappointed. He’d hoped that the freakish things happening around him meant that his own freaky family was still alive and waiting to welcome him, but it didn’t seem like that.
“They are your godfather’s family.”
“What’s a godfather?”
The face paused for a moment as though not prepared for the question. Harry could feel his own face burn a little. He knew he was uneducated compared to most people, but that was partially because it was hard to read in the cupboard and Dudley would rip his books up anyway.
“He is someone sworn to protect you,” the face said at last. “Sworn on his magic. You are aware that you have magic, child?”
“I just thought I was a freak.”
The face made a horrible grinding sound like wind turning over stones. “Never use that word to refer to yourself! You are a proud child of the House of Black, and this is your home. This is your bedroom. You will catch food for yourself within these walls.”
Harry stared with his mouth open. The last words worried him a little, but his heart was pounding over the first ones.
I have a bedroom?
“You are your godfather’s godson,” the face continued. “We reached out and pulled you here. You were with Muggles.” People who didn’t have magic, probably, Harry thought. “You are the future of this family, and you will do us proud.”
“Okay,” Harry whispered.
“There are no elves in this house. They left long ago. You will have to catch and cook your own food.” The face paused as if needing to rest. Its eyelids drooped. But it opened its eyes again, and Harry jumped as it focused on him. “And there is a little money that you can use to spend for some things that you may need, we suppose.”
“Magical money?”
“No, it is metal.”
That wasn’t really what Harry had meant. But since he had no idea where to spend magical money anyway, he just nodded.
“Go downstairs into the garden,” the face whispered, its rattly voice starting to fade. “There is a door that will lead you there off the stairs on the ground floor. Find…your destiny. We will speak to you again.”
The face melted back into the wooden wall, and Harry turned around and stared at his bedroom again. It was real. It was all his. It was something that he had never even dreamed of.
Well, he had dreamed of it, but he had always known the dreams weren’t going to come true.
He was going to explore the bedroom before he went and found any food, even though his stomach was rumbling with hunger. The bedroom was a dream come true, and he would always live here and love it.
•
Grimmauld Place watched carefully as the Potter child ran around his bedroom, looked out the windows, used the bathroom, smoothed his hand down the walls as he walked the stairs. He gaped at the room with the family tapestry and the library, but didn’t try to enter. His clothes hung about him, and Grimmauld Place reached out to the wardrobe in the best-preserved room.
Regulus Black’s clothing would be large for the child, but he could use his magic to shrink them. It was merely a matter of will.
*
Harry stared down at the rabbit that he had managed to catch in the garden. The garden itself had heaved the stones under the rabbit’s feet, and he thought had probably frozen it for him. Even though the rabbit’s eyes were huge and it looked like it wanted to kick, it couldn’t move in his hands.
Harry knew what he had to do. The house didn’t seem keen on providing extra food for him, and Harry didn’t know how to use the magical money, and they were probably a long way from Muggle food.
Harry took a deep breath and twisted the rabbit’s head around.
Its neck broke with a pop that made Harry jump. He had thought it would be horrible, and it was. But it was also food, and at least he had the chance to give himself food here, instead of waiting on someone to feed him like at the Dursleys.
Or waiting for myself to feed me.
It made Harry wonder what the Dursleys were doing now that he was gone. Were they cooking their own food? Was Dudley complaining because Aunt Petunia’s bacon wasn’t as good as Harry?
Cheered at the thought, Harry wandered back inside the house and towards the fireplace, which was creaking and stretching for his attention. He would learn how to cook his food, with the house’s help.
It wasn’t that great the first time, but it made Harry’s stomach stop grumbling, and the house slid open the wall and there was a huge cookbook. Harry opened it and settled down at the kitchen table to read it.
*
The boy was gone.
Petunia had questioned the neighbors, looked Dudley in the eye and had him tell her the truth, talked to Dudley’s friends, and made sure to play the part of a grieving aunt for the teachers at the school. But it was undeniable. When the freak had disappeared as he was running in front of Dudley and his friends, he had totally disappeared.
And there were no news reports of a boy in ragged clothes caught wandering around anywhere in Surrey, as Petunia had feared at first would happen.
She didn’t act at once. She knew that it was entirely possible that Dumbledore man had them under observation, and although nobody had ever confronted her about the freak not eating or living in a cupboard, they might know and not care as long as he was alive. So she continued to tear up when she spoke to the teachers, contacted the police and gave them the freak’s description, and told Dudley that he would get extra ice cream for acting like he missed his cousin.
But days passed. Weeks. Nothing came up and no one said anything.
That was when Petunia began, quietly, to look at other options.
*
Harry laughed as he took the pan of roasted carrots and rabbit meat off the fire. It had taken him a long time and many, many tries to get it to perfection, but now it worked! He could even make soups!
The garden grew all sorts of vegetables and berries, although they were so wild that not all of them were safe. Harry had learned to take the food inside the doorway and hold it up so the house could look at it before he bit into it. It only took one night of vomiting for him to decide that he shouldn’t just gobble down things out in the garden.
But he knew what carrots and potatoes and onions looked like, and apparently magical carrots and potatoes and onions were the same as “Muggle” ones. And there were strawberries and blueberries, and he had also learned to catch hedgehogs and some prickly little creatures without a name he knew along with the rabbits.
He missed bread and sweets, but there was only a little magical money, and even though he had found out he was in London, the house wasn’t clear about where he should go to spend the magical money. It had given him books that talked about Gringotts and goblins and vaults, but not where those were.
It didn’t matter that much to Harry. He had clothes that he had concentrated to shrink (it gave him a headache, but he really did have magic, and he managed it), food whenever he wanted it and was willing to wrestle it out of the ground or catch it, and most of all, his own bedroom. He was going to be okay.
Sometimes he wondered if the Dursleys were looking for him, but then he stopped worrying about it. They couldn’t find him even if they were.
The smell of the food came to his nostrils, and Harry perked up. It was never going to get old, having food he wanted whenever he wanted. He set the plate on the table—much cleaner now than it used to be thanks to more concentration and the house’s help—and dug in.
*
Grimmauld Place was pleased with the child’s progress. He understood responsibility in a way that several recent generations of Black children had not. He was self-sufficient and resourceful, and capable of wandless magic when he tried. He listened intently when the house spoke through its limited ability to do so.
He seemed especially anxious to know where Gringotts and Diagon Alley were, but Grimmauld Place did not know the location from itself. It had never spoken with anyone who did not already know where Gringotts was.
But there would be a map, or a chance to finding one, and in the meantime, the Potter child scampered up and down the corridors, and read books from the library, and depended on Grimmauld Place to swat poisonous food away from him with a branch formed of its walls.
There was endlessness to be had, now that Grimmauld Place had revived its family.
*
Harry wrinkled his nose at the description on the page in front of him, but the house had been pretty insistent about this book, so he turned reluctantly to the cauldron and the table stained with green in front of him.
He had to brew a potion. And he had to use things like salamander blood and chicken livers. Apparently they were all there under Stasis Charms, which Harry could break just by touching them with a finger, but ew.
(Harry did sort of wistfully wish that the chickens had still been alive, so he at least could have eaten them).
The doorway creaked, and Harry rolled his eyes. “I’m doing it, I’m doing it,” he muttered, and reached for the pan of water he had boiled over the fire and let cool to make the potion’s base.
It did turn out to be sort of fun to combine the ingredients, once he had decided that he could pick up the livers with his hands wrapped in some of the old towels that were so common in the house. The blood stank, and the potion bubbled, and there was a sound like a burp when he added what was apparently powdered moonstone, also from the Stasis Charmed cabinets. Then he tipped in a few petals from a daisy in the garden, and—
And the potion exploded.
Harry ducked away with a screech, his arm tucked around his face. A second later, he heard bangs as the pieces of the shattered cauldron clattered against the walls and the shelves, but not near him.
He lowered his arm and saw that the house had raised a wooden wall in front of him, right out of the floor!
“Did you do that?” he asked the house.
The wooden face slowly formed on the wall. Harry had learned that showing that to him tired it out, although he wasn’t sure why it was so much worse for the house than swatting away poisonous foods or shoving books at him. “Yes,” said the grinding voice, sounding to Harry like a Muggle machine running down. “I will protect you. But you must be more careful.”
“I will,” Harry said. He turned to pick up the potions book and figure out what had gone wrong.
Oh, he’d stirred too fast! That was what had gone wrong!
Harry nodded. If he could cook a full feast for the Dursleys and Aunt Marge with Aunt Petunia screaming at him, which he’d had to do many times, then he was sure he could brew a magical potion the right way.
*
Petunia, as she ruthlessly packed her clothes in a bag, was certain. The freaks hadn’t noticed the boy was missing, and they would never come to find him. That meant she and Vernon and her Dudders could leave and find shelter in another country.
Of course, they had to be careful. It was one thing for the freaks not to care about a freak, and another for them not to notice the house being sold.
So they had done it very quietly. Vernon had found someone through his work who was looking for a house, and even though they weren’t quite the sort of family Petunia would have wanted to buy it, they had been willing to buy it with private meetings and private visits and money through the banking system that Petunia thought the freaks wouldn’t understand. (Why would they? They gave animals control of their money). The packing had been done as neatly and quietly, with Vernon taking what looked like empty boxes out of the house while complaining loudly, and secretly transporting them to where they could be shipped.
And now…
Now they were on their way to New Zealand, because Vernon had found a job there that wanted a kind of person just like him, and there was no way the freaks would ever find them.
Petunia stuffed the final shirt in and stood up with her bag. Dudley bounced to the top of the stairs with his own last suitcase. He was eating an ice that Vernon had got him earlier that afternoon, bless him.
Petunia smoothed her Dudders’s hair down and kissed his forehead. “Ready to go, sweetums?”
“Of course, Mum.” Dudley spoke through his mouthful of food, but that was just his way. He had so much energy. “Let’s go before the freak comes back!”
Petunia nodded. They had told Dudley that Harry could come back at any time, brought by other freaks, and that had calmed his tantrums about having to leave his friends and school and travel so far. Petunia was sure that Dudley would make plenty of friends in their new country. People were just drawn to him like a moth to a flame.
“Let’s,” she agreed, and walked down the stairs to where Vernon and the car were waiting without a look back.
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: None, gen
Content Notes: AU, child abuse and neglect, animal harm, slightly feral Harry, humor, angst, blood, gore, pureblood bigotry (not by Harry), unreliable narrator
Rating: PG-13
Summary: AU. Harry accidentally Apparates to an empty Grimmauld Place when he’s nine instead of to the top of the school roof when he escapes Dudley’s gang. The house is empty except for portraits and sometimes a speaking wooden face, and Harry has to kill his own food, and there’s something nasty in the cellars, and some of the portraits are mad. But this is still a vast improvement over the Dursleys.
Author’s Notes: This is one of my “Songs of Summer,” shorter fics being posted between the summer solstice and the first of August. Chobani asked for Harry accidentally Apparating to Grimmauld Place and surviving there on his own. It will have three or four parts.
Growing Up Grimmauld
It took it a long time to notice it was empty.
Number Twelve Grimmauld Place stirred slowly. Soft messages raced back and forth through the corridors, behind the doors, down into the floorboards. It creaked and swayed like a great tree. It remembered trees, although dimly.
Better, it remembered the wizards and witches who had lived here and cast spells and raced down the corridors and leaned against the walls and cooked in the kitchen.
It remembered.
And it wanted that back.
Shadows crawled along the walls like tree roots, and Grimmauld Place reached for the family tapestry that hung in one room brighter than the rest with the memory and promise of magic. It reached, and it reached, and it reached, and sparks sprang to life in its power and what passed for its mind.
Yes.
It knew, it remembered, and it felt the tie of magic that connected a child to one of its exiled sons. That son had not been the father of the child, which would have been better, but he had been the godfather.
And Grimmauld could use that tie to pull the child back to it. A child would be better. A child’s magic would fill the house with liveliness and life, and a child would be easier to protect since they would not insist on venturing outside the walls so often.
Grimmauld thought and pulsed and dwelled and turned with a slowness that a mountain might have envied, and reached.
*
“I’m gonna get you, freak!”
Harry lowered his head and ran as fast as he could. Dudley and his gang were right behind him, and Dudley’s threats sounded scarier than usual. And Harry would be the one in trouble if they caught him. He had to get away.
Get away, get away, get away! Please, someone help me!
It felt as though someone woke up and took notice, or maybe they were already awake and they took notice. Harry grabbed hold of the vision of an enormous hand, brown like wood, extending towards him, and—
And he was gone.
*
Harry looked around and stood up very slowly.
He was in a dark, dingy room of some kind. There was a mirror on the wall, and it showed him, his eyes wide with surprise and his mouth a little open. Because Aunt Petunia would have had something to say about it, Harry made an automatic effort to flatten his hair.
Then he looked around and his mouth dropped open further.
He was in a bedroom. One that sprawled so far he had trouble seeing the other wall through his broken and dirty glasses.
But right in front of him was a bed. It had dark green sheets on it and pillows that were so white Harry didn’t want to touch them. He looked around, worried that the person who the bedroom belonged to would come in and yell at him for doing freaky things.
There was a soft creak, and Harry looked around to see that a door he hadn’t noticed was opening. It looked like the doorway into a corridor, so he went over. He would have to find some way to apologize and leave as quickly as possible.
Then he stopped, because now that he was close enough, he could read the flowing handwriting on a piece of wood on the door.
Harry Potter’s Room.
“No way,” Harry breathed. “How can this be my room?”
No one answered him, but the floorboards creaked slightly in what sounded like a welcoming note, and then a light appeared on the ceiling. Harry yelped and scrambled backwards. It really had appeared, a huge golden old-timey chandelier! It was filled with brilliant white candles that shed a brilliant white light.
Harry stared around at the bedroom again, and realized it had mirrors on the other walls, a huge desk, lots of chairs, a door standing open that showed a glimpse of a white bathroom beyond, and a window seat. He’d always wanted a window seat.
“But why is this my room?” he asked the house, because he didn’t have anybody else to ask.
The wood on the wall stirred, and a face formed there. Harry jumped and stared, more than a bit worried about what this meant for his freakish sanity, but he supposed it wasn’t any different from the light forming on the ceiling.
The face had shut eyes and huge wooden eyebrows and a beard. It also had a big nose that looked as if it would poke Harry if he got too close. But he was going to stay back, because the mouth was huge, and the teeth looked like sharpened stakes.
The eyes opened.
Harry yelped. The eyes that stared back at him were more like glowing pools of water than eyes, with a light underneath them and a bright green color. They looked like his, if his had no pupil and glowed.
“Welcome, child,” the mouth breathed.
“Er. Hello?”
“Welcome to Number Twelve Grimmauld Place, the home of your godfather. Harry Potter, be welcome in the home of the Black family.”
“I don’t know who they are,” Harry said, feeling a little disappointed. He’d hoped that the freakish things happening around him meant that his own freaky family was still alive and waiting to welcome him, but it didn’t seem like that.
“They are your godfather’s family.”
“What’s a godfather?”
The face paused for a moment as though not prepared for the question. Harry could feel his own face burn a little. He knew he was uneducated compared to most people, but that was partially because it was hard to read in the cupboard and Dudley would rip his books up anyway.
“He is someone sworn to protect you,” the face said at last. “Sworn on his magic. You are aware that you have magic, child?”
“I just thought I was a freak.”
The face made a horrible grinding sound like wind turning over stones. “Never use that word to refer to yourself! You are a proud child of the House of Black, and this is your home. This is your bedroom. You will catch food for yourself within these walls.”
Harry stared with his mouth open. The last words worried him a little, but his heart was pounding over the first ones.
I have a bedroom?
“You are your godfather’s godson,” the face continued. “We reached out and pulled you here. You were with Muggles.” People who didn’t have magic, probably, Harry thought. “You are the future of this family, and you will do us proud.”
“Okay,” Harry whispered.
“There are no elves in this house. They left long ago. You will have to catch and cook your own food.” The face paused as if needing to rest. Its eyelids drooped. But it opened its eyes again, and Harry jumped as it focused on him. “And there is a little money that you can use to spend for some things that you may need, we suppose.”
“Magical money?”
“No, it is metal.”
That wasn’t really what Harry had meant. But since he had no idea where to spend magical money anyway, he just nodded.
“Go downstairs into the garden,” the face whispered, its rattly voice starting to fade. “There is a door that will lead you there off the stairs on the ground floor. Find…your destiny. We will speak to you again.”
The face melted back into the wooden wall, and Harry turned around and stared at his bedroom again. It was real. It was all his. It was something that he had never even dreamed of.
Well, he had dreamed of it, but he had always known the dreams weren’t going to come true.
He was going to explore the bedroom before he went and found any food, even though his stomach was rumbling with hunger. The bedroom was a dream come true, and he would always live here and love it.
•
Grimmauld Place watched carefully as the Potter child ran around his bedroom, looked out the windows, used the bathroom, smoothed his hand down the walls as he walked the stairs. He gaped at the room with the family tapestry and the library, but didn’t try to enter. His clothes hung about him, and Grimmauld Place reached out to the wardrobe in the best-preserved room.
Regulus Black’s clothing would be large for the child, but he could use his magic to shrink them. It was merely a matter of will.
*
Harry stared down at the rabbit that he had managed to catch in the garden. The garden itself had heaved the stones under the rabbit’s feet, and he thought had probably frozen it for him. Even though the rabbit’s eyes were huge and it looked like it wanted to kick, it couldn’t move in his hands.
Harry knew what he had to do. The house didn’t seem keen on providing extra food for him, and Harry didn’t know how to use the magical money, and they were probably a long way from Muggle food.
Harry took a deep breath and twisted the rabbit’s head around.
Its neck broke with a pop that made Harry jump. He had thought it would be horrible, and it was. But it was also food, and at least he had the chance to give himself food here, instead of waiting on someone to feed him like at the Dursleys.
Or waiting for myself to feed me.
It made Harry wonder what the Dursleys were doing now that he was gone. Were they cooking their own food? Was Dudley complaining because Aunt Petunia’s bacon wasn’t as good as Harry?
Cheered at the thought, Harry wandered back inside the house and towards the fireplace, which was creaking and stretching for his attention. He would learn how to cook his food, with the house’s help.
It wasn’t that great the first time, but it made Harry’s stomach stop grumbling, and the house slid open the wall and there was a huge cookbook. Harry opened it and settled down at the kitchen table to read it.
*
The boy was gone.
Petunia had questioned the neighbors, looked Dudley in the eye and had him tell her the truth, talked to Dudley’s friends, and made sure to play the part of a grieving aunt for the teachers at the school. But it was undeniable. When the freak had disappeared as he was running in front of Dudley and his friends, he had totally disappeared.
And there were no news reports of a boy in ragged clothes caught wandering around anywhere in Surrey, as Petunia had feared at first would happen.
She didn’t act at once. She knew that it was entirely possible that Dumbledore man had them under observation, and although nobody had ever confronted her about the freak not eating or living in a cupboard, they might know and not care as long as he was alive. So she continued to tear up when she spoke to the teachers, contacted the police and gave them the freak’s description, and told Dudley that he would get extra ice cream for acting like he missed his cousin.
But days passed. Weeks. Nothing came up and no one said anything.
That was when Petunia began, quietly, to look at other options.
*
Harry laughed as he took the pan of roasted carrots and rabbit meat off the fire. It had taken him a long time and many, many tries to get it to perfection, but now it worked! He could even make soups!
The garden grew all sorts of vegetables and berries, although they were so wild that not all of them were safe. Harry had learned to take the food inside the doorway and hold it up so the house could look at it before he bit into it. It only took one night of vomiting for him to decide that he shouldn’t just gobble down things out in the garden.
But he knew what carrots and potatoes and onions looked like, and apparently magical carrots and potatoes and onions were the same as “Muggle” ones. And there were strawberries and blueberries, and he had also learned to catch hedgehogs and some prickly little creatures without a name he knew along with the rabbits.
He missed bread and sweets, but there was only a little magical money, and even though he had found out he was in London, the house wasn’t clear about where he should go to spend the magical money. It had given him books that talked about Gringotts and goblins and vaults, but not where those were.
It didn’t matter that much to Harry. He had clothes that he had concentrated to shrink (it gave him a headache, but he really did have magic, and he managed it), food whenever he wanted it and was willing to wrestle it out of the ground or catch it, and most of all, his own bedroom. He was going to be okay.
Sometimes he wondered if the Dursleys were looking for him, but then he stopped worrying about it. They couldn’t find him even if they were.
The smell of the food came to his nostrils, and Harry perked up. It was never going to get old, having food he wanted whenever he wanted. He set the plate on the table—much cleaner now than it used to be thanks to more concentration and the house’s help—and dug in.
*
Grimmauld Place was pleased with the child’s progress. He understood responsibility in a way that several recent generations of Black children had not. He was self-sufficient and resourceful, and capable of wandless magic when he tried. He listened intently when the house spoke through its limited ability to do so.
He seemed especially anxious to know where Gringotts and Diagon Alley were, but Grimmauld Place did not know the location from itself. It had never spoken with anyone who did not already know where Gringotts was.
But there would be a map, or a chance to finding one, and in the meantime, the Potter child scampered up and down the corridors, and read books from the library, and depended on Grimmauld Place to swat poisonous food away from him with a branch formed of its walls.
There was endlessness to be had, now that Grimmauld Place had revived its family.
*
Harry wrinkled his nose at the description on the page in front of him, but the house had been pretty insistent about this book, so he turned reluctantly to the cauldron and the table stained with green in front of him.
He had to brew a potion. And he had to use things like salamander blood and chicken livers. Apparently they were all there under Stasis Charms, which Harry could break just by touching them with a finger, but ew.
(Harry did sort of wistfully wish that the chickens had still been alive, so he at least could have eaten them).
The doorway creaked, and Harry rolled his eyes. “I’m doing it, I’m doing it,” he muttered, and reached for the pan of water he had boiled over the fire and let cool to make the potion’s base.
It did turn out to be sort of fun to combine the ingredients, once he had decided that he could pick up the livers with his hands wrapped in some of the old towels that were so common in the house. The blood stank, and the potion bubbled, and there was a sound like a burp when he added what was apparently powdered moonstone, also from the Stasis Charmed cabinets. Then he tipped in a few petals from a daisy in the garden, and—
And the potion exploded.
Harry ducked away with a screech, his arm tucked around his face. A second later, he heard bangs as the pieces of the shattered cauldron clattered against the walls and the shelves, but not near him.
He lowered his arm and saw that the house had raised a wooden wall in front of him, right out of the floor!
“Did you do that?” he asked the house.
The wooden face slowly formed on the wall. Harry had learned that showing that to him tired it out, although he wasn’t sure why it was so much worse for the house than swatting away poisonous foods or shoving books at him. “Yes,” said the grinding voice, sounding to Harry like a Muggle machine running down. “I will protect you. But you must be more careful.”
“I will,” Harry said. He turned to pick up the potions book and figure out what had gone wrong.
Oh, he’d stirred too fast! That was what had gone wrong!
Harry nodded. If he could cook a full feast for the Dursleys and Aunt Marge with Aunt Petunia screaming at him, which he’d had to do many times, then he was sure he could brew a magical potion the right way.
*
Petunia, as she ruthlessly packed her clothes in a bag, was certain. The freaks hadn’t noticed the boy was missing, and they would never come to find him. That meant she and Vernon and her Dudders could leave and find shelter in another country.
Of course, they had to be careful. It was one thing for the freaks not to care about a freak, and another for them not to notice the house being sold.
So they had done it very quietly. Vernon had found someone through his work who was looking for a house, and even though they weren’t quite the sort of family Petunia would have wanted to buy it, they had been willing to buy it with private meetings and private visits and money through the banking system that Petunia thought the freaks wouldn’t understand. (Why would they? They gave animals control of their money). The packing had been done as neatly and quietly, with Vernon taking what looked like empty boxes out of the house while complaining loudly, and secretly transporting them to where they could be shipped.
And now…
Now they were on their way to New Zealand, because Vernon had found a job there that wanted a kind of person just like him, and there was no way the freaks would ever find them.
Petunia stuffed the final shirt in and stood up with her bag. Dudley bounced to the top of the stairs with his own last suitcase. He was eating an ice that Vernon had got him earlier that afternoon, bless him.
Petunia smoothed her Dudders’s hair down and kissed his forehead. “Ready to go, sweetums?”
“Of course, Mum.” Dudley spoke through his mouthful of food, but that was just his way. He had so much energy. “Let’s go before the freak comes back!”
Petunia nodded. They had told Dudley that Harry could come back at any time, brought by other freaks, and that had calmed his tantrums about having to leave his friends and school and travel so far. Petunia was sure that Dudley would make plenty of friends in their new country. People were just drawn to him like a moth to a flame.
“Let’s,” she agreed, and walked down the stairs to where Vernon and the car were waiting without a look back.
Thank you!
I have added this to my list of Best Fanworks Found in 2025.