[Songs of Summer]: Growing Up Grimmauld, 2/4

[lomonaaeren]

Harry cheered as he laid down the stirring rod and saw the bright blue color in the cauldron. The potion had worked! It had taken some more tries and some wasted ingredients, but at least the cauldrons hadn’t exploded again, and the house had guided him through some of the mistakes so that he wouldn’t make them twice.

Now he had a potion that should guide him to where other magical people in London were, and that meant where Gringotts was.

Harry bit his lip as he stared at the potion. He had gone out into the garden to hunt and pick fruits and vegetables, of course, but otherwise, he hadn’t left Grimmauld Place since he’d appeared here. It was scary, thinking of going around all those other people.

But he couldn’t just give up. He really did want some bread and sweets, and he had to have magical money to buy that.

Making up his mind, Harry dipped a flask into the potion the way the book had said, then tilted it back and drank.

It tasted awful! The book and the house hadn’t said that! Harry dropped the flask on the table that held his extra stirring rods and other potions stuff and staggered back and forth, coughing. It felt like he’d stuffed burning earwax down his throat.

But gradually, the feeling lessened, and Harry stood up with a bright smile. He could feel the location of other magical people. He knew they were some way away, but that was all right. He could walk.

It was strange, like having a lead weight in his stomach, Harry thought, as he went up to his bathroom to brush his hair. But he was sure he would get used to this feeling, too, like he had the burning in his throat from the potion.

Meanwhile, he was going to brush his hair neatly and make sure his robes didn’t have wrinkles and that he had the nicest pair of the shrunken shoes the house had given him. He didn’t want to look weird.

*

Walburga hated the child.

He had come here, creeping in through the doors or the windows like the filth he was, and without a house-elf, there was no one to chase him out again. At first, Walburga had thought screaming at him would drive him away. It had meant that even members of her own family didn’t visit the house anymore, which was the way she wanted it.

But the boy had just looked at her with a sort of puzzled air, and then walked away once her screaming was done. Or sometimes before it was done. He didn’t disagree with her or try to say that he wasn’t a Mudblood or filth. He just walked away.

Now he walked past with shoes and Regulus’s robes on and his hair flattened over that strange scar on his forehead and a bright smile, and Walburga could not stand it.

“DIRTY-BLOODED DEFILER OF MY HOUSE! GET OUT! GET OUT AND NEVER RETURN!”

The boy halted and looked up at her. His green eyes were unnatural, Walburga thought. Just like a Mudblood to give them to his or her son.

“You turn red when you yell, and my Uncle Vernon turns purple,” the boy said thoughtfully. “I didn’t know people could turn different colors.”

“Who is this Vernon?” Walburga demanded.

“I said. My uncle. My Muggle uncle,” the boy added, with a glint in his eyes that made Walburga scream again.

“THE CHEEK! TO COMPARE THE LAST MATRIARCH OF THE HOUSE OF BLACK TO A MUGGLE! IF YOU DO NOT LEAVE NOW AND NEVER RETURN, I WILL HAUNT YOUR SLEEP!”

“How? I don’t think you can leave that frame the way the other portraits can. You had yourself painted so that you couldn’t, right?”

Walburga narrowed her eyes. How did a filthy child know that?

“I’ve just watched you,” the child said, and stood on his tiptoes to look up at her. He was short and ragged despite the fine robes—anyone could look at his hair and see that he wasn’t a person of breeding—but he met her eyes and smiled at her despite that. “You don’t move from the portrait, and I’m not even sure you have a body. Just a face.”

He was right. Walburga had desired to be painted that way so that she would not be troubled by visits from “concerned relatives” whose portraits hung in other Black properties.

But no one else had ever guessed it, not even the few purebloods Walburga had seen since she had died, and it roused her wrath. “HOW DARE YOU!”

“I’m just going,” the boy said, and turned and slipped out the door before Walburga could yell at him to come back and face her. Walburga found herself staring at the empty entrance hall.

It was an outrage.

It was not something she could do anything about, given the choices she had made before her death.

*

Harry walked and walked and walked. And in the end, he walked some more. But at the house’s suggestion, he had learned to concentrate hard enough that Muggles’ eyes sort of slid over him, so he went into a shop and stole some sweets, and then he sat and ate them far enough away from the shop that he could let the concentration go.

Some Muggles stared at him, but no one tried to approach them, and after Harry had rested and eaten, he stood up and walked on.

In the end, he arrived at a small pub off Charing Cross Road that all the Muggles appeared to be ignoring. Harry stepped into the Leaky Cauldron and glanced around curiously. He’d never been in a pub before, but it looked like what Uncle Vernon had said they were all like: small, dim, and smelly.

“Looking for Diagon Alley, boy?”

Harry turned around and made his way to the bar with the man standing behind it. At least the man had a wrinkled smiling face and didn’t look upset with him. “Yes, sir,” Harry said. “I have some money to take to Gringotts.”

“Ah, right,” the man said, and then looked over Harry’s shoulder. “Your parents didn’t come with you?”

Harry felt a little jolt of sorrow. He reckoned that at least his father must have been magical, since he’d asked Sirius Black to be Harry’s magical godfather and there was someone named “Charlus Potter” married to Dorea Black on the family tapestry. But he didn’t know anything about his father other than that, and nothing about his mother other than her being Aunt Petunia’s sister.

“They said that I ought to be able to go out by myself, sir,” he said, sticking his nose up a little and adopting a bit of Dudley’s way of speaking.

“You’re awfully young for it.”

“Well, but I start Hogwarts in just two years, sir, and then I’ll be on my own all the time.” The house had especially shoved books about Hogwarts at him, probably because it knew Harry would need to leave then and it wanted him to be prepared.

“Well, all right,” the man said, after a little shrug. “None of my business how these modern people raise their kids, I suppose.”

Harry stopped a giggle and followed the man to a brick wall, watching intently as he tapped on it with a wand. Harry would have really liked a wand so that he didn’t have to concentrate so much and give himself splitting headaches, but he knew he couldn’t get one until he was eleven.

He stepped past the man with a gasp into the bright whirlwind of Diagon Alley, and ignored the man behind him who made a strangled sound as the wall closed. Something about “Harry Potter?”, so Harry supposed he must look like his dad.

Not that he was going to stop and talk to people about it. They might try to take him back.

He did dart into a shop selling hats as the wall opened again, but whoever it was ran straight past and ignored him. Harry stepped out again after a few minutes, getting a puzzled look from the shopkeeper. Probably he thought that Harry was weird for staring so intently out the window and not wanting to buy a pointy hat.

But Harry didn’t want to, really. Some of the portraits at Grimmauld Place wore them, but he always thought they looked sort of odd.

He walked down the main street, rejoicing in the sunlight and the way that other people around him wore robes, too. He could see Gringotts clearly, of course. It was the huge white building at the end of the street. The soft pull in his chest, like he was a compass, was just one more clue.

When he came up to the doors, Harry stopped for a minute. He had seen only one book in the house with illustrations of goblins, and they didn’t look like this. The writer of the book had managed to make them seem both shorter and uglier.

But the goblins were watching him, so Harry nodded to them and put on his best polite smile before he walked past and into the main bank.

Inside, there were tellers and flashing jewels and metal scales and people popping in out and out of fireplaces and goblins with spears. Harry stood petrified for a second again. He didn’t like crowds, not when there was always a chance that someone would glare at him for being out of place or looking like the Dursleys’ criminal nephew. And here, there was the greater chance that someone would recognize him as being like his dad, the way the man in the bar did.

But he had to get some more magical money, if he could, and put the money he had in a vault that would “grow” it somehow, if he couldn’t. (The house hadn’t been very clear about how banking worked). Harry stepped into a line in front of a goblin teller and pretended he couldn’t see the people who were staring at him.

No one else shouted about him being Harry Potter, at least. Harry got up to the front of the line without a problem.

“Name?” the goblin asked. He looked intensely bored, his claws tapping against each other as he looked at a pile of blue gems instead of Harry.

“Harry Potter.”

The goblin’s gaze snapped to him instantly, and Harry winced. Maybe he was recognizable for a bad reason? Maybe his parents had done something evil?

“Are you really,” the goblin mused.

Harry took a deep breath and nodded. The books about the goblins had said that goblins really valued honor and kept track of all debts. Maybe he would have to pay any debts his family had? Although he really didn’t understand that, either. “Yes, sir. I’d like to see if I can get any magical money out if I can? Or at least have a safe resting place for the magical money I brought with me.”

The goblin tapped his claws against the blue gems again before he abruptly stood up. “Come with me.”

Harry trotted after him down the front of the bank and into a side corridor that led to a lift covered with silver and lit by little flaring lamps. The goblin got in and gave Harry an impatient glare, so he scrambled in, too. The lift swayed from side to side for a moment, and then began to plunge straight down. Harry held his breath so he wouldn’t scream.

“We are going to your vault,” the goblin said.

“Oh. It is a Potter vault?”

“It is not.”

Harry frowned, nibbling his lip. What did that mean? Had his mum been magical, too? And a pureblood? But she couldn’t be, not if she was really Aunt Petunia’s sister?

“It is a vault of the Black family,” said the goblin, turning to look at him. “Children are not allowed to access the Potter vault before their eleventh birthday. But you, Mr. Potter…” He smiled, and his smile was horrible but also sort of cool and interesting. Harry wanted to learn how to smile like that. Then people would leave him alone! “You have the magic of the Black family house smeared all over you.”

“Oh, yeah. I live at Number Twelve Grimmauld Place.”

“Why do you live there?”

“The house took me when I was running away from my Muggle cousin. It adopted me, sort of. Because I’m Sirius Black’s godson?” Harry added, since the goblin was raising his eyebrows. “So that’s a family connection. Although I don’t know why Sirius Black isn’t here and raising me. His mum screams a lot of nonsense, so I don’t know if I should believe her when she says that he’s in prison for something.”

“He is in prison for betraying your parents. It happened on the night that you became the Boy-Who-Lived for defeating the Dark Lord Voldemort.”

“I became what?”

*

Harry left the bank with his head spinning worse than before. He was famous for something that happened as a baby? How could anyone think that he had defeated the Dark Lord as a baby?

The house had told him a little about Voldemort, although not a lot; Harry thought the events were too recent for it to really know. The house mostly knew about older things. But it had said that Regulus Black and Orion Black had both been supporters of Voldemort, and even though they were dead and Sirius Black was in prison, Harry now wondered if he should return.

Only for a minute, though. The house was good to him. Living there was so much better than the Dursleys. And there was a Black vault that apparently was connected to the house somehow, although the goblin had said he wouldn’t be surprised if the house had forgotten. So now Harry had magical money!

He went into a bakery first and bought so much that the baker looked a little concerned when Harry staggered up to the front with his arms full of bread. But he looked a lot more reassured by the Galleons and Sickles Harry handed him. That was good. The last thing Harry wanted was for people to think he was a thief.

Their thinking he was the Boy-Who-Lived wasn’t great, either, but he flattened his hair over his scar any time he came out of a shop, and it seemed to be all right.

But in the meantime, he had bread and croissants and biscuits and things that he didn’t know what they were called but they had looked good, like marzipan. He was going to eat so much he was sick.

And best of all, the baker had shrunken it down for him so that Harry could just have a little cauldron he put in a pocket and carry it all that way!

Magic was brilliant.

Harry really wanted a broom after reading some of the books the house had shown him, but he winced even looking at the price of an old one, so he left that shop quickly. He did go into an apothecary and buy some fresh Potions ingredients, and had a butcher give him some cuts of beef and chicken all wrapped up in Stasis Charms and little magical bubbles that wouldn’t break unless someone threw them on the floor really hard.

Honestly, it was mostly food that Harry wanted. He got marmalade and butter and so many sweets that his hands ached carrying them all to the counter of that shop. And he sat down and had an ice for the first time in his life.

It was brilliant.

He was smiling widely by the time he started back to the Leaky Cauldron to return to the house. But he stopped when he heard someone say his name and ducked down near the door of the hat shop again.

“Harry Potter…yes, Albus, I swear he was…”

Harry peered very slowly around the corner. The pub owner was facing a tall man with sparkling purple robes and waving his hands around. Harry bit his lip. It sounded like they were discussing him.

And the pub owner looked very upset. Harry wondered if he had been a supporter of the Dark Lord Voldemort, or someone who his parents had deceived somehow. (It was hard to stop thinking of his parents as criminals or freaks given that he still knew very little about them. The house hadn’t known them).

“But why would he be here, Tom?” The tall man’s voice was soothing. He moved a little, although luckily he wasn’t looking in Harry’s direction, and Harry saw that he had a long white beard and glasses. He put a hand on the pub man’s shoulder. “I know where Harry Potter is staying, and he is very safe with his relatives. They wouldn’t bring him here without asking for a Ministry escort, at the very least.”

Harry wrinkled his nose. The Dursleys would never ask for an escort from the Ministry of Magic, which Harry only knew about from reading some of the books in the house. The Ministry sounded very magical and did lots of things to keep Muggles from noticing them. He thought his relatives probably knew about magic because of how they had called him a freak, but that just meant they wouldn’t call the Ministry.

Then he paused.

How does this Albus man know the Dursleys?

“But it was him, Albus, I swear it. The green eyes and the glasses and the scar! And that Potter hair that can’t be flattened no matter what!”

Harry scowled. I have to do something about the scar.

“Have you considered, Tom, that it could have been someone glamoured to look like Harry Potter, with the help of his adults or guardians?”

That’s stupid, why would someone do that?

From the expression on “Tom’s” face, he thought the same thing. But Albus went on before Tom could say anything. “They may have been trying to take advantage of Mr. Potter’s fame for something as simple as getting a bargain on a broom. Or to have the disguised child express certain political opinions that would put him more in alignment with the Death Eaters than with the people he grew up with.”

Harry decided to ask the house about Death Eaters. Or maybe Mrs. Black’s portrait. She shouted a lot, but she knew more about current events than the house, since the notice under her portrait said she had died just a few years before.

“Maybe you’re right, Albus,” Tom said at last, shaking his head. “But I would feel better if you did search the alley for him before you left.”

“Of course, Tom, I shall be happy to. But I don’t expect to find anything.”

No, you won’t, Harry thought, doubling back so that he was behind the hat shop and carefully watching the Albus man walk away. Tom went back into the pub, and Harry took a deep breath and concentrated mostly the way he had when he was walking through the Muggle part of London on the way here.

I’m invisible. You can’t see me. I’m just invisible.

It started giving him a headache almost immediately. Harry didn’t know if that was because he was concentrating harder or because he was in a magical place and people were more likely to notice him there than in a Muggle place. But he stubbornly kept concentrating as he slipped up to the brick wall, and when a large family with five children came straggling through, he slipped through the other way.

It was even worse inside the pub. Harry had been doing all right with the people around him in Diagon Alley, when he hadn’t seen people for months, because he’d just avoided them and only approached the shopkeepers when there was no one waiting in the queue. But now he could feel sweat breaking out on his back under his robes. And he had to keep dodging people, and someone spilled something cold and yucky-smelling on his head and he couldn’t even react. He just had to keep his head bowed and plow forwards.

He finally came out of the pub and let himself walk one more street away before he released the concentration. A Muggle girl who was looking in his direction started when he appeared, but Harry turned and glared at her, and she gave a little shriek and ran the other way.

Harry rubbed his pounding head and went to a park he remembered passing so he could sit down. He would have to rest before he walked back to the house.

But soon he would be back home, in his own bedroom, behind walls and the things the house had said were called wards. People wouldn’t be able to see him.

No Dursleys. No crowds. No Albus man. And he had the bread and sweets and Potions ingredients and other things he had gone to Diagon Alley for, and he wouldn’t have to go there for a long time.

Humans were overrated, anyway.

*

Albus took his time about carefully and thoroughly searching Diagon Alley, even though his instruments had all told him Harry was alive and well and in a place he regarded as home. He respected Tom’s powers of observation, and there was the slightest chance that Petunia had told Harry about magic earlier than Albus had expected her to—that was, when she was forced to by the arrival of his Hogwarts letter.

But there was no sign of Harry in Diagon Alley. Certainly none of the people Albus struck up a casual conversation with, all of whom were thrilled to see him, would have kept the news of Harry frequenting their shops or walking past them in the street to themselves. Which left Albus with the glamoured child theory.

If so, the parents or other guardians of the boy had thought better of it the ruse or been frightened away before they’d achieved any gains from it. Albus heard nothing about free sweets or books or brooms, or even ones at reduced prices, offered anywhere. No shopkeeper bragged about having served the Boy-Who-Lived.

In the end, Albus shrugged and turned his steps back to the nearest Apparition point. He would examine his instruments one more time when he returned home and send a message to Arabella. But he expected to hear nothing more from her than what he had for months: that Harry must be going through a shy period, as he stayed within the house at all times and didn’t even work in the garden anymore.

That his aunt had indulged the boy’s desire to do so made Albus smile a little to himself. The Dursleys might not have been very loving when Minerva had looked in on them, but they had clearly improved with time.

He reached the Apparition point and turned cheerfully on his heel, already anticipating the crooned greeting from Fawkes and an afternoon of reading new speculations on alchemical theory as it related to the moon.

Comments

Yay!

[ysabetwordsmith]

I continue to love the hell out of this story. :D

>> “You turn red when you yell, and my Uncle Vernon turns purple,” the boy said thoughtfully. “I didn’t know people could turn different colors.” <<

Nothing confuses an abuser like facts.

>>“Have you considered, Tom, that it could have been someone glamoured to look like Harry Potter, with the help of his adults or guardians?”<<

That's actually a good cover story.

>> Humans were overrated, anyway. <<

So. Much. This.