Chapter Text
There is a quiet wretchedness to her life, one Harri has learnt since forever ago. The same way she has learnt that there are certain things meant to be loved, and she is not among them.
She learns all this in the quiet moments folded into the cupboard under the stairs. Where spiders weave their webs and call it home, where broken toy soldiers stand at attention, and Harri tries her hand at tenderness.
Learns it in the silence between Petunia’s nasal praise of Dudley and Dudley’s tantrums.
Learns it in the way Vernon’s meaty flesh makes a home in her bones.
Learns it in everything the world gives to others and leaves her only the scraps.
She learns it from a tender age, when language is not yet something she knows how to use, and body language the only accomplice she can rely on.
These lessons furthers when her freakish nature finally has a name, but hope still blossoms in the hollows of her chest and in the small pockets of her smile.
But that diminishes as this new world, too, teaches her she is a freak even among them.
At Hogwarts, she learns what it means to matter, what it means to be praised, and wanted, but not in the normal sense people should. It’s a different type of hurt to pinpoint, one she learns to shoulder and move on with.
And when she tries to move on, Severus Snape is there to remind her that adults can be inexplicably as cruel as children.
It reminds her of skin-burnt blisters, and of Harri hunting. Of stick and stones and soil embedded into soft flesh, and Harri hurts all over. She feels seven again, young, hurt, and slow to heal.
Eventually, she learns to stop looking for softness that isn’t coming.
By consequence, she becomes a social pariah, both by choice and not.
That changes by All Hallows’ Eve, when Neville sits across from her in the Great Hall with soil under his nails and worry on his face.
She asks why.
“It’s the anniversary of your parents’ death.”
It explains everything and nothing at all.
She shrugs. “Yeah, I’m fine, I guess.”
Neville nods. And Harri thinks it’ll end there. It doesn’t. And somehow, Neville never quite leaves.
Somewhere between her first and second years, Hogwarts becomes a battlefield she has not chosen willingly, yet she endures. It’s all she can do. It’s all she’s ever done, really.
Neville tells her there’s always a choice in everything we do. Harri doesn’t understand, because the luxury of choice had always been decided for her, both in the Muggle and wizarding world. She tells Neville as is. He tells her to start small.
It goes as well as anything in her life does, poorly, and utterly left.
She learns from that, that while some people are well meaning in their advice, it is ill suited for someone like her to take them on.
And so she catalogues this, and puts it with all the other lessons learnt.
She hopes, distantly, to unlearn them in the near future.
She does unlearn the majority of it, because the lessons once learnt do not survive in the face of Sirius Black.
How can they?
He comes into her life as a precarious balance of horror and tragedy. Harri eats it up and learns to call it kinship.
Rhetoric falls apart under his hands. He builds her from scratch and calls it birthright. The lessons once learned in the cookie-cutter hedges of Privet Drive pool into their own abyss.
Grimmauld Place is everything Privet Drive wasn’t, and everything it is. Harri loves it in the same way Petunia loves normalcy.
Here, she learns to love Quidditch, learns which Bertie Bott’s Every Flavour Beans make her toes curl and which make her retch. She enjoys both in equal measure, and learns childhood the same way Dudley does.
He teaches her what it means to be a child, and then a teen. Teaches and shows her what it means to be loved by a parent. What it means to be given a choice, a luxury she now bathes in, and tells Neville about.
Sirius calls it change.
Harri learns to name it.
She calls it hope.
It lasts for two years and seven months. Lasts for a hundred and thirty four weeks, nine hundred and thirty eight days before it comes crashing down.
It’s the first she’s ever cried in a long time. The first time she’s properly learnt to grieve and put a name to it. Sirius had been everything she wanted and everything she deserved.
The Daily Prophet simultaneously shame and pity her for grieving a convicted felon. The students and staff at Hogwarts are no better.
It’s the most anger she’s ever felt, and the most vindicated she’s ever been once she captures Peter Pettigrew in that graveyard, Cedric dead and Voldemort a hideous thing.
Dumbledore praises her for bravery, for clearing her dead godfather’s name, in the same breath accuses her of killing Cedric, and then asking if she’s sure that it was Voldemort that night in the graveyard.
The accusation does not land all at once. Instead, it settles. It settles somewhere behind her eyes, beneath her ribs, in the same place where grief has learned to live. Dumbledore’s doubt feels familiar in a way she hates, not loud, not cruel, just quietly corrosive.
He does not look at her like a child who has survived something unbearable. He looks at her like a weapon that might have misfired.
Harri does not argue. She does not defend herself. She has learnt, by now, that innocence is not something adults grant easily.
She stores it away instead, alongside everything else she is not meant to speak of, and has learnt.
The summer that follows is both tender and cruel in its mercy. The English heat a burning joint on her skin, the Dursleys enjoying the softer sun in Greece.
Harri enjoys the peace for all that it’s worth. It’s the longest she’s ever been alone, and truly at one with herself.
It does not last.
Dumbledore comes as an interlude that summer, and takes back that luxury of choice Sirius had given her.
She learns of a childhood steeped and marked by the loneliness of a dreary place named Wool’s Orphanage; of graying, cracked walls, and cold winter nights spent under threadbare sheets with talking snakes as companions.
Of bullying and exorcism, of lessons and prayers, and a father who is not father, and a matron who is nothing but a frail, drunken woman who has no more room left in her heart for children who have no doubt forgotten what love is, like she has.
She learns who Tom Riddle is at his core, and learns of horcruxes. There is both pity and detachment fighting for first place.
The detachment wins over. What pity should she have for a man who doomed her to a childhood full of ruin and what ifs.
She then learns to stretch that blame across both Snape and Dumbledore somewhere between her and Neville hunting horcruxes and running from the Snatchers.
It’s frustration and hurt and anger into one. She can’t tell where one emotion starts and the other ends. Doesn’t know how she let herself be roped into this, into whatever this is.
How she let herself be moulded into a child soldier without realising it. Why Dumbledore and the world put her on this pedestal as the Chosen One. Why they thought it was perfectly fine for a child to be doing an adult’s job.
It’s her first ever breakdown. And it stretches her thin. The war does too.
By the time she and Neville find out she’s the last standing horcrux, she understands she’s walking to her death. She always had been.
Realisation is a bitter, cold thing, and Harri wants to claim ignorance.
The part of her that dreamed of growing old, of having her own family, a lover, of getting everything she had been deprived of since birth, since Sirius’s death, will stay as that, as dreams.
And there she is, seventeen, empty eyed, leaving Hogwarts, leaving Neville, rushing to her death, and Harri’s eyes land on the blue sky, and for a moment, she’s eleven again, leaving the Dursleys, and this time, she doesn’t wonder what part of her life she would be leaving behind.
And it’s there when it hits, in the middle of the battlefield, her and Voldemort and every other witch and wizard surrounding them, and suddenly she’s all tears and snot and missing home, missing Sirius.
It’s an ugly feeling, and Sirius is dead and home was Sirius.
-/
She’s seventeen when she leaves the war behind her.
When the Killing Curse hits, it feels almost merciful. The place between life and death is pale and quiet and wrong. Harri understands, distantly, that this is where endings are supposed to be clean.
They are not.
But she makes it so.
Dumbledore stands there, not whole, not broken, but something in between. Less a man than a memory trying to hold its shape.
“You were brave, Harri.” He sounds old and grieving, and regretful.
Harri bristles. “I wasn’t given much of a choice.”
Dumbledore studies her. For a moment, he looks grandfatherly. Kind. Sincere.
“Something I regret deeply,” he says. “But it does no good to dwell on the past.”
Harri’s eyes burn. “So what’s next, then?”
“The choice is yours, Harri. You can either move on, or go back. And I sincerely hope you choose what is good for the greater good. Voldemort still lives, and more human than he ever has been.”
Harri’s throat tightens. “You would have me go back?”
Dumbledore does not deny it. “I would have you end what you were prophesied to do.”
That, more than anything, damn them both.
Not because he asks it of her.
But because he asks it calmly. As though this was always how it would end. As though she was never meant to outlive what she was made for.
“I guess you’ll have to forgive me, Professor.” It’s all Harri says.
She does not wait for his answer.
Forgiveness, she has learnt, is often demanded by those who have already decided to take.
And it’s then she thinks of Neville, who is gentleness and loyalty wrapped in one, because friends who come unexpectedly, but stayed, and fought with you towards a bitter end, deserve to be remembered. She hopes Neville can forgive her, and find happiness in a world she has always longed to leave behind, and finally is.
And thinking of Neville does not make her hesitate, as she thought. Instead, it steadies her.
He is proof that goodness can exist without needing her to bleed for it. That some people will go on living, quietly and well, even when she is no longer there to stand beside them.
And she’s still seventeen, boarding the train at King’s Cross; the war, and Albus Dumbledore, at her back, and her choice hers for the first in forever, and it sits something warm and hopeful in the crevices of her rib cage.
She does not look back.
Not because it doesn’t hurt, but because for once, going back, staying, would hurt more.
She wonders if she’ll meet her parents, meet Sirius again. It’s a giddy feeling, and she’s glassy-eyed, with a smile bright in its intensity and a hope that is as treacherous as it hopeful.
Awareness does not come back to her all at once. It comes in small bursts and fizzles away just as quickly, and Harri finds her grasp on time tenuous at best.
It starts as flashes of gentle touches on her person. Of dull aches that she recognises as receding headaches. A breathlessness that must have come from drowning in the ocean for too long before being rescued.
Of a burning, overwhelming sensation of pain located in her lungs, and Harri feels as though she is dying again.
Her grasp on reality a fragile thing, but as awareness continues to come in small bursts for longer periods of time, Harri understands, vaguely, that something is not quite right with… her?
Harri is not sure, but there is a tug; a soft, persistent ache that calls her to follow, to unwrap what has her on edge.
But awareness is fickle. It comes and goes like the wind, and Harri falls into darkness, and time becomes unattainable.
Then awareness truly comes, and Harri the centre of attention. Harri finds herself falling into the soft laughter of a tender old woman, and comforted in the callouses of a steady arm, weaving stories of childhood she does not quite remember, but yet clearly does.
Everything is vague and distorted, and Harri cannot help but think it’s right, that it’s home, and everything she’s been missing.
But sometimes, for all her heart is steady in her ribcage, sunny days consecutive, storytelling and partying the fuel of all their happiness, Harri cannot help but feel like this isn’t hers, that something is completely, and utterly wrong. That she is not supposed to be here. Not really.
She tries to tell Nadya, the Romani lady who nursed her to health with her husband, that something is not right with her. That the hollows between her bones crave a zap she does not understand. That her blood thirsts for a conduit she cannot explain.
“It’s the gypsie in you, lassy. It craves what it cannot yet have,” Nadya replies once, when Harri has learnt to string her concerns properly.
She does not understand half the words Nadya uses. Romani. Gypsie. Tikna. But Harri learns to roll with it all. She learns to enjoy and treasure it for all it’s worth.
And in the harmony of all their laughter and the endless, party-filled days to come, Harri wonders why she is so determined to believe something is wrong with her. Why that belief itches and gnaws at her ribs, and hides in the hollow of her memories.
That there is something missing, and not quite right with her.
And even after that realisation, the feelings do not go away, and some nights, some mornings, some too-quiet moments when the sky bleeds from blue, and into shades of orange and red, and the world sleeps in their drunken stupor… Harri remembers a sickly green light, and a mother’s hair dyed to rust.
Some days she wakes with a scream in her throat that feels like a dying man’s final cry.
Some days she wakes to the face of a lifeless godfather, clinging to a barely there corpse as she screams herself hoarse.
Some days she wakes and sees the endless blue sky, feels the rubble surface of soil, stick and stones beneath skin, and she’s sure she’s on a battlefield… dying…?
Some days, no matter who she spends her day with, no matter how long she hugs Nadya, or how hard she laughs, she feels lost, incomplete, and so utterly alone.
So lost, incomplete, and so, so utterly alone.
And then the memories arrive.
They do not follow order. They simply arrive, each carrying its own shape, its own ache.
Some come sharp and bright, with jagged edges that cut and hurt. And some, warm and gentle, that have her yearning for more.
They press down on her chest and sit there, patient, unmoving.
She learns a name. Sirius. And it lodges in her throat. Choking and tender.
And then a battlefield follows. All noise, and colour, and heat.
And then, one evening, as Nadya spins a tale of her heritage, the memories all settle in, and root themselves home in the crevices of her skull.
Harri can’t help wonder where it all went wrong. She had boarded the train, in hopes of moving on. In hopes of seeing her parents, of seeing Sirius again.
Instead, she is… here. A here she does not have a name for. A here that seems to hold a tender-hearted woman, and her husband, who have nursed her to life and have come to care for her as much as she has for them.
She wonders if this is some sort of mirage. If she is still tethering between life and death, and whatever this is, is a small reprieve for what is to come.
But Harri knows this is very much real. That she is very much alive.
She wonders where Nadya found her, how long she’s been with her and Jon.
“Nadya,” she interrupts softly, one evening.
“What is it, lassy?”
“Where did you find me?”
Nadya hums, slow and thoughtful.
“On the cut. Half drowned. You looked more dead than living.”
She gives a small, wry smile, and continues.
“Jon pulled you out in May. You’ve been with us near a year now.”
“That means I’ve already turned eighteen.”
She had never thought she’d reach that age, given her years at Hogwarts. Hadn’t thought she’d make it past the Dursley’s abuse either, but here she is.
Nadya’s eyes cut to her, sharp and assessing.
“You don’t look a day over fifteen,” she says quietly.
“Whoever had you before us didn’t feed you proper. That’s sin.”
A pause, then she pats Harri’s knee once.
“No getting rid of us.”
The words settle somewhere deep and unexpected, and warm.
Steady in the way Sirius’s presence once was, not loud, not demanding, just there, and certain.
Harri hadn’t realised how long it’s been since someone spoke of her staying as a given, not a question. Since someone said it without waiting for her to prove she deserved it.
The feeling doesn’t hurt. It reminds her, faintly, of being held without fear of being dropped
Harri hums, then asks, “Where am I?”
Nadya huffs a soft laugh.
“Birmingham, lassy. Near Small Heath way.”
She tilts her head.
“Doesn’t look like London to you, does it?”
No, it didn’t. But it looked similar enough to look like it.
“How’d you know I was from there?”
The question’s dumb, but she’s still half not in her body. For all that nearly a year has passed, it feels like yesterday she was fighting a war. Her physical and mental states on different levels, and Harri hopes they’ll orientate in tandem soon.
Jon’s rambunctious laughter cuts in, as he ambles in through the door.
“Got your memory back, have you, lass?”
He grins at her.
“You’ve been here near a year and never could tell us much about yourself without trailing off.”
He lights a cigarette.
“Besides, Londoners all sound posh as fuck.”
He squints at her.
“Not you, though. Ain’t as posh as you used to be.”
He grins, roguish.
“Reckon you’d pass for a Cockney miss now.”
He jerks his chin toward Nadya.
“Raised you right, we did.”
Harri can’t help but smile. It’s a little off, a little watery, and it takes effort, that smile.
It pulls at places in her that are still sore, still healing, like laughter pressed gently over a bruise.
But she keeps it there anyway, because being raised right, even if it had only been for a year, it turns out, sometimes just means being allowed to stay, means being wanted, and cared for.
That night, she sleeps restlessly.
She learns a year is both long as it is not.
A year, supposedly, since Nadya and Jon found her. A year since she left the war behind, left London, left Neville.
A year, of existing as something other than Harriet Potter, the girl who lived. It is disconcerting as it is eye opening.
Birmingham is not where she expected to land. It’s feels close enough to London that she doesn’t feel as home sick as she thought she’d be, but different enough for her to miss the hustle of it all.
For all that London had been a long ruinous journey, it had taught and given her lessons and people she’d forever treasure. It had been both her salvation and ruin. It had raised her, just as it has broken her. She is a city made girl.
She twists and turns on the bed she has learnt to call hers, and doesn’t feel as displaced as she ought to be.
She is used to change. It is the one constant thing in her life. One she had always easily adapted to, whether she wanted to or not.
It’s with that thought, she tries to settle into sleep. She listens as the animals quieten outside, and the house breathes a final sigh, and falls into its own slumber.
And as her mind wanders back to her past, back to the Dursley’s, back to Hogwarts, and the weight of her wand, and a war she has left behind, Harri finds that it may not be as hard as it seems to let it all go.
She is whole again, and for now, that’s all that matters.
-/
The next morning, when she wakes to the usual rhythm of Jon’s boots creaking on wood, of Nadya’s bustling round the kitchen, and the farm a cacophony of animal sounds, Harri learns that what unsettles her isn’t absence, but the contradiction of things.
She has lived a year without electricity, without glass screens, and humming wires. Without the quiet convenience she remembers once having relied on. She had not noticed their absence then. How could she.
It had been simple, life that is. Hands to soil. Water hauled and food cooked slowly. Time passing without needing to be measured
This is how she manages it. Not by denying what she remembers, and not by yearning for what she no longer has, but by accepting that she has already adapted once, twice, and can do so again.
Now, with her memories returned, the lack of all these things feel louder. Not because she needs them, but because she remembers they existed.
The same goes for her magic.
She has lived a year without it, without knowing she ever had it, but always knowing something was amiss with her. Living a year without it should’ve made the ache bearable. But memory is a cruel as it is merciful. She misses it the way one misses a limb, achingly and terrified.
Misses it in the practical ways. In the quiet calculation of labour. In the way her hands ache after work that could once have been eased with a thought. In the slowness of mending, of lifting, of coaxing things into place when she knows there is another way.
But she also remembers there is something in the manual work, in the repetition, the slowness, the insistence on doing things by hand, that begins to feel therapeutic in a way she does not name aloud, and reminds her, distantly, and bitterly of four privet drive.
But still, magic had always been hers. Had always been there since forever. It has ostracised her just as it made her belong. She thinks, briefly, of how much easier things might be, of how many problems could be solved before they ever had the chance to become problems at all.
Magic had been both ease and difficulties, and she misses it fiercely.
For a few days, it throws her off balance. She reaches for things she knows will not be there. She pauses mid-thought, mind slipping forward years that have not yet happened. She catches herself comparing , London to Birmingham, future to past, ease to effort, and feels the familiar tightening in her chest that usually signals she is about to lose her footing.
But Harri has always been good at recalibration.
She reminds herself, quietly, that she has lived without far worse. That she lived a year here without knowing what she was missing and was no poorer for it. That memory does not mean necessity.
So she lets the contradiction exist without resolving it.
She allows both truths to sit side by side: that the world is smaller here, and that it is not lesser for it.
Yet, when her magic returns, soft and warm and coaxing, she does not hide it.
The house becomes warmer, the animals settle. Jon’s radio hardly glitches and the agriculture blooms.
Nadya notices, course she does. And learns to name it in her own way.
Jon, too, notices. He shrugs and accepts it as another fact about the girl they have already decided to keep.
-/
She falls into a softer routine she has never had.
She learns the rhythm of Jon’s boots on wood, and the bustle of Nadya round the kitchen, and finds comfort in the constant noise of the animals demanding they be fed and acknowledged.
One morning, she loiters in the kitchen, and Nadya says without looking up, “Don’t just stand there, lassy, kettle won’t fill itself.”
Harri hums and reaches for it, the motion easy, practised. Jon watches her over the rim of his mug.
“You move like you been doing this longer than you say,” he remarks.
Harri shrugs. “Guess I learn fast.”
Jon snorts. “Or you’ve lived rough before.”
Nadya shoots him a look sharp enough to cut. “Eat your bread.”
There is comfort in being needed for small, immediate things.
She works with her hands most days. Cleaning stalls. Carrying feed. Mending what breaks, because things always do. There is no applause for it, no praise beyond a nod or a muttered good from Jon, but the work ends when it is done. Nothing follows her back to bed at night except tired muscles and the smell of hay still clinging to her clothes.
“You’ll ruin your back lifting like that,” Jon calls once, watching her heft a sack higher than she ought to.
“I’m fine,” Harri replies, breathless but smiling.
He squints at her. “You always say that.”
She glances back. “And I usually am.”
He lets it go, which is how Jon shows care. By trusting her to know her limits, even when he doesn’t like them.
Sometimes Nadya sends her into the city centre with a list folded small enough to fit into her pocket.
“Don’t get distracted,” Nadya warns, handing it over.
Harri grins. “I won’t.”
“You always do.”
“Only a little.”
Nadya sighs like this is a long-standing argument they’ve never bothered to resolve. “Be back before dark.”
Harri nods. She always is.
She walks the roads instead of taking any sort of transport, learning the shape of the place one street at a time.
She learns where the canals cut through, where the smoke hangs heavier, where voices grow louder or quieter depending on who is meant to hear them.
When she returns, boots dusty and pockets lighter, Jon raises an eyebrow.
“You spend the lot?”
Harri pulls a loaf from her bag, then another, then a small paper parcel wrapped carefully.
“No,” she says. “But I thought we could use this.”
Nadya inspects it, then softens. “You think of us.”
How can she not, she thinks.
Out loud, she says, “Course I do.” And Harri ducks her head.
She likes the markets best. The noise, the bargaining, the sense that everything is moving even when it looks like chaos. It reminds her, faintly, of Diagon Alley without the spectacle.
She notices how people look at one another. How class sits in posture, in shoes, in the way someone counts their coins twice before handing them over. She has always been good at reading rooms. Birmingham is just another one, larger than most, and still similar to London.
She starts taking small jobs when they’re offered. She likes earning her own coin. Likes knowing exactly what it costs her.
They are nothing permanent, the jobs, that is. Carrying crates. Cleaning. Helping where hands are needed and questions aren’t. She’s good at doing that sort of stuff. Learnt it from young and carried it with her to adulthood.
Jon doesn’t comment the first time she brings home coins of her own. Just watches as she sets them on the table.
“You didn’t have to,” he says eventually.
“I wanted to,” Harri replies. “Feels right.”
Nadya nods once. “A girl should know what she earns.”
Ambition creeps in quietly.
Not the loud, burning kind, but the one she’s always had.
The desire for a future that did not require her sacrifice as proof of worth. The desire she had when she was little and the Dursleys a cage, and Sirius a future that had been cut too short. The desire for a future that is all hers, and a family of her own making.
She wants a life that lasts.
She wants mornings that don’t begin with dread. Evenings that don’t end in vigilance. A future that doesn’t require her to die to justify its existence.
One evening, as they eat in companionable silence, Harri asks, “Did you ever think you’d end up here?”
Jon laughs outright. “No.”
Nadya smiles, small and knowing. “Life don’t ask permission.”
Harri thinks of that later.
Her magic hums faintly beneath it all now. Present in the way muscle memory is present, and becomes something she treasures and uses for everything and nothing.
One afternoon, the fence mends faster than it should. The animals settle quicker than usual.
Jon notices the quiet first. “Huh.”
Nadya watches Harri over her knitting. “You do that again.”
Harri stills. “Do what?”
“That,” Nadya says gently. “Make things listen.”
Harri hesitates, then says, “Is that… bad?”
Nadya shakes her head. “Just is.”
Jon shrugs from his chair. “Ain’t brought us no trouble.” Harri exhales, something loosening in her chest.
Evenings are quieter. Nadya tells stories sometimes, not always about family, not always about truth, but they are comfort and laughter wrapped in one.
“Once,” Nadya says, “my aunt swore she married a man who could speak to horses.”
Jon scoffs. “He could barely speak to people.”
“He still married her,” Nadya snaps.
Harri laughs before she can stop herself.
Jon points at her. “Careful, encouraging her.”
Nadya smiles at Harri instead. “You like stories.”
“I do,” Harri admits. “They give you another world to experience.”
“Yes,” Nadya agrees.
-/
At first, she tells herself it isn’t intentional. But Harri has always known her own lies better than she’s known her truths.
She avoids anything that could explicitly state the year she’s found herself in.
She knows she is not nineteen-ninety-seven. But there is something chilling, scary, knowing she could be displaced in a time where the people she once knew are not born yet. She would rather them be toddling infants than not exist. Because them existing would ease a comfort in her she has been missing.
When Nadya brings in the post one afternoon, Harri averts her eyes without thinking, busying herself with washing up.
“Curious thing, ain’t you?” Jon remarks, watching her scrub an already-clean plate.
“About what?” she asks.
“Most folk want to know when they are.” He shrugs. “You never ask.”
Harri keeps her head down. “Don’t see the rush.”
Nadya hums from the doorway. “Some answers don’t improve a day.”
Harri feels seen in a way that is not uncomfortable, exactly, but close.
She occupies herself instead. Works longer hours. Walks further into the city centre than she needs to. Learns the canals by heart, the way sound carries differently over water, the way the city exhales at dusk.
She learns which streets feel safe and which ones don’t. Learns where to buy bread that tastes like effort. Learns which pubs Jon will not step foot in, and which ones Nadya insists are cursed.
“They’re just loud,” Jon mutters.
“Loud brings trouble,” Nadya replies. “Always has.”
Harri smiles at that, but something inside her tightens.
At night, when she lies awake, she thinks about numbers without naming them. Counts years the way one counts scars, carefully, without touching.
She knows enough history to know that once she asks, she cannot un-ask.
And Harri has lived a life where knowledge always came with a price. So she lets the days remain shapeless, year-less. She lets herself be eighteen without anchoring it to a year. Lets herself exist without context.
When her magic flares unexpectedly, a gate swinging open without hands, a lamp burning longer than it should, she doesn’t flinch.
Nadya only says, “Careful, lassy. Don’t get careless with yourself.”
Harri nods. “I won’t.”
Jon watches her over the top of his paper. “You sure?”
She meets his gaze. “As I can be.”
That seems to satisfy him.
It is easier, she finds, to move forward when she doesn’t know exactly how far back she’s gone.
Easier to believe this is simply her life now. That the quiet has always been hers. That she has earned this softness without needing to explain it to herself.
But avoidance has its limits.
And Harri knows, has always known, that one day something small and ordinary will break it open.
And that small, ordinary thing that breaks it is Jon’s paper.
She’s clearing that morning’s mess on the table, Jon’s radio in the way and that morning’s paper underneath it. She doesn’t give it much thought, pulling it out from under, and as she folds it in half, the date is as big as it is damning.
April 13, 1930.
Harri stills, a faint tremble to her hands. She swallows hard and tries to get her bearings right.
Nadya watches her too closely. “You all right, lassy?”
Harri nods once. Again. “Yeah. Just didn’t realise it was April already.”
Jon frowns. “Been April a while.”
She hums, noncommittal, the way she’s learned to do when the truth is too sharp to touch.
1930.
The year settles somewhere deep and cold.
After that, it takes Harri a moment to gather herself. She folds the paper once, then twice, and sets it back under the radio where it belongs.
Behind her, she hears Jon’s chair scrape against the floor as he stands. Nadya hums, low and tuneless, as she moves about the kitchen. Outside, something bleats. Something else answers. Life carries on, unaware it has handed her a knife and called it time.
Harri picks up a cloth and wipes the table. Her hands are steady again. That, more than anything, unsettles her.
Later, she takes the long way into town.
She walks the canal paths until the water dulls to slate beneath the sky. Children pass her, running, shouting, all elbows and dirt and laughter. One trips. Another hauls him up by the collar, swearing affectionately.
She watches them longer than necessary.
Not because they remind her of Hogwarts, or of war, or even of Neville.
But because they are alive in a way that feels unburdened. Because they do not yet know what the world might ask of them.
A child with dark hair barrels past her, nearly colliding with her knee.
“Sorry, miss!” he calls, already gone.
Miss.
The word lands oddly. She keeps walking.
That night, she counts.
She counts distance. London is close enough to hurt. Far enough to pretend it isn’t calling.
She counts age. Three. Maybe four. Old enough to speak. Old enough to remember kindness. Old enough to be afraid. To know fear.
She does not think his name.
Names have power. She has learnt that the hard way.
Instead, she thinks of orphanages. Of cold floors and narrower beds. Of how loneliness can grow teeth if left long enough. Of cradles and futures that fracture quietly, years before anyone notices.
She thinks of Sirius, of laughter too big for the spaces he occupied, of love given recklessly and without conditions. She thinks of her parents, faces she knows only in fragments, in echoes.
She thinks of Neville. Still alive somewhere ahead of her. Still good. Still choosing kindness even when it costs.
She thinks of debts, and of futures paid for in blood that was not meant to be spent so young.
She presses her palm flat against her chest and breathes until the tightness eases.
The thought does not ask permission when it comes.
I should kill him. For Sirius. For Neville. For her parents.
Killing him would be easy.
That is the most frightening part.
They had all sacrificed themselves for her.
She owes them something better than the future she remembers.
But Harri is not cruel. She is exhausted by the world more often than not. And for all that she is indifferent to a plethora of things, and has the emotional range of a teaspoon, she knows she cannot bring herself to kill a babe.
It would be a poetic irony of sorts if she did. An eye for an eye. But she is above that.
And then another thought intrudes, uninvited and unwelcome.
But what if he had been loved?
The idea irritates her at first. Feels naive. Sentimental. Like something Dumbledore would have said while asking her to bleed quietly and call it destiny.
But Nadya’s hands come to mind. Jon’s certainty. The way they had kept her without question, without asking who she had been before or what she could offer in return.
Love, she has learnt, does not fix everything.
But it changes enough.
She is proof of that. First with Sirius, and now Nadya and Jon.
Perhaps Tom, too, could be proof of that.