Chapter Text

Chapter One

The House of Black

The thing Harry could not get used to, three weeks into the summer, was the noise.

Not loud noise. Number Twelve, Grimmauld Place was not a loud house; it was an old, deep, settled house, and even transformed, it kept some of its hush, the way a cathedral keeps its hush even full of people. What Harry could not get used to was that the noise was friendly. At Privet Drive the sounds of the house had all been warnings: the tread of Uncle Vernon on the stairs, the clip of Aunt Petunia's heels meaning a chore he had failed to anticipate, the television turned up to drown him out. He had learned to read a house by its sounds the way a sailor reads weather, and every reading had told him the same thing, which was make yourself small.

Here the sounds said the opposite.

Here Sirius was singing tunelessly and badly in the kitchen, butchering something the wireless was playing, breaking off to swear cheerfully at a pan. Here Remus was turning the pages of a newspaper in the morning room, the soft companionable rustle of a person who did not mind being near you. Here there was the creak of the old stairs under feet that were coming to find him, usually to feed him, and Harry still felt, every single time, the faint old reflexive flinch before he remembered that nobody on these stairs was hunting him.

He was getting better at remembering. That was the summer's quiet work, going on under everything else: the slow unlearning of thirteen years of warnings. He woke now, most mornings, without the lurch of recalculation, the half-second of whose house, what's owed, what have I missed.

He came down to breakfast without rehearsing how to be unobtrusive. He had, twice, asked for a second helping of something without first weighing whether asking would cost him, and both times Sirius had simply pushed the dish across without looking up, as though a boy wanting more food were the most ordinary thing in the world, which Harry was beginning, with a kind of vertigo, to understand it was.

And still, underneath, the brace.

He noticed it most in the good moments, which was its cruelty. He would be sitting in the walled garden with a book, the sun warm on the back of his neck, Sirius and Remus arguing lazily about something three feet away, and a thought would surface, unbidden, cool as a draught under a door: this is on loan. Good things were loans. He knew that the way he knew his own name. They came, and you were grateful, and you were careful with them, and then the lender came back, and the careful gratitude only made the taking-away worse. Some animal part of him, trained too early and too well, could not stop waiting for the knock at the door, the letter, the change in the weather, the moment someone would arrive to explain that there had been a mistake, that this was not really his, that he should fetch his trunk.

He did not say any of this to Sirius. He had tried, once, obliquely, and watched something terrible happen to his godfather's face, a grief so immediate and so personal that Harry had understood at once he must never make Sirius carry it directly. So, he carried it himself, filed in the old drawer where he kept the things he did not let himself look at all the way to the end. It was a smaller drawer than it had been a year ago. But it was not empty, and the brace lived in it, patient as the rest.

What he had learned to do, instead of arguing with the brace, was to lean the other way. To collect the good ordinary days on purpose, the way another boy might collect cards or stamps, pressing each one flat in the memory: the morning Sirius taught him to make a truly disgraceful fry-up; the afternoon Remus found him a battered second-hand book on the founding of the old houses and said nothing about why he might want it, only left it on his pillow; the evening all three of them had stayed up too late playing exploding snap until Sirius set his own eyebrows alight and Remus laughed so hard he had to sit on the floor. Harry kept them. If the lender came, the lender came; but the days were his, and he was learning, slowly, that having held a good thing was not the same as being a fool for holding it.

♦

The garden was the proof of it, really. The whole summer was written in the garden.

When Sirius had lit a single candle out there on the longest night of the winter, the walled square behind the house had been a ruin of bramble and dead stone, a place where nothing had grown in a generation because nothing in the House of Black had wanted anything to grow. Now, against all reason and most of Sirius's actual gardening, it was a green riot. There were tomatoes Remus tended with a patience he extended to few other things; beans gone mad up their canes; a chaos of flowers that nobody admitted to planting; and a corner of herbs that Harry privately suspected Neville had advised on, because they thrived in a way that things Neville touched always thrived, even by owl-post from a hundred miles away.

"A personal triumph," Sirius announced, the way he announced it most days, standing in the doorway with two glasses of lemonade and surveying the green chaos as though he had conjured it from nothing by force of will. "I grew that. With these hands."

"Remus does the watering," Harry said.

"Remus does the watering," Sirius agreed, entirely unbothered, handing him a glass and dropping onto the warm stone step beside him. "And I provide the vision. Every great garden needs a visionary, Harry, and a labourer, and it is simply the natural order of things that I am the former."

He stretched his legs out into the sun. He did that often now, turned his face up to light and warmth the way a plant did, a small unconscious habit Harry had come to understand: a man who had spent twelve years somewhere with no sun was not going to waste any of it now. "Your father," Sirius added, "could not have grown a weed in a bog. Just so you know. Wherever you got the green thumb, it wasn't the Potter side."

"It's Neville's thumb, mostly. By post." Harry proudly said.

"Then we shall credit young Longbottom and move on." Sirius took a long drink and was quiet for a moment, which was rare enough that Harry looked over. His godfather was watching him with an expression that had become familiar over the summer, a kind of helpless studying, as though Harry was a sum that kept coming out larger than expected. "You've grown," Sirius said. "Again. I'm not imagining it. Stand up a moment."

"I'm fine where I am."

"Stand up, you ungrateful child, let me be wounded properly."

Harry stood, mostly to make him stop, and Sirius stood with him, and there was a moment of comparing that Harry would not have submitted to from anyone else. It was true. He could feel that it was true, had been feeling it for a fortnight in the way his trousers ended too high above his ankles and his wrists came out past his sleeves and his whole body felt faintly unfamiliar, borrowed, like a coat bought to grow into. He had shot up. Madam Bramble, on her last visit, had measured him against the morning-room door frame and made a small satisfied noise and pencilled a mark a startling distance above the last one, and said, in her brisk way, that this was exactly what was meant to happen, that a body starved of what it needed did not simply forgive the debt, it collected it later, all at once, when the conditions were finally right; and that Harry's conditions were now, evidently, right.

"You're going to be taller than me," Sirius said. It came out somewhere between outrage and wonder. "You are. Look at you. She said it at Yule, Madam Bramble said taller than me inside two years, you're going to overshoot the lot of us." He seized Harry by the shoulders and held him at arm's length and looked, and the wonder won out over the outrage, and under both of them was the thing Sirius never quite managed to hide, the grief that ran beneath all his joy like a cold current under a warm sea: that he was watching Harry grow because Harry was finally somewhere he was allowed to. "They made you small," he said, more quietly. "Those muggles. They kept you small on purpose, or near enough. And look. You're not going to stay it." He let go and cuffed Harry lightly round the head to break the moment, because Sirius could only hold a tender thing for so long before he had to set it down. "Eat something. You're a growing disgrace. There's the rest of the pie."

Harry ate something. He was, it turned out, always hungry now, in a clean, uncomplicated way that had nothing to do with the careful old hunger of Privet Drive; his body had decided to become itself and was demanding the materials.

He stood in the green garden in the sun eating cold pie with his fingers, taller than he had been a month ago, and pressed the moment flat with the others: the day my godfather measured me against himself and was glad.

♦

The one corner of the house the summer's warmth had not reached was Kreacher.

The house-elf moved through Number Twelve like its last unreformed inhabitant, a small bent grievance in a filthy loincloth, muttering. He muttered about Sirius constantly, a low venomous stream just under hearing, blood traitor, shame of my mistress, the filth that came back to the noble house; he muttered about Remus (werewolf, beast at my mistress's table); he muttered, when he thought no one heard, about the portraits and the old days and the mistress who had loved him, in the broken devoted way of a creature whose entire self-had been built around serving people who had despised him for it.

Sirius could not bear him. That was plain, and it was mutual, and Harry understood, watching them, that it ran far too deep to be reasoned with. To Sirius, Kreacher was the house made flesh, every cruelty of his childhood given a voice that still called him filth in his own hall; to Kreacher, Sirius was the boy who had broken his mistress's heart and come slinking back to defile what was left. They could not see each other at all. When they were in a room together, the air went tight, and Sirius's jaw set, and Kreacher's muttering took on an edge, and Harry had learned to find a reason to be elsewhere.

But Harry could see him. That was the strange thing, the thing he did not have words for and did not examine. He looked at Kreacher and did not see the house made flesh, or a venomous old servant, or a problem to be managed. He saw, with a recognition that came up from somewhere below thought, a creature who lived in a house that did not want him, performing his small invisible labours for people who would rather he did not exist, holding to the memory of the one person who had ever, even cruelly, made him feel he had a place. Harry knew that creature. Harry had been that creature, in a cupboard, for thirteen years.

So, he did the things he did without quite deciding to. He said good morning to Kreacher, who stared at him with bulging disbelieving eyes and did not answer. He did not flinch from the muttering, the way Sirius flinched, because the muttering did not frighten him; he had grown up fluent in being resented, and he could hear, under the venom, how much of it was simply grief.

Once, finding Kreacher struggling to drag a too-heavy pail of water up from the cellar, even his elven magic not enough to carry it. Harry had taken the other handle without a word and carried it up with him, and Kreacher had been so utterly thrown by this that he had stopped muttering for a full minute, staring at Harry as though he had grown a second head.

And once, late, Harry had come down for water and found the elf in the dark of the drawing room, doing nothing, simply sitting on the hearthstone with something clutched in his small, gnarled hands, rocking very slightly, lost somewhere far away and long ago. Harry had not been able to see what he held.

Something on a chain; something that caught no light. Fetched his water quietly, and on the way back he had said, into the dark, not knowing why, "Goodnight, Kreacher."

The elf had gone very still. And then, in a cracked whisper, so low Harry half-thought he had imagined it, the thing clutched and hidden in its hands: "...The young master is up late. Master should not let the house tire him."

It was not kindness. It was barely civility. But it was the first thing Kreacher had ever said to him that was not a curse, and Harry had stood in the dark stairwell with his glass of water and understood that something, somewhere in the bent old creature, had turned a single degree toward him.

He did not tell Sirius. Sirius would not have understood it, would have been hurt by it, perhaps, that the elf who called him filth had unbent for Harry; and besides, it was a small private thing, and Harry was not certain it would hold. But he noticed, in the days after, that his bed was made with a particular care it had not been before; that the food he liked appeared more often; that the muttering, when he passed, dropped to nothing, as though the old elf did not quite want him to hear it. Kreacher watched him now, with his great pale eyes, and the watching was not friendly, exactly, but it was no longer hateful. It was something more like appraisal. As though the elf had caught the scent of something in Harry, something old, something that mattered to the deep blood-loyal part of him that lived beneath the grievance, and was slowly, suspiciously, deciding that the young master might be worth the serving after all.

"He likes you," Remus observed, one evening, mildly, having watched Kreacher set a cushion at Harry's back with something approaching attentiveness before shuffling out muttering. "Which is remarkable. I didn't think the creature was structurally capable of it."

"He doesn't like me," Harry said. "He just hasn't decided I'm the enemy yet."

"With Kreacher," said Remus, "I suspect that is the same thing." He turned a page. "Be kind to him, Harry. Whatever he is now, somebody made him this way, a long time ago, by deciding he didn't matter. You of all people know how that's done." He said it without weight, without looking up, and went back to his paper; and Harry sat with it, the small true thing of it, and added Remus to the long list of people who saw him more clearly than he expected to be seen.

♦

The letter, the strange one, the one signed only L, sat in the top drawer of the desk in Harry's room, where he had put it the night it came and where it had stayed.

He took it out, sometimes, in the quiet of the evening, and read it again, though he knew it by heart.

 The words had not changed. The strangeness of them had not faded with rereading; if anything, it had deepened, the way a deep pool looks deeper the longer you investigate it.

Sirius and Remus had pored over it with Harry, and turned it every way and arrived, between the three of them, at precisely nothing. No surname. No return address. A bird that Remus, who knew his magical creatures, could not name. An old, fine, luminous parchment that reminded Harry of exactly one thing in the world, the blood-inheritance sheet in Gornuk's office a year ago, though he could not have said why the two should be kin. And then, since there was nothing to be done with it and no sign of the sender, the matter had gone quiet, the way the most important things sometimes did, settling under the surface of the warm ordinary summer to wait.

Until the autumn, the letter had said. The autumn was a long way off, from the green height of July. Whatever was coming when the term began, whoever, it was not here yet, and Harry had discovered in himself a new capacity, hard-won across the strangest year of his life: the ability to let a waiting thing wait. The Peverell ring on his hand was quiet but still oddly cold, whilst the others now felt like part of his skin. The pull he had felt that night in the garden, the vast click of something seating itself, had not come again. There was only the summer, and the green garden, and the friendly noise of the house, and a godfather who measured him against door frames and was glad.

He put the letter back in the drawer. Outside the window the long light was going gold over the London rooftops, and from below came the sound of Sirius calling up the stairs that supper was nearly ready and that if Harry wanted any he had better come down before Remus ate the lot, and the smell of something only mildly burned was climbing the house.

Harry went down. He was good at this now or getting good at it: walking toward the warm noise instead of away from it, taking the loan and not flinching, collecting the day. Behind him, in the dark of the drawing room, the old elf watched him pass with pale considering eyes.

 He went down to supper, into the light, where the people who loved him were waiting; and for that evening, at least, the house of Black was only a home, and the boy coming down its stairs was only a boy, growing, at last, into the whole of himself.