Chapter Text
“Your name isn’t really Harry Potter.”
Harry blinked at the tall man in black clothes in front of him. “It’s not?”
“No.” The man sipped the cup of tea that for some reason a glassy-eyed Aunt Petunia had prepared and grimaced. Then he put the cup down and leaned forwards to look at Harry, who was sitting on the opposite couch in the Dursleys’ parlor—the first time he’d ever got to sit there. “But we’ll call you that for the moment, until I can explain. First, Mr. Potter, what do you know of magic?”
“It doesn’t exist, of course.”
“Then how would you explain this?” The black-clad man waved a long wooden rod that had somehow appeared in his hand, and a vase sitting on the table near his teacup rose into the air and spun around. Harry gasped as blue-white light appeared around it and glittered in shards that seemed to fly into the walls.
“Don’t hurt the walls, please!” Harry yelped. “I’ll get in trouble!”
The man snorted and lowered his—wand? The vase was immediately on the table again, and the light was gone with no sign that it had existed. “You’re a wizard, Mr.—Potter. Surely things must have happened around you that you can’t explain?”
Harry nodded hesitantly, thinking of the time that he’d grown all his hair back after Aunt Petunia cut it, and the time he’d shrunk that stupid jumper until he couldn’t possibly wear it.
“Then you will understand that there are other wizards and witches, and next year, you will be invited to join a school full of them, called Hogwarts.” The man leaned forwards. “My name is Severus Snape. I’m your mother’s husband.”
The light sneer on his face deepened as Harry gasped, “You’re my dad?”
“No, of course not,” Mr. Snape said, so quickly and violently that Harry flinched back into the couch. “I’m married to your mother. Your father is married to someone else. They used to be married. They quickly realized that it didn’t work and divorced so that they could marry other people. Ones infinitely better-suited to them.”
“So I was born during their marriage,” Harry whispered. “Why aren’t I living with them?”
“You were not exactly born.”
“What?”
And Mr. Snape launched into a huge technical explanation that made Harry’s head spin. He re-explained it in smaller words when Harry just stared at him, but Harry still had to struggle to make sense of it.
Essentially, though, he understood that James and Lily Potter had been married for too short a time to have a child, divorced, and married other people. But something about the magic James and Lily had used to marry each other in the first place had created a child. Him.
Except not really a child. Not born in the way that Dudley had been born, and which Harry saw in the evidence of his baby pictures in Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon’s bedroom. Just a combination of what Lily Snape and James Potter could have produced, if they’d had a son.
“You are made of magic,” Mr. Snape said flatly. “Pure magic, with little to hold you to a human form except the lingering arcane force of a marriage that ended ten years ago. You could disappear any day.”
“I could die?”
“You are not properly alive. It would be disappearing.”
Harry closed his eyes, shivering. “So that’s why they dumped me here,” he whispered. “So that they wouldn’t have to see me and be reminded of it. Or because I was embarrassing.”
“Yes.”
There was a long pause, and Harry almost wondered if Mr. Snape had gone away. But he’d had to have some reason for coming here, right? He probably wasn’t very happy about the fact that his wife had had a kid, or a sort of kid, with another bloke, so he wouldn’t have just come to tell Harry the truth.
Harry took a deep breath and opened his eyes. “What do you want?”
Mr. Snape stared at him intently for a second. Then he said, “It’s in everyone’s best interests that you don’t attend Hogwarts as Harry Potter.”
“Because it would make people think that your wife and James cheated with each other,” Harry said dully. He was familiar enough with cheating, given that it was a constant source of Aunt Petunia’s gossip.
“Yes. And they would probably encourage you to make contact with James’s children, or with mine and Lily’s.”
I have siblings? Harry wanted to say. But he knew they weren’t really siblings, or even his half-siblings. He nodded.
“So I have a deal to propose to you.” Mr. Snape took a glass bottle with something thick and brown in it out of his pocket and set it down in the middle of the table. A small crystal bottle with something thin and green in it followed. “I am a Potions brewer. If you take these potions, then they will strengthen your magic and change your looks. You should last longer, and everyone will see that you have dull brown hair and a face that doesn’t look anything like your supposed parents’.”
“Okay,” Harry whispered.
“And you must attend the school under a different name. Not Harry Evans,” Mr. Snape added quickly, as if Harry had been about to suggest that. “That was Lily’s maiden name and would still point towards a connection with her. You will have to come up with a different one.”
“Harry Dursley, then,” Harry said.
Mr. Snape paused for a long moment, then nodded. “That will do nicely. Few wizards or witches venture into the Muggle world. The world of non-magical people like your aunt and uncle,” he added, before Harry could ask. “I still have enough contacts to ensure that the letter gets sent to the right name, and that you will be identified as Harry Dursley when you attend.”
Harry thought of another problem then. “How am I going to do that? The Dursleys aren’t going to let me go.”
“Let me arrange things,” Mr. Snape said, with a weird, vicious glance into the kitchen where Aunt Petunia was humming and making tea.
“Umm. Okay.”
“Likewise, you will have access to a small pool of funds set aside for Muggleborns—those magical folk born of Muggles, which everyone must think you are—that you can use to purchase books and a wand and the like.”
“Okay.”
“I will send your potions every week. Take them without fail,” Mr. Snape said, with an odd emphasis in the words. “Otherwise, I can’t guarantee that you won’t simply disappear or revert to looking like a boy that doesn’t exist and whom no one should think you look like.”
Harry flinched from Mr. Snape’s words, but nodded. He hadn’t chosen to have it look like his wife had cheated on him, after all. Harry could do this. He glanced at the potions sitting in bottles on the table. “Can you do one favor for me, Mr. Snape?”
“What I have done is not enough?”
Harry bore up under the cold words. He’d had lots of practice with Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia. “Can you send me some books or bring me some books on the magical world? I want to know what to tell everyone if I do start getting sick or something. I could pretend to have a magical disease, and that would probably be enough to stop most questions.”
Mr. Snape tilted his head. “Why do you think so?”
“Because most people are more interested in themselves than in me. I can deflect and give them a chance to talk about their own sicknesses or sick people that they know, and they’d be happier to do that, instead.”
Mr. Snape’s eyebrows slowly crawled up his face. “Perhaps you aren’t a lost cause, after all,” he murmured. “Yes, I will send you the books. Look for my owl.”
He rose and stood looking down at Harry with a judgmental expression that made Harry keep sitting. “For Merlin’s sake, keep your real features concealed. Potter and Lily’s divorce was enough of a scandal at the time. No one needs a walking reminder of it staring them in the face every day.”
“Yes, sir,” Harry whispered.
He waited while Mr. Snape walked to the door and Aunt Petunia snapped out of whatever strange trance he’d put her in. Then he went to do the chores that she demanded he do, feeling he was moving in a bright, numb dream.
He waited until he was back in his cupboard for the evening to cry.
*
“And what do you value most, young Harry?”
Harry took a deep breath and swallowed. Then he said, “Friends. I want friends. But I don’t want to hurt people if I die of my sickness.”
He could feel the Sorting Hat spreading little tendrils through his brain. Harry hunched. He didn’t like the feeling, but he knew that he couldn’t prevent it. His magic was pretty average for his age, from what Mr. Snape’s books had said. It couldn’t block someone from attacking his mind.
Even though Harry wanted to learn.
“I see.”
The Sorting Hat’s tone was low and somber. Harry swallowed again. This was one reason that he really didn’t want to talk to anyone about his sickness, or condition, or whatever someone could call being made of pure magic, and he’d had to come up with a different story.
“I just want a normal life,” he whispered. “For a wizard. For as long as I can have one.”
“Very well, Harry Dursley,” the Hat said, with a long pause on his last name that made Harry uncomfortable. “If you insist…better be HUFFLEPUFF!”
There were loud cheers and claps, and Harry took the Hat off with a feeling of relief and walked over to the table of the badgers. People immediately started greeting him and telling him their names, and Harry laughed and shook their hands and made jokes with a few other Muggleborns who were older than he was. Justin Finch-Fletchley, when he Sorted there, turned out to also be Muggleborn.
At least Harry would have friends in his year and classes who had no reason to dislike him. For as long as he lasted.
*
“Amazing that we have NEWTS in just a few months, isn’t it?”
Harry smiled, leaning back against the chair behind him. Just as always happened at a Hogwarts Sorting Feast, he was pleasantly full. Pity this was the last time he would get to experience it. “Only you would call ten months ‘a few,’ Ernie.”
“It really is only a few months!” Ernie Macmillan’s blue eyes were wide and bright. “We have to study and be prepared!”
“We will,” Susan Bones said, leaning over from her seat next to Harry. “We’re badgers. We know what hard work looks like.”
“I hope that for once, the people with the most NEWTS in the school will be Hufflepuffs instead of Ravenclaws,” Ernie mused. “We work as hard as any of them, harder, and we get called a lot of duffers.” He shook his head in disgust. “Which won’t prevent some people from thinking it a twist of fortune if we do earn the marks. Or that we must have ingratiated ourselves with the Ravenclaws for them.”
Harry hid a smile behind his cup of pumpkin juice. Ernie was sturdily proud of Hufflepuff, and he practically embodied its traits. But he was also smart enough that Harry was sure he could have been an eagle if he’d wanted to. The Head Boy pin flashing on his chest this year was proof of that.
“What plans do you have for after school, Harry?”
Harry started a little. Ernie was leaning towards him and studying him in that intense way he had, as if Harry were the only person in the whole Great Hall.
Susan, for some reason, rolled her eyes and leaned back, turning to talk to Hannah.
“Ah…I’m not sure, actually.”
Ernie looked horrified. “Harry! Good Merlin! You need to start making moves now to secure yourself a Ministry post or an apprenticeship. Or a career playing Quidditch, if you wanted,” he added, with the dubiousness that he always showed anyone who wanted to get on a broom and dodge flying balls for a living. “I know that you’ll excel at whatever you do.”
Harry felt his mouth fall open. Then he cleared his throat. His face was warmer than usual. “Ah—thanks, Ernie. That’s high praise.”
“It’s only truth. So what do you want to do?”
Live.
But Harry knew that Ernie and everyone else around him wouldn’t understand that answer. He breathed out softly. “Well, I think my curse might limit my options.” It had been impossible to hide that he received specialty potions by owl every week, and he hadn’t been able to find a magical disease that fit his circumstances, so he’d gone with the tale of a curse that some Dark wizard who hated Muggleborns had cast on him in Diagon Alley when he visited.
“The Healers couldn’t take care of that for you?”
Harry shook his head. In truth, he’d never gone to a Healer other than Madam Pomfrey, who had only treated him for minor colds and Quidditch injuries. He was worried about what a deeper Healing scan might reveal about what he really was.
“It’s not right.” The frown was carving deep lines in Ernie’s face. “We’re all proud of our magical heritage, but it’s not right to be cursing Muggleborns with incurable diseases.”
“So you’ve said before, Ernie,” Zacharias Smith drawled. He draped a hand beneath his cheek and mimed snoring.
“That doesn’t make it just, Zacharias.”
“How many times have I told you to call me Zach?”
“How many times have you been disrespectful to Harry’s plight?”
Harry shook his head and pushed his chair back from the table. Ernie and Zacharias would have an argument that was only about him in the sense that Harry would serve as a catalyst. He didn’t technically need to be there.
“You’re going to the common room already?” Susan asked.
“Yeah, I’m tired, and you know that I have sensitive ears. I try not to be here when they sing the school song.”
Ernie stood up hastily. “I’ll walk with you.”
Harry blinked at him. It wasn’t like Ernie to miss a chance to talk with the first-year Hufflepuffs and encourage them to be proud of their House, or argue Zacharias down to a more “reasonable” stance about purity of blood. But he didn’t control what his friend did, either. “Sure, if you want.”
Ernie strutted along at his side as they made their way behind the Gryffindor table and out of the Great Hall. Harry kept his eyes focused on his friend, smiling fondly. Ernie’s mannerisms could be irritating, but underneath them lay a soul of steel and a total lack of the prejudice that some purebloods were prone to.
Harry liked looking at him. Liked the curves to Ernie’s cheeks and the way his blond hair hung over his forehead and how his hands gestured as he talked about ways to make their world more just.
Besides, if Harry was looking at him, he wasn’t looking at Matthias and Arielle Potter at the Gryffindor table, or the twins Vespasian and Valyssa Snape at the Slytherin table.
He would have liked to know them. But aside from the awkwardness it would create for everybody, what would happen to his sort-of siblings when Harry disappeared one day because the magic holding him together simply dissolved?
Which was looking more and more likely.
*
“So you must have wondered why I wanted to accompany you to the common room early.”
Harry turned away from the fire to face Ernie. They were the only ones in the common room right now, since Hufflepuffs tended to linger over the evening meal and rarely rushed away. “Well, I assumed you had something to talk to me about, but maybe you just wanted me to rescue you from Zach’s endless diatribes.”
Ernie’s face lit with a true smile that always made Harry catch his breath. “They are endless, aren’t they? Where he gets the breath, I’ll never know.”
“So if it wasn’t that, what was it?”
Ernie took a deep breath and looked at Harry with wide eyes. “I promised myself that this would be graceful, since I know you so well. But it’s not.”
Harry leaned forwards a little, concerned. Ernie sometimes asked him things about the Muggle world or his own background or “curse,” which of course Harry always played off. But this sounded more serious. “Ernie?”
“Yes, I can do this,” Ernie said, as if talking to himself. He nodded determinedly and reached into his pocket.
Of all the things that Harry expected him to pull out, the last was a small, elaborately-carved wooden box with emerald vines sparkling on the surface. As a gift, it was too extravagant, and what in the world could be inside it?
“Ernie?”
Harry thought he probably sounded like a parrot, just repeating the name, but Ernie didn’t seem to notice. He leaned forwards with his hands steady now and a faint half-smile lifting the corner of his mouth that Harry had never seen before. His eyes were bright and as earnest as his name.
“Harry Dursley, it would give me the greatest honor in the world if you would allow me to court you.”
“What?”
Ernie didn’t flinch at the reaction, and he didn’t draw back and pretend it was a joke. Of course he didn’t. He was Ernie, who never flinched at anything. “You heard what I said,” he murmured softly. “I admire you so much, Harry. You’ve plunged into the challenges of living in a world where people hate you and you’ve just—you’ve borne it and borne it, and you’ve thrived. You’re so good at magic even if you aren’t always the top of our classes. You’re honest and strong and patient and such a good teacher.”
Harry swallowed. Their Defense professor, Galatea Merrythought, had apparently been a wonderful duelist once, but she was getting on in years and didn’t teach them effectively anymore. Harry had taken over education for the first- and second-years since he was in his fourth, when the Tri-Wizard Tournament had disrupted the Quidditch practices that had always taken so much of his time. And he’d even taught some of the older students some of the more complicated spells. He was just—good at it.
He hadn’t realized that Ernie had been, what, watching and evaluating him? Part of Harry wanted to be upset at that and accuse Ernie of planning out his whole life for him.
But looking into Ernie’s shining eyes, he couldn’t do it.
“I admire all of that,” Ernie was continuing in a simple tone. “We’ll take it slowly, of course. Courtships can span years. But I’d be deeply honored if you even considered becoming my husband.”
“I—Ernie,” Harry said, and reached out a trembling hand to the box. He honestly didn’t know if he would clutch it closer or push it away. He ended up just holding it. “My curse—even if I agreed, I don’t know how many years I could give you—”
“I would take a day.”
Harry closed his eyes. Then he let out a long breath and said, “Let me think about it for tonight?”
“Of course,” Ernie said, and his voice was so gentle that he sounded like he was trying not to frighten Harry. “I never intended to rush you into a decision. But this gift is yours to keep or wear or sell, no matter what you decide.”
He bowed to Harry and left the box in his hands as he stood up. Harry slowly rose to his feet, staring at Ernie, feeling that he’d never seen him before.
Well, no, of course he’d seen Ernie look like this. But maybe Ernie had never worn his soul so openly on his face before.
“I could love you,” Ernie said softly. “I hope you could do the same thing for me. Good night, Harry. I await your decision.” He gave Harry a lingering look, and then turned and walked through the door in the far wall that would transport him to his separate Head Boy quarters.
Harry turned and stumbled up the stairs to the seventh-year boys’ bedroom, feeling like he was in a dream. When he got into his bed and drew the curtains, so that he was huddled in his own private little world of velvet, he flipped open the lid of the box.
Inside lay a small, simple chain of gold with onyxes attached to it.
Harry smiled. Their House colors. Of course.
He lifted the chain out with hands that he managed to keep steady, looking it over. At first he’d thought it was a necklace, but he quickly realized that it would resize itself to whatever he wanted; he could drape it around his wrist, or over his head. He could also wrap it around his wand. He could feel the holly wand in his holster tugging a little towards the chain.
Then he knew for certain what it was, and his breath caught in his throat.
Certain protective charms could only be braided into an amulet, or a ring, or a necklace, or a cloak, or another kind or piece of clothing or jewelry, depending on the spell. Ernie had created a Versatile Chain, which, precisely because it could be worn so many places, could have many different kinds of charms on it.
And these were the protective kind, Harry saw when he cast a diagnostic, but not against ordinary hexes. Charms for luck, for happiness, for reassurance, to keep him from tripping or spilling things on himself, to bring whatever he was searching for more quickly to his hand.
When Harry wrapped it around his wand, he discovered something else. A steady, flame-like warmth rose from it. Harry touched the links in wonder, and was immediately surrounded in what seemed to be a cloak of Ernie’s magic. It was like having his friend hug him and hold onto him, so strong that Harry looked around wildly.
But no, Ernie wasn’t in the room with him. Only his gift was.
Harry closed his eyes. His breathing was fast and shallow, and he didn’t know what to say.
On the one hand, it felt monstrously unfair to Ernie to accept this. How many years could Harry give him? Ernie might say he’d be content with a day, but that was romantic nonsense.
On the other hand, it hadn’t felt like nonsense. Ernie was so practical and down-to-earth that his Patronus, which Harry had managed to teach him to cast, actually was a badger. He wouldn’t say it if he didn’t mean it.
And he might not know that Harry really wasn’t human, but he knew about Harry’s “curse.” He’d seen the effects when Harry had forgotten to take the potions Snape had sent due to being in the hospital wing. Thrashing seizures and three days of unconsciousness were what Ernie had to look forward to.
If Harry didn’t just vanish one day.
Harry swallowed. And then he clenched his hand around the chain.
He’d spent the last seven years making friends but also trying to tread as lightly as possible with them, to make sure they wouldn’t miss him too much when he’d vanished. He’d spent the last seven years staring enviously at people who went on dates or even just had really close friends, because they had what he never would.
And he’d avoided the only people who could ever possibly be his family members, because he didn’t want to hurt them, either. He might have done that even if it hadn’t been part of his deal with Snape.
He might die of the forces that made up his existence ripping it apart any day. But he might also die from a stray hex in Defense or in a broom accident or from taking the fucking Floo that he hated so much.
He wanted this.
Ernie had made the first move, but Harry knew which one he would make in return.
*
When Ernie appeared to lead the first-years to breakfast the next morning, Harry was waiting for him, too. Ernie turned his face towards him and waited for the answer, patient and steadfast as a mountain.
“It’s yes,” Harry said quietly, and lifted the chain that lay around his neck so that Ernie could see he’d added his own pendant to it, a charmed Galleon that Harry had worked Transfigured onyxes into.
The first-years gaped in confusion when Ernie crossed the room to Harry and bent over to kiss his knuckles, and Harry flushed. But the joy in Ernie’s eyes when he looked up made up for any bad reactions or just confusion people might have.
“Thank you,” Ernie whispered. “I promise, I’ll give you all of myself.”
Harry’s smile in return was shaky, he knew. There were secrets he just couldn’t share with Ernie, no matter how much he might want to.
But he reached out and laid his hand against Ernie’s cheek, whispering, “Thanks. I’ll do—the best I can.”
“That’s all I ask, Harry,” Ernie said, and twined their fingers together as he went to the front of the common room to give a cheerful talk to the first-years.
Harry felt the warmth around his neck and from Ernie’s magic beating against his skin, and, somewhat surprisingly, from his own heart, and smiled.