Dumbledore comes back, careful, apologetic, but persistent. Harry agrees to see him because he knows the man will never give up until someone sees him, but he insists that Hermione and Erasmus stay away. Erasmus is the one Dumbledore most wants to see, Harry thinks, but Harry is better placed to deal with him. Erasmus hasn’t learnt not to care what Dumbledore thinks.

So Harry sits there in silence with his knees pulled up to his chest, hugging them, while Dumbledore watches him with aching eyes and sits very still and unmoving, as if he fears that the faintest movement on his part will shatter Harry.

They sit there and the silence goes on and on until even Dumbledore’s patience wears thin and he speaks first. “The winter term is now under way, Harry. Will you not consider returning to Hogwarts?”

Go back to the castle, to the people who laughed at him and didn’t believe him and called him a coward when he didn’t turn up for the first task because he was fighting for his life. To the people who thought Mr and Mrs Granger were of no importance because they were Muggles. To a place where he will be surrounded by magic.

“Please, Harry. It does you no good to hide here.”

His fingers curl into fists. Has Dumbledore thought about why he wants to hide? About the people he can’t trust, about the magic that promises so much pain? He’s not sure any of them will survive being surrounded by magic. Not after what magic did to them. And he doesn’t want to be surrounded by those people.

Dumbledore goes away, his usual quiet confidence shaken now by Harry’s continued obstinacy, by Hermione’s continued obstinacy, by Erasmus’s unrelenting anger. Mr Granger sees him out and then comes back to the living room and watches Harry silently. “I don’t want to go back,” Harry tells him, and he can’t sit still so he stalks around the room. “I hate the wizarding world. They love me and then they hate me and then they love me again, but they always expect me to save them. They tell lies about me all the time and they betray me. They all betrayed me. Even my friends, none of them believed me. And then Moody—”

“It wasn’t Moody,” Mr Granger says quietly.

“I know!” He stops pacing and sighs. “I know. But it looked like him. And even if it wasn’t him he was my teacher and he sent me to Voldemort. I don’t want to go back to Hogwarts. It’s not safe. I want to stay here.”

This is Harry’s home. His haven, his security, the place he’s made safe, the place that loves him, the place where he is loved. How can he give that up?

“You’re allowed to run away. In fact, I think you’re perfectly entitled to run away. But are you going to run forever?”

“What if I want to?” he asks sullenly.

Mr Granger watches him. “Do you want Hermione to run forever?”

-

“You can’t catch me!” Harry’s shout rings out across the playground, empty other than the three of them, and is followed by Hermione’s shriek as she slips while trying to climb up the slide and skids back down to the bottom. Harry, safely reaching the top, dances madly and thumbs his nose at her. “Told you!”

“I’ll get you, Harry, and your little owl too!” Hermione shouts back (they watched The Wizard of Oz last night and it’s had strange effects on Erasmus’s companions). Hermione races up the slide and makes it to the top this time – just as Harry races across the swing bridge to another part of the fort. Hermione laughs and lunges after him. Harry dodges out of the way, misjudges the distance to the wall, and bounces off it into Hermione’s waiting arms. She grabs the woolly hat off his head and darts away, scrambling up the ladder to the playfort’s tower and waving her trophy like a flag.

Erasmus, hands in his pockets, strolls over to look up at her, smiling, as Harry charges up the ladder after her. “Erasmus! Catch!”

Startled, he catches the hat as it drops towards him. “What?”

“Run, Erasmus!” Hermione shrieks, holding Harry back. But Harry breaks free and comes tearing down and Erasmus realises he’s the target now and he starts to run.

He runs. And he never knew before how much fun it is to run for his life without actually fearing for his life, and when Harry catches him and knocks him to the ground Erasmus laughs out loud as they wrestle for possession of the hat and is ludicrously proud of himself when he manages to wrench it free and throw it to Hermione.

For half an hour there is no fear, there is no hurt, there is only laughter and friendship and a strange bubbling feeling that Erasmus belatedly, wonderingly, identifies as joy.

-

Harry stands in a great crowd and they call his name and the roar is like breakers on a stony shore, crying, “Harry, Harry, Harry!”

They love him and he is lifted up on a wave of wonder at their love. He is laughing because his joy is too great for smiles, and they lift him onto their shoulders and parade him around under the sun. He is loved, he is happy, and that is amazing because he was never loved before. But then everything goes dark and they drop him onto the stones and they shout at him and shower him with rocks.

He runs blindly, stumbling through the darkness, feeling the sting of their anger more fiercely than the sting of the rocks as they strike him. He should have known, shouldn’t he have known? No one ever loves him, nothing ever goes right.

He crawls into his cupboard because he knows that’s where he belongs, that’s where he’s safe from the world. He should never have left. Never dreamed there could be more than this. It was stupid, unforgiveably stupid.

He wakes, sobbing softly.

There’s a hand on his shoulder. But it’s not Hermione’s. “Harry?” Erasmus asks. “Are you okay?”

Harry doesn’t meet his eyes. “Sometimes I don’t think I’ll ever be okay.”

Erasmus sits down on the bed beside him. “Yeah. Me too.”

They sit there in silence. Out in the street a car drives slowly past, its headlights sweeping across the darkened wall through a chink in the curtains. “Dumbledore wants us to go back to Hogwarts.”

“I don’t want to go,” Erasmus says swiftly.

“Me either,” Harry says. “But... Is it because it’s dangerous or because I’m scared?”

“Does it matter?”

Harry wraps his arms around himself and doesn’t answer. Because he has the sinking feeling that yes, it matters. It matters a lot.

-

Erasmus thinks it’s strange to have adults they can actually tell things to. It seems wrong, strange, unnatural. Adults are to be feared and avoided, not to entrust with truths about what Dumbledore wants with them and how they feel about it. Harry agrees, he knows, Harry isn’t used to having adults be responsible for him either. But Hermione doesn’t hesitate about talking with her parents.

It’s kind of... nice.

“We would rather you didn’t go back to that school,” Mrs Granger says frankly. “It’s too dangerous and I don’t trust them and I don’t trust magic. But if magic is a part of you then education is important, if only so you know how to never use it – or how to defend yourselves.”

“We’ll support you whatever decision you make,” Mr Granger tells them. “You’ll always have a place in our house, no matter what. If that means you hide out here for the next ten years then that’s fine with us. But before you make your choice I want you to think very carefully about what I’m about to say: Magic isn’t bad.”

Erasmus is definitely not the only one staring at him. Magic? Magic is horror and fear and pain, magic is to be put up with because it can’t be gotten rid of. Erasmus knows that, Harry knows that, Hermione knows that. How can Mr Granger not know that?

“Harry, even I can feel what you’ve done to this house, how it welcomes me home, how it wants to protect me. Magic isn’t just destruction, magic isn’t only pain. Magic is also life.”

He stares at them solemnly, each in turn, his eyes intent. “Magic is love.”

-

Harry likes Mrs Carter, he does. She’s sensible and down to earth, and he thinks that even if he told her the truth, told her all about magic, she’d just take it in her stride and move on. What he doesn’t like is that she’s persistent. Too persistent. And too perceptive.

“So, are you going to tell me what’s really bothering you?” she asks after he spends half an hour going in verbal circles over old ground.

He hunches his shoulders defensively. “Why should anything be bothering me?”

“You tell me,” she says. She looks at him.

Harry tries to hold out, then sighs heavily. “The Headmaster came again.”

“And?”

“He wants us to go back to school.”

“And you don’t want to go?”

“Why should we? Hermione’s keeping us up to date. More than up to date!”

Mrs Carter is silent.

“And they all hated me, they thought I was a liar.”

Mrs Carter is really good at being silent.

“We were kidnapped from school!” he bursts out angrily.

“All right,” she says. “But are you going to let that one event define the rest of your life?”

His shoulders sag. “No. But that’s not all of it. They – if I go back there they’ll expect things of me. They think I’m a hero, they want me to be, to be special for them.”

“So don’t.”

He stares at her. “What?”

“It doesn’t matter what they expect. That’s their problem. You don’t have to be what they want for them, you have to be what you want for you. Screw them!” He jumps at her vehemence and she smiles. “Not the advice you were expecting?”

“No. But I like it anyway.”

“I thought you might. Look, if you go back it’s not for them. It’s for you. To prove you can. Because you need to put this behind you. Whatever. But it’s all for you.”

-

Erasmus feels – besieged. Around him all the adults seem to want them to go back to Hogwarts. Go back to where all the bad things started (and he acknowledges that yes, okay, Hogwarts is no way the source of all evil but it’s where he remembers all the bad things starting). Even the adults he almost trusts think he should go back and Erasmus is – scared. Terrified. He doesn’t want to go back there, oh Merlin he doesn’t want to go back. Not to Hogwarts, not to Dumbledore. he doesn’t want to leave this house. Not the one safe place in all the world.

He struggles all the fiercer for the horrible certainty deep inside him that somehow the adults aren’t wrong. He hides in the train room and buries himself in paint and flock and precision, trying to pretend that nothing else matters but the tiny model taking shape under his hands but Harry and Hermione find him there. And though they are all of them silent as they spend an hour making up models, Erasmus can hear all the unsaid words pushing down on him with terrifying clarity.

“We should go back.” Hermione is the one to say it. Reluctantly, unwillingly, but firmly. “We need to know how to defend ourselves.”

bright curses, screams, pain

“You can teach us,” Erasmus says. He doesn’t want to go back there, no matter what anyone says. Not ever. Not ever.

He watches Harry’s fingers clench into fists around his scars and wonders why life has to be so hard. Why does everything have to hurt? He’s so tired of hurting.

Hermione says, “We’ll learn better there.”

“Why should we learn?” he demands. “I hate magic. I hate it.”

Harry shudders, a full body shudder of revulsion and despair and resignation. “If we learn enough,” he says, “we can stop what happened to us happening to anyone else.” He lifts his chin and for a moment he looks like Hermione. “I won’t be weak again.”

-

They send Hedwig with a letter and Dumbledore brings her back, hope and fear warring in his eyes; Harry wonders when Dumbledore stopped being the great and all-powerful defender of his childhood and became simply another man, as human and fallible and breakable as the rest.

Harry stands there, Hermione and Erasmus flanking him defensively, and he looks the man in the eye, chin high in defiance against his own weakness. “We’ll go back to school.” It’s not triumph in Dumbledore’s eyes, but relief. That makes Harry feel better about the decision. “But not for you. For us. Because we will not be afraid.”

He thinks (and was he always this cynical or is it Erasmus’s influence?) that Dumbledore is not so much relieved for their sake, for the fact that they are strong enough to do this now, but rather because he no longer needs to feel guilty that here are more lives he has ruined. Maybe he’s being too hard on the Headmaster, but Harry decides that it doesn’t really matter either way.

It doesn’t matter what Dumbledore thinks. It doesn’t matter at all.

-

Now that the decision is made there is no more hesitation: they pack reluctantly but determinedly and in a frighteningly short space of time their three trunks sit side by side in the hall, corded up and ready to go. Erasmus stares at them, at the proof that this is happening. “Can we do this?” he asks, and his voice is very small.

Harry’s eyes blaze with fear and determination. “We survived Voldemort,” he says. “We can survive school.” Erasmus doesn’t find it funny that none of them find anything strange in his comparison.

Hermione slips her hand into Harry’s, giving or receiving comfort. Maybe both. She stares at the trunks and then she stares at Erasmus. “He won’t put you in Slytherin,” she says. No one needs to specify who ‘he’ is. “Even if that’s where you belong. After Tom Riddle Slytherin scares him too much.”

“I should’ve been in Slytherin.” Harry nods. His eyes assess Erasmus. “He’ll probably put you in Gryffindor. So you’re ‘safe’. So you stay with me. Which you don’t have to if you don’t want to.”

Erasmus hesitates, looks at them, takes a leap. “What if I want to?”

They smile. They smile, at him, at the idea of being his friend. “We’d like that,” Harry says.

-

When the aurors finally found the missing students and the source of the phenomenal magical explosion, they found Harry Potter with Hermione Granger clutched awkwardly in his lap, sobbing into her hair, while one shaking hand clutched his most-hated teacher’s robes in a grip so strong they had to stun him to make him let go.

And in front of him, dead and desiccated but unmistakeable, lay He Who Must Not Be Named’s body.

-

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