"Just kill me, Dumbledore."

"You know I cannot do that, Severus."

Their breath hangs grey and wispy in the air of the prison cell. Neither of them notices: this is too big for concerns about something so insignificant as cold. They stand face to face with the bars between them like black-scored lines across reality.

"Better death than the Kiss." There is no bitterness in him, no drama. It is simply a fact, as obvious as the greyness of the stone surrounding them and as inevitable as the Wizengamot conviction that only Dumbledore's influence has warded off this long.

"It won't come to that. I promise you, Severus, I—"

"I don't want your promises! I don't want words, I don't want kind thoughts, I just want oblivion!" Anger wraps around him, adrenaline giving him the strength his body no longer has. Not after dementors and cold cells and prison diets. "Set me free, that's all you can do for me. Kill me."

"No. There is still—"

"I don't need saving, I don't need rescuing! I am what I am and they know it now." Severus thrusts forward the bare arm where the Dark Mark sits, black and ugly and leering. "Let go, Dumbledore. Let me go."

Dumbledore doesn't even look at the tattoo, his eyes determined and fierce. "No. I will not give up."

"Then you are a fool. A fool intent on letting me drag you down with me. Do you think they will let me go? I am what I am and not even you can change that. They will destroy me and if you demand it of them they will destroy you as well. Stop playing the Hufflepuff and face reality. I don't need you, Dumbledore, I don't need you to be my saviour. Go find somebody who actually wants rescuing, go save the boy. Leave me out of it. Let me die. If you won't kill me, let me be Kissed. I don't care anymore, I'm ready to leave this whole damn world behind me." He falters, his voice softens to unaccustomed gentleness. "Please, Albus, just let me go."

Dumbledore's voice softens too and guilt lights his eyes. "I have failed you too many times in the past, Severus. I will not fail you now."

"Dammit, Dumbledore!" He turns away, paces the short length of his cell like the caged animal he is. And turns again to glare at the man still steadily watching him with determined, sorrowed eyes. "Sometimes people don't want saving," he spits, "sometimes they just want to accept responsibility for all the wrongs they have done and they want to be done with it all! I'm begging you." He steps forward, pleading in every line of his body. "I'm begging you, please."

"I will keep you safe, I promise you that."

Severus lifts his head warily, nostrils flaring, scenting danger in the inflexibility of Dumbledore's stance, in the grim set of his lips. He takes a step back, suddenly afraid. "What are you planning?"

"You will see." Dumbledore pulls together all of his considerable skill and power, tightening his magic into a blade of finely-honed weaponry. "Or rather, you won't."

There is a reason he was the only one Voldemort feared. A blinding flash of magic fills the room so that Severus cannot breathe, so thick is the power in the air. He throws up his hands, covering his head, closing his eyes tightly against the light and the sting. The weight of power grows and grows, filling the cell, piling up on top of him so that his legs buckle under him and he collapses onto the floor, forced down onto the stones by the vast pressure of a magic too great for anyone to bear.

And in the midst of the swirling magic a firm voice orders: "Obliviate!"

- 

"No!"

Harry jolts up in bed, gasping into the shadows and trying to lift his hands to ward off the nightmares, to protect himself against Voldemort's red eyes and the flicker of deadly magics, but he's tangled up in the sheets and he can't fight his way free. The bleed-over terror from his dream turns into panic and he struggles wildly, desperately, tearing at the sheets to try free himself from their clutching tentacles as the panic digs deeper and blurs his vision and—

And then Hermione is there, unwrapping him from the blankets, pulling him into her arms, holding him as he sobs in helpless rage and sorrow and despair. Hermione is there and the nightmare is gone, and so he just lies limply in her arms and lets the tears flood out of him until sleep grips him with dark claws and drags him back down. Down to where, because Hermione is there, he can sleep without fear.

He wakes with Hermione curled up against his back and Mrs Granger sitting beside him on the bed, running her hand comfortingly through his hair. It's the only motherly affection he's ever known; no one ever comforted him like this before, no one ever took on the empty role of his mother, and the pain of gaining all he never knew he'd lost aches through him.

"Sorry," he whispers. "I'm so sorry."

She looks down at him through the shadows and shakes her head. "No, Harry."

"I shouldn't have brought this on you, shouldn't have dragged Hermione in, shouldn't have—"

"You brought Hermione back to us."

He shudders. "I'm the reason she was taken in the first place."

"None of it is your fault, Harry," she tells him, and her hand never stops that gentle movement through his hair. His heart aches, aches for all he's lost, for all he never had. For how close he came to ruining that for everyone he loves. "You didn't ask for any of it to happen. And it's over now. It's over."

It's over. He knows that.

He just doesn't believe it.

- 

In homes all across magical Britain the headline on the front page of the Daily Prophet screams: DEATH EATER ESCAPES AZKABAN!

The last known Death Eater, Severus Snape, has escaped from Azkaban. People are advised to remain calm and stay in populated areas. Anyone sighting Snape should leave the area immediately and notify the authorities. Under no circumstances is he to be approached.

Snape was in Azkaban awaiting sentencing for his Death Eater activities. He was certain to get the Dementor's Kiss, as did all other Death Eaters. The only reason sentencing has been delayed this long is because of the protests of Albus Dumbledore, Headmaster of Hogwarts, and Harry Potter, You Know Who's Bane, both of whom have tried to claim Snape was a spy in He Who Must Not Be Named's ranks. The Minister has said "The Death Eater probably used magic on them both. Compulsion charms or something. It's ridiculous to think anything else, he's obviously a Death Eater."

How Snape escaped is not yet known, but it is thought he took advantage of lowered security while visitors toured Azkaban. He escaped at the same time several Wizengamot members were visiting the prison and left Dumbledore, winner of the Order of Merlin, for dead. Dumbledore is currently recovering in St Mungo's.

There is no doubt Snape is a Death Eater as he clearly bears the Dark Mark on his left arm. The Dark Mark was the means by which You Know Who contacted his followers and, with his death, can no longer be hidden. While You Know Who was alive certain magics built into the Mark allowed it to be hidden from casual viewers.

There have been continued calls from within Britain and around the world to stop delays and finally rid the world of the last of the Death Eaters. Unfortunately, they were not heeded in time. We at the Daily Prophet trust the Death Eater will soon be caught and put to justice.

- 

Reluctantly Harry takes a seat on the Grangers' sofa and scowls at Dumbledore, standing on the opposite side of the coffee table and looking very wizardly and out of place in this Muggle house. "What do you want?" he demands.

Dumbledore sighs heavily, gustily. "I just wish to speak with you, Harry. Nothing more."

"No magic!" He grips the fabric of the cushion beneath him, trying to stop the power inside him from rising up and reacting to his fear.

Dumbledore looks old as he carefully and gingerly takes a seat. "At this moment, Harry, I could do no magic even should I wish to."

He grunts reluctant acceptance and they look at each other in silence. On back of the couch Hedwig preens and ruffles her feathers, keeping a watchful eye on Harry. Crookshanks leaps lightly onto the couch and curls up on Harry's knee. He listens to the cat purring, to the soft rustle of Hermione's clothes where she stands in the hall listening unseen.

"Harry..."

He scrunches down in his seat. He doesn't want to hear it, he knows he doesn't want to hear it. "Tell me he's safe."

"Harry—"

"Just tell me he's safe!" Harry screams. "I don't care what he did, I don't care what you did, just tell me he's safe!"

Dumbledore's eyes are opaque and there is no twinkle in them. "He is as safe as I can possibly make him."

Harry closes his eyes in wild relief, clutching Crookshanks to his chest as the cat purrs reassuringly. Hedwig nibbles comfortingly at his hair, and he knows that Hermione is holding herself back in the hall with difficulty. But whatever happened, the man is safe and that's what counts. He and Hermione are safe and that is all that matters to Harry in the whole world.

"Can you not tell me how you defeated Voldemort, Harry?" Dumbledore asks.

"No."

"You must tell someone, Harry."

"No. He's dead. That's all you need to know."

"But if there is even a chance he could return to—"

"No! He's not coming back." Never never never. Harry did that. Never coming back. "He's gone, okay! I did what you wanted and I got rid of him and he's never coming back! I took care of it. Just like you wanted. It's over. So just leave me alone. Leave me alone."

It's an old argument, running in familiar patterns, but no less painful and sincere for all that.

"You must return to Hogwarts at some point."

"I must do nothing. I killed your monster, I saved your world, you don't need anything from me anymore!"

"It is not what I need, Harry, but what you need."

"What I need? I need you even less than you need me!"

"You cannot run forever, my boy."

Harry looks at him. Just looks at him, for a long time. And then he says quietly, "I can if I want."

His name is Erasmus and he is fourteen years old. That is all he knows, and that only because the strict woman in the square-rimmed glasses told him, with an irritated huff directed at someone not him. Otherwise, he remembers nothing. Nothing beyond waking in this castle with the woman who watches over him and children shouting in the corridors who make him so scared he hides under his bed until they're past.

Strictly that's not true. He remembers pain and horror and a monster with red eyes. He remembers screaming. He remembers fear. But he tries not to. If those things are all he has to remember then he doesn't want to remember anything – except that he does want to remember, wants to so badly that sometimes the longing wrenches a sob from his chest. But he never does. Never remembers anything. Certainly not why Professor McGonagall should look at him with sharp, unspoken sympathy.

So while he waits he hides in this room and when the fears and nightmares get too much he hides under the bed because it's almost safe there. Almost. There's too much magic here in the castle, too many spells, too much that makes him flinch with half-remembered pain and horror, but at least under the bed it's dark and quiet and free of magic. He's hiding there when the white-bearded man first comes, hiding because hiding is easier than dealing with a lack of memories and the overriding fear that dogs him so blackly that sometimes in the middle of the night he genuinely can't breathe.

Professor McGonagall gives up on trying to reassure him and stands with a whisper of robes; Erasmus, eyes firmly closed, listens to her firm stride head toward the door and then falter. "Albus!" the sharp woman scolds. Erasmus half-accepts her because she is biting without malice, briskly kind without hiding behind honeyed words. He doesn't people who try to be nice, like that mediwitch who saw him when he first arrived, because he wonders what they're hiding. "You shouldn't be out of bed yet."

"I am merely magic-less, Minerva, not ill. How is Erasmus?"

She snorts inelegantly. "Do not be a fool, Albus."

"I assure you, Minerva—"

"You send me a boy and a note – and don't think I appreciated that little trick you played on me – telling me his name and that one of your contacts found him in a Death Eater home, tortured and in need of care."

"The truth, my dear."

"Do not take me for a fool, Albus. I taught the boy, I lived with him. Do you truly think I wouldn't know him here and now? The disappearance, the timing – and your magical exhaustion. Did you think I wouldn't realise the truth?"

"I hoped you wouldn't," the man admits. "Feared, however, that you would. But knew you would protect him nevertheless."

"I could do nothing less, not for him. And I will keep his secrets willingly, knowing what they will do if they find him. But this castle is no place for him, Albus. It only hurts him."

A sigh. Erasmus curls in on himself and tries not to listen, tries to pretend she hasn't cut to the core of him and seen who he is. "Then I must find another place for him."

- 

Upstairs Mrs Granger is vacuuming, the sound distant but reassuring in its domesticity, in its normality. Downstairs in the sitting room Hermione and Harry share the couch to read. Not that Harry's doing a lot of reading. He would enjoy the adventures of the characters more if he hadn't had so many adventures of his own and besides he's tired after too many nights of nightmare-broken sleep. The words wobble on the page and threaten to become Voldemort's thin, spidery hands. He jolts as Hermione shifts on the couch, moving closer, nestling in under his arm and resting her book on his knee. The reassurance of her presence banishes Voldemort and he picks up her book, smoothing down the page. Then he starts to read it aloud. Hermione relaxes, her ear against his chest listening to him speak, and her hair brushing his chin. Harry reads on, taking comfort in the words, in Hermione's nearness, in the fact that none of this has anything to do with Voldemort. His own voice lulls him into a drifting sleep-walking state, and the hum of the vacuum cleaner sings him a lullaby.

Harry sleeps. And dreams.

Voldemort's red eyes, Voldemort's long fingers pointing a wand at Hermione. Voldemort dying. Pain and horror – and fear of the magic, even his own familiar magic, that can do that.

"Dementor!" he gasps, dragging himself out of sleep and into Hermione's arms. "Evil, evil, evil." He shudders, remembering. "I didn't mean to."

Hermione's hands are fierce, gripping into his shirt. "You're not," she tells him. "It's okay. It's not your fault."

"I did it."

"It's not your fault. Harry, it's not your fault."

He grips onto her, onto the familiar scent and touch of Hermione, with the desperation of a boy waiting for the world to fall apart around him. "I should take Hedwig and leave," he says, curling his fingers into her sleeve. "I know I should. But I can't. I'm not that strong. I'm just not."

"It doesn't matter," she tells him, her tears damp against his shirt. "If you leave I'll follow you."

He should leave. Go where she can't find him. But he just isn't that strong. He needs her too much.

- 

Erasmus doesn't like Dumbledore. He doesn't like the warm, knowing twinkle in the man's eyes or the serene confidence in his stance. He doesn't like people who are kind without aggravation. He doesn't like people who lie.

So when Dumbledore comes to visit Erasmus pulls his feet up onto his chair and hugs his knees to his chest, staring at the toes of his shoes and ignoring the man even as he piles an assortment of sweets onto the small table where Erasmus eats his meals. "I thought you might enjoy a little treat," Dumbledore says with grandfatherly kindness. "Though I would ask you not tell Professor McGonagall, I fear she would not approve."

Erasmus knows she wouldn't and he agrees with her because it's just a bribe, something to make him feel better. So he doesn't look at the sweets, he doesn't look at Dumbledore, he just studies his shoes and tries to pretend he's alone in the room.

Dumbledore doesn't appear to notice. "And how are you today, Erasmus?"

Silence is Erasmus's only answer.

"I trust you are fully recovered now."

He hunches his shoulders closer, trying to fit himself into a smaller space.

"Professor McGonagall tells me—"

"Who am I?" he interrupts sharply.

"That is what we mean to determine. It was my thought to enrol you here in Hogwarts while we investigate."

"You know who I am!"

"I am sorry to say, Erasmus, that there is no mention of anyone matching your description in the Ministry records and so—"

It's just lies, all lies. Erasmus isn't stupid, no matter how much Dumbledore wants him to be. The man offers help, offers smooth words and facile promises, but there's nothing truthful in him. When Erasmus demands truths the man just slips away, hiding behind riddles and lies.

He wants to go home. He wants to know who he is. He just wants to go far away from this place with the hurting magic and lies. Anywhere would be better than this place.

- 

"Harry, you have a visitor." Mrs Granger stands in the doorway of his room, half pleased for him, half disapproving. He abandons the futile struggle for an afternoon nap and stands up, almost relieved but knowing that whatever is to come will be hard on him. Mrs Granger hugs him and he rests his head on her shoulder for a moment of surrender. Then he pulls away and looks up at her. "I know it's hard," she says softly. "But if it could help..."

He wants to point out that nothing can help but he knows that's not what she needs to hear from him. She hears it anyway, and he thinks his own mum would have looked like that, hurt and sorrowed and aching for him. "You don't have to, Harry. I can tell him to go away."

There are two things that make him not agree. One is that knowledge that she would do it, that she would act like she was his mum, that there is an adult willing to do that for him without having known his parents or his fame, just willing to do that for him. The other is habit. He has always been strong for the wizarding world and he doesn't know how to stop.

Sirius is pacing around the sitting room, lank hair swinging into his face with the force of his uneasy movements. He looks healthier than Harry remembers seeing him, but that's not saying much. Harry's soft-footed entrance goes unnoticed until he turns around, and then a bright smile of relief brightens his face and brings an almost manic look to his eyes. "Harry!" He comes leaping forward, but Harry flinches back from the nearness of his magic, from him. The light goes out of his face and he stops, bringing his arms close to his body, unthreatening, stiff. "How are you, Harry?"

"Fine."

They stare at each other, nothing to say. Harry remembers being so delighted to have a godfather, to have someone who belonged to him, but that was a long time ago, another lifetime. Sirius's shoulders sag and he sinks into the nearest chair. "I'm sorry, Harry. I just want to help." He looks up, gaunt face fringed by dark hair, with more resemblance to the walking dead than that laughing man Harry's seen in his parents' photos. "What can I do to make you trust me?"

Harry stands stiff and awkward, knowing Sirius has accurately put his finger on the problem, wanting to make it not true and make his godfather feel better but knowing that he can't. "You weren't there when I needed you—" not there when Pettigrew took my blood, not there when Voldemort returned to horror-movie life "—and I know it's not rational or reasonable, but I can't help how I feel. You weren't there."

A deep sigh gusts out of Sirius's down-turned mouth. "Do you trust anyone, Harry?" he asks hopelessly.

"I trust Hermione and I trust Snape." And he hopes Snape is okay, where ever he is.

He stands there in the doorway, feeling about a million years old and looking at his godfather who looks about sixteen and utterly bereft. "I'm sorry," he says, and feels the inadequacy of it rattle through his bones. "I'm sorry."

- 

Harry wishes they would just leave him alone. But he sits calmly opposite Dumbledore with Hermione sitting right next to him and he doesn't scream and he doesn't run away, he just sits there clutching Hermione's hand and lets the silence play itself out.

Dumbledore sighs. "What can I do to make you trust me, Harry?"

"Trust isn't made, it's earned." It's only a whisper, but they all hear it.

"Miss Granger is, as always, correct," Dumbledore admits.

"What have you ever done to deserve my trust?" Harry asks tiredly. He just wants it all to go away, he wants to leave behind the nightmares and the confusion and the memories. Hermione's hand is warm in his and that's all he needs, that warmth. The rest of the world can go away.

"What have I done to earn your distrust?"

The list is so long Harry doesn't even bother to say it. Leaving him at the Dursleys. Never telling him the truth about Voldemort. Never discovering fake-Moody or Quirrell. Not explaining what Sirius had to do with him. All the half truths and omissions and "you are too young"s. "You treated me as a child and expected me to act as an adult. You can't have it both ways."

Dumbledore looks at him. Just looks, no twinkle in his eyes, only quiet resignation and a humbled realisation. The silence stretches around them, almost tangible, waiting to snap. Then: "No," he says very softly. "I can't."

He stands and walks to the window, where he stares out at the grey winter garden. Harry leans into Hermione's side, and she rests her head against his. Silence stalks them all with sharp, angry claws; outside in the street a car door slams and somewhere in the neighbourhood a dog lifts its voice in angry barking, but in here is a bubble of bitter no-sound.

Then Dumbledore turns and Harry opens his eyes at the rustle of fabric to find the wizard staring at him. "I'm sorry, Harry," he says, and in a flicker of robes he is gone.

The door clicks behind him, and as if it is a signal, tears prick at Harry's eyes. Hermione tugs him into a hug and Harry lets the tears fall. He's always strong for the others, he has to be because he's the hero. But here with Hermione he is allowed to be weak.

It's not over, not really.

It'll never be over.

It never ends. Erasmus doesn't want to interact with the world, he doesn't want to join the other kids in their classes, he doesn't want to talk to the smiling, lying adults. He just wants to stay in this room and pretend that there's no world outside of its walls. If there's no world then there's no one left to hurt him.

But Dumbledore doesn't let him pretend, he visits and visits, weaving his genial, smiling lies and never faltering even when Erasmus yells at him. Even when Erasmus threw the bag of sweets back in his face and it broke, spewing sweets in their bright-coloured wrappers across the floor, all Dumbledore did was smile gently and draw his wand to tidy up the mess.

At which point Erasmus dived for the safety of under his bed, because a wand is a terrible thing. He doesn't remember much of anything, but he remembers a white hand and a dark-wooded wand and the bright, pretty, terrible magic that sprang from it. He remembers the sound of screaming. Some of it might not be his, but he's pretty sure a lot of it is. Dumbledore spent nearly half an hour trying to coax him out from under the bed but Erasmus just curled up tighter the more he talked and eventually the man must have got the message because Erasmus awoke in the dust, his cheek cold where it was pressed against the stone, and he was alone.

He just wants them to leave him alone, that's all.

Why can't they understand that?

"Misery wants company," Dumbledore quoted at him once, eyes actually twinkling. Twinkling! Erasmus's misery doesn't want company. Erasmus's misery wants to crawl into a dark corner and fade away into nothing. Nothing is a pleasing thought, he likes the idea of oblivion. Not this aching limbo of half memory and whole hurt.

Oblivion would be better than this place.

- 

Harry and Hermione try not to laugh as they sneak down the hall towards the hobby room. Mr Granger had a choice between an office and a hobby room and he took the latter. They creep along the carpet on tip-toe in mimicry of old adventures through school halls, sans invisibility cloak, and as long as Harry only remembers those happy adventures he can stay in this moment, in this tenuous happiness. If he thinks too hard he'll lose it, so he doesn't think, he just follows Hermione down the hall and fills his world with the smile on her face and pretends there are no shadows in her eyes. Hermione gently pushes the door open, with a faint whisper as the wood brushes over the carpet. They peer inside, Harry leaning on Hermione's shoulder – and Mr Granger looks up.

He smiles on seeing them and waves them in. Harry loves this room. It's filled with a miniature railway landscape that is forever growing and changing, like stepping into a new world where he's a giant and old familiar things are suddenly tiny and strange. Carefully the children tip-toe to the stools by the workbench, hardly daring to breathe as if they could make the tiny, perfect models vanish in a puff of air. Mr Granger smiles at them and bends his head over his work again, creating tiny trees two or three inches high.

There is more magic here than in all of Hogwarts, watching Mr Granger's steady, dentist-trained hands undertaking work of incredible detail, turning sticks and glue and flock into miniature realities. Hermione and Harry can spend hours sitting side by side, watching in breathless awe as Mr Granger cunningly puts together the intricate landscapes that his model trains run through. And they try their own hands at the magic, at the art of creation, and they laugh at their sticky attempts and feel proud when Mr Granger admires them. They help with small things, and even if they make mistakes it's okay because Mr Granger doesn't mind, he just laughs and does a little bit of his magic so that even a mistake looks perfect.

It's magic. Harry knows it's magic. When a new landscape is completed and the trains run through the new world for the first time, darting in and out of the tunnels and stations, snaking around hills and across bridges, there is no word for it but magic. Good, wonderful, awe-inspiring magic.

Harry doesn't know it, but there is healing here. In the small comforts of watching a man working his hobby, of being part of a family, of watching the magic of an artist at work. Little scabs heal over in the peace of the work, little wounds stop festering and start healing. Perhaps it is because there are no demands here but what he puts on himself. No one is urging him to get better or to tell them what happened to Voldemort, he is simply here, part of the companionship, belonging here. There is time and ease to play, no expectations. Perhaps it is because here, unlike in real life, he has control over the landscape.

Harry only knows he is having fun.

- 

Professor McGonagall visits Erasmus every day. And he is quick enough, observant enough, to know that it is nothing that Dumbledore has said but instead a decision she has made for herself. Angry, he wants to sneer and say it's because she pities him or because she wants to feel like a good Samaritan. But underneath his anger he is observant and he thinks that mostly it's because of a friendship for someone he doesn't remember. Whatever that may mean. He's seen the flash of dismay when she looks at him after a moment of absent-mindedness, as if whomever she thought she was with is not him. He's seen the tension in her when she visits, visibly reminding herself he is not someone else.

But he also knows the acerbic kindness of a woman who will not shield her tongue just because he is 'ill' but who will like him simply because he is himself. That is why he asks her what he would ask of no one else.

"You know who I am, don't you?"

The question hangs in the air between them. She hasn't moved, not to stiffen in shock nor steady herself for a lie, and that is why he asked her. Not Dumbledore, not Madam Pomfrey, not Flitwick (although to be fair he's not sure Flitwick has any clue who he really is). The question neither surprises her nor scares her. Her eyebrows pull together and her mouth thins into a straight line and Erasmus knows that whatever she tells him know will be the truth. Even if it's not a truth he wants to hear.

"I have guessed and I am certain I have guessed correctly."

"Then who?" The question bursts out of him with more force, more anguish, then he would like, but he can't take the words back now and they arouse no pity in her, only an anger directed at someone who is not him.

"I cannot tell you." She taps her wand to her lips, raising blue sparks, and Erasmus's angry protest is cut off before it begins, because even when he remembers little he knows what that means. Binding spell. She literally cannot speak of it. "The spell was on the note brought in with you, I was given no option in its application."

There are two strands to his anger then, one, the main one, the one he is used to, is anger that people are keeping information from him. The other, unaccustomed and strange, is anger that she should be forced into silence. "He should have asked." There is no question who 'he' is.

She doesn't protest his bitterness. "He should," she agrees. "He wished only to protect you – and I will admit it is understandable—"

—fear and horror and pain, magic and flashing lights that rip and tear, red eyes and harsh laughter, screaming, screaming, screaming—

"—but he had no right to go about it this way." Her eyes soften, ever so slightly. "I continue telling him you have a right to know, but I have little faith he will listen to me."

At least you tried. Isn't that what he's supposed to say? She tried and that makes everything better. But it doesn't. Because only trying doesn't get him the truth, only trying doesn't tell him who he is, only trying doesn't HELP!

She knows. Pressing her lips together she says nothing. And they say nothing for the rest of the visit. What is there to say?

- 

Harry prowls the house in the dark hours when he can't sleep, silent and watchful. Awareness sinks into him, knowledge of the house that is filling up with his love, with his need, with his trust. He knows where Hedwig has chosen to perch, wise-eyed and awake, in the sitting room, knows Crookshanks is sitting still and watchful in front of a likely mousehole in Hermione's room, knows that Hermione is curled up in bed between her parents, one last tear on her cheek. This is the one place he feels safe, the one place where he can be sure of who he is and who is around him. The one place he feels loved.

Padding silently through the halls, he sinks his awareness into the world around him, stretching magic out into the walls, the floors, the ceilings... Feeling the house smile back at him.

He likes staying with the Grangers. He cooks breakfast and dinner every day and after each meal he and Hermione do the dishes together. Mrs Granger lets him help her in the garden and hugs him as much as she does Hermione. Mr Granger is teaching him car maintenance and is explaining all the rules of rugby. It's like, for the first time, he's normal.

He can never repay Mr and Mrs Granger for all they've done. For how they've taken him in and given him family. Not because he is the Boy Who Lived, not because they pity him, not because they are obliged to, but just because he is Hermione's friend. They not only don't think of him as the Boy Who Lived, they don't even know what it means. Oh, they know he's famous and they know what he's done, but Voldemort is mostly an abstract quality to them, not the terror that the wizarding world still remembers, the terror that drove them to give all Death Eaters the Kiss with no hesitation, and they are in fact appalled at a world that hero-worships a boy.

Besides, Hermione loves them. That makes them okay. There aren't many people Harry trusts and Hermione is almost all of them.

Sometimes, though, he thinks that the best thing about the Grangers is that they never ask how he defeated Voldemort.

- 

Night wrapped its cold shadows around the walls of Hogwarts, stars glittering outside in the dark sky in competition with the glittering lit windows of the castle. This close to curfew the night before the first task of the TriwWizard Tournament, the corridors were almost empty. Everyone was in their commonrooms speculating excitedly on what the next day might bring, leaving the youngest champion and his best friend to walk unchallenged back from their training session, magically worn out and mentally exhausted but triumphantly certain of Harry's ability to use the Summoning Spell.

Almost unchallenged.

"Potter! A word!"

Moody's voice, but with a strange edge to it that paranoid, jumpy old Moody had never had before, almost excitement, not quite feverish. Harry and Hermione turned as the man clunked down the hall towards them.

"Hello, Professor Moody," Hermione said politely, but there was that hesitation in her voice that told Harry he wasn't alone in his sudden uneasy feeling.

Moody's artificial eye rolled back and forth between them. "Dammit, Potter," he growled, "don't you go anywhere alone?"

Two things Harry would always remember: The look of unleashed loathing and triumph on Moody's face as he threw the ball at Harry and Hermione's shriek as she tried to push him away. "Harr—"

And then the portkey took them.

It’s two o’clock, so Harry and Hermione go for their walk. “Don’t forget your raincoats,” Mrs Granger calls as they swap slippers for shoes by the front door. Harry snickers quietly – this is England in December, anyone going out without a raincoat is just asking to get wet – and Hermione elbows him in the side. Since he’s crouched over his shoe at the time, this sends him toppling onto Mrs Granger’s work shoes. Unapologetic but smiling, Hermione gives him a hand up and they pull on their raincoats before heading out into the grey London afternoon. Low cloud hangs heavy overhead, washing all the streets and buildings grey, and Harry digs his free hand deep into his pocket to keep it warm.

They walk every day because Mrs Granger has decreed it unhealthy for them to stay inside the whole time. Today is Monday, so they walk to the library just like they do every Monday so that Hermione can riffle through the shelves like a geologist and max out her library card at the desk. Harry isn’t a bibliophile like Hermione, but he can understand the appeal. He likes the feel of the library, the smell of paper and the warmth, the rumble of the building as the heating system works, the stacks of books. The knowledge. If he’d had enough knowledge could he have stopped it all from happening? If he’d known more, studied harder, maybe none of it would have happened. And maybe it would, but Harry understands now why Hermione is addicted to knowledge. Only by knowing everything can he make sure everyone around him is safe. He likes libraries.

When Hermione has finished her fossicking and collecting, Harry takes one pile of books and follows her up to the lending desk. The librarian smiles in a friendly fashion and prattles about the weather and comments on a familiar book: Hermione nods and smiles and says nothing while Harry lets the words wash over him. They don’t mean anything, not after... They don’t mean anything. As the librarian checks out each book, Harry takes the ones she’s finished with and shoves them one by one into his backpack, each with a little push of magic so that they all fit in.

“It’s bigger than it looks, isn’t it?” the librarian asks cheerfully, nodding to his bag as Hermione puts her card back into her wallet.

Harry shrugs. “Guess so,” he says, pushing in the last book. He swings the bag onto his shoulder and Hermione slips her fingers into his, squeezing his hand reassuringly. He smiles at her, then smiles at the librarian. “Yeah.”

-

Red light wraps around him and red eyes laugh. He screams and the eyes delight in his pain and fear. He fights and black-robed figures hold him down. He screams.

Erasmus wakes up. Not with a gasp, not with a shout, not with anything to admit to the world what he has just been through. But there is sweat pooling inside his bent knees, along with everywhere else skin touches skin, and he curls up tighter into a ball and tries not to shake. Why is it the only things he remembers from before are all about pain and fear? Why is there nothing nice in his past? Surely there were pleasant things, why is it like his past is only full of dementor-leavings?

He pulls the blankets over his head and shudders into the bed.

“Erasmus?”

He ignores Professor McGonagall’s quiet voice. He doesn’t want to know she’s there, doesn’t want anyone to know about this. That’s not his name anyway, so why should he answer to it? She’s as bad as Dumbledore, keeping everything from him. Surely she could find a way to tell him who he is. All he wants is the truth. Is that so hard to give him?

For a moment he feels the gentle pressure of a hand on his head, then it’s gone and he wonders if he only imagined it. He must have imagined it. In all the scraps of memory he has, there is no memory of anyone ever being kind to him. Never. So he buries himself deeper into the blankets and he tries so hard not to remember anything, not to think, not to feel. If he can escape all feeling then nothing will hurt him ever again.

-

Dumbledore comes back and Harry cringes. Doesn’t the man understand they want nothing to do with him? Doesn’t he realise that his presence hurts? But of course he doesn’t, none of them understand, and so Harry sighs and lifts his chin and clings to Hermione’s hand for a moment. She clings back for that moment, because she understands. And then their hands separate because they know better than to show weakness unless they have to, and they go to face Dumbledore.

Dumbledore, who watches them without a twinkle in his eyes and folds his hands in his lap as if to hide their tremble. “I would ask a favour of you, Harry.”

The flare of anger is brief but real. “Haven’t I done enough for you already?”

Before this last month Harry would never have believed that Albus Dumbledore is capable of looking so old and sad. “More than enough. But this is not for me. There is a boy, about your age – we rescued him from a Death Eater prison. You understand what that means for him.” Harry looks away. He knows. “He needs a place to stay, people who will make no demands on him. Someone to help him put himself back together.”

“I can’t even help myself.”

“But I believe you can help him. He is not reacting well to the magical world, for there is too much pain associated with it, as you will understand.” Harry stares down at the carpet. Red eyes and red lights. “Yet few Muggles can understand what it means to have been a Death Eater victim. Although he is a wizard he was raised in a Muggle environment and he will be comfortable here. Miss Granger’s parents have already agreed to take him in should you be amenable. But only, they stress, if you agree.”

He closes his eyes as Hermione slips her hand into his, grips onto her fingers. Then he lifts his heavy head and looks up at Dumbledore. “Does it ever stop?”

“What, Harry?” he asks with great gentleness.

“The need to save the world. Will I ever be able to just be me and say sod the rest of them? Tell them to fix their own problems because I have enough of my own.”

Dumbledore looks tired and Harry refuses to feel guilty that the man only ever looks tired around him these days. “If I ever find a cure I shall be sure to tell you. I am sorry, Harry. I would not ask this of you if I had any other option.”

“You would if you thought you knew what was best for me.”

“I would try not to, I promise. No longer. In this case I am only trying to do what is best for Erasmus. Had I another choice, I would take it. But—” He looks at Harry, really looks at him as if to an equal and not a little boy who needs to be cosseted and guided. “There is no one else I would trust with him.”

-

Professor McGonagall packs up his few things for him into a satchel while Erasmus sits on the end of his bed and watches her dully. This room is almost the only place he remembers and now he is leaving it. The emotion filling him, though, is not sorrow or regret. Just dull acceptance. The Professor closes the bag and glances around the room to make sure she’s left nothing. As if there was anything to leave. She pauses in handing the satchel to him, though, staring down at him as if trying to see past his eyes and into his thoughts. Erasmus glares back, unrepentant, unyielding. She nods and gives him the bag, ushering him to his feet and towards the door where Dumbledore waits.

“Come, Erasmus,” Dumbledore says, and behind his confidence lurks guilt. Whatever he thought he would get when he brought Erasmus to Hogwarts, he hasn’t got it. Erasmus scowls but nods, and the man walks toward the stairs. Erasmus follows. He doesn’t know where he’s going, but he’s not sure that he cares.

“Erasmus.”

He stops in the doorway to turn and look at Professor McGonagall, he stands in the doorway and looks back into the room that has been his sanctuary and his cell. There is concern in her face, not the guilt that lights Dumbledore’s eyes but just concern for him. “Try not to hate him too fiercely,” she says gently. “He means well.”

She turns away and adds, in a whisper he is not meant to hear: “Worse I could not say of him.”

-

Harry specified with icy precision: No magic in the house. No magic.

So he and Hermione watch from her bedroom window as Professor McGonagall levitates a bed up the path towards the front door, looking quietly irritated at being unable to use a simple shrinking spell. Dumbledore follows behind her, laden with bed linen and followed by a sulky-looking boy and two men Harry doesn’t know carrying a mattress.

Hermione tugs at his hand and Harry follows her to the door, gripping her fingers in his as he prepares to face them, sucking in a deep breath and holding it as if that will make everything well. Wary fear of the unknown future hovers over him, thick and grey, but Harry is used to fear. He ignores it.

Through the open front door down below comes a loud clanging and crashing as the bed drops unexpectedly onto the path. Maybe he should have specified just where ‘house’ begins. Dismayed voices rise up to meet them as they skip down the stairs. “No magic,” Harry mutters under his breath and Hermione giggles.

Everyone converges in the hall. Harry stands beside Mr Granger, Hermione close beside him, and stares at the intruders. “Erasmus,” Dumbledore says in his best warm, grandfatherly voice, “these are Harry, Hermione, and Mr and Mrs Granger.”

The boy is thin and pale and dressed in clothes – particularly the jumper – straight out of the seventies. Harry normally finds it quietly amusing that when wizards do manage to get Muggle clothing right they inevitably gravitate to the seventies but now he’s too busy studying this newcomer. Close up the look on his face is less sulky and more scared, though he scowls to try hide it. His dark hair is long enough to be pulled back into a ponytail and his hands are shoved deep into his pockets as if to hide their shakes.

“Hi,” Harry says quietly. Erasmus makes a small sound that could possibly be taken as a response. He’s shrunk into himself as if to keep from getting too close to the adults around him and Harry can understand that. Magical adults, more than one, are in his home. His fingers are laced through Hermione’s, her nails digging into the back of his hand just as his are digging into hers.

The boy stands silent as the adults talk, watching with dark distrust. And his eyes miss nothing, dark and soulless, watching, flickering backwards and forwards as they follow the conversation. And then they skip to Harry and Harry meets that gaze – and those eyes are not soulless. Those are the eyes of a soul that has too much pain and is trying to hide from it. The effect is too much like looking into a mirror and Harry looks away.

This is a really bad idea.

-

Whatever this new form of transport was, Harry didn’t approve. It was worse than the floo as he spun and swirled sickeningly through some unspace, spiralling across reality. He and Hermione fell over on landing in a heap of tangled limbs like frightened puppies, before scrambling to their feet. Desperately trying not to sick up his stomach, Harry grabbed his wand only to have it vanish from his hand. The shout of “Expelliarmus!” caught up Hermione’s wand too, so that it flew with Harry’s into the hand of a familiar man.

“Pettigrew!” Harry said, horrified but not yet scared. Pain flared in his scar and he slapped his hand to his forehead.

“Among others.”

That voice was too familiar. Harry froze, Hermione at his side equally frozen as she read the truth in his fear. “Voldemort,” he whispered.

“Oh no oh no oh no,” Hermione muttered almost under her breath, probably unaware she was saying it. She clutched at Harry’s sleeve, pulling him behind the nearest wall – which turned out to be not a wall but a gravestone. They were in a graveyard. With Voldemort and Pettigrew. “I don’t understand,” Hermione hissed. “Why would Moody send us here?”

“Does it matter?” Harry hissed back. No wands. No defence. They were dead, they were so very dead. Hermione’s face was chalk white and Harry was pretty sure he wasn’t looking any better.

“Split up?” Hermione offered.

He nodded. “Yeah. Make a run for it. One of us has to get to help.” Or at least survive. And since he was the one who’d done Voldemort in thirteen years ago, he was pretty sure he’d be the main target. That would let Hermione get free. It wouldn’t be so bad if she escaped.

“It’s rude to hide, children,” Voldemort said, darkly amused.

“Run!” Harry said.

The magical adults have gone, leaving the shell-shocked inhabitants of the Granger house to deal with the aftermath of their invasion. Mr Granger puts on a kettle for tea and Harry holds onto Hermione and whispers stupid reassurances with the desperation of someone who wants to believe them but doesn’t. This is their home, their place of safety, and now there’s an intruder in their midst. And it doesn’t matter if they took him in of their own free will, all that matters is that he’s here. That everything is different now.

As the kettle whistles Mrs Granger comes into the kitchen. “He’s settled in,” she says, but that’s all she says. And so they sit around the table, the four of them with their steaming cups of tea in their hands and the silence sitting heavy on their shoulders. From upstairs there comes no noise; there might as well be no one else in the house. But he’s there, that stranger boy with angry scowls and hurting eyes, and everything is different now. Suddenly home doesn’t quite feel like home any more. It feels dangerous, uncertain.

Harry holds onto Hermione’s hand and tells himself that it will be okay. Everything will be fine.

He wonders when he lost the ability to lie to himself.

-

Erasmus spends most of his first day in someone else’s house hiding in the bedroom he is to share with the other boy. He doesn’t want to have anything to do with those people. Probably they’re laughing to each other at how feeble he is, how pathetic he is. Or maybe they’re making up new lies to tell him; after all, no one ever tells him the truth so why should he expect these new people to do so? But he’s not scared of them. Not even the adults. In his memories are worse things than anything these people could do to him and he’s not scared at all.

He’s angry and lost and hurt and terrified of the blanks in his memories, but he’s not scared. It’s about the only thing he has going for him.

Mrs Granger checks in on him every couple of hours – pity, he snarls into his pillow, and ignores her – and brings him up some sandwiches and a glass of juice for lunch. Those he eats, but only because there’s no way he’s starving himself here. If he gets sick he’ll have to deal with them and he doesn’t want to deal with them. He just wants the whole world to go away and leave him alone.

When he refuses to go down to dinner Mrs Granger’s eyes narrow in a way that reminds him of Professor McGonagall, but she says nothing and goes away, only to bring up a plate of food for him. Erasmus eats alone in silence and pretends he doesn’t hear the distant sounds of muted conversation. Tells himself he doesn’t want anything to do with them and he’s glad they’re far away. Glad they’re ignoring him.

But when she comes to take the plate away she says, “Erasmus, we’re going to watch a movie if you want to join us. But you don’t have to.”

She doesn’t want him to. She’s hoping he’ll say no. That irks him. It’s one thing to want nothing to do with them but if they want nothing to do with him it’s something else entirely and so perversely he sits up. “Okay.”

She’s surprised, but takes it in her stride and leads him downstairs to where the rest of the family are gathered in the sitting room. Erasmus stops in the doorway as all eyes turn to him, three people, a cat, and an owl – and dear Merlin, this was a bad idea, he doesn’t want all these eyes watching him, he should have stayed where he was, stayed safe and out of the way—

Then Mrs Granger gently pushes him toward a seat and people and animals stop looking at him. There’s an argument over to what to watch, which Erasmus watches wide-eyed, but then Mrs Granger rules, “We’ll watch Stargate. Erasmus, you’re closest, you put it in.”

He stands, because he’s too proud to admit he doesn’t know what to do, and he stares at the blocky black videotape hoping the knowledge will magically appear in his brain. And knows his pale cheeks give away his blush when Mrs Granger gives him directions.

He takes the tape from the case, aware of the suspicious eyes on his back.

“I thought you were Muggleborn,” Mr Granger says.

“I don’t know,” he snarls, jamming the tape into the machine and hoping it breaks. “I have no idea.” He drops the case on the floor and stumps back to his seat, folding his arms and pushing himself down into the cushions.

He doesn’t know anything.

-

Erasmus is the angriest kid Harry’s ever met. He throws things on the floor at the least hint of frustration, he slams doors, and he scowls fiercely at anyone who dares to be in the same room as him, let alone say something to him. He radiates anger and his temper snaps at the slightest thing. And all the while his eyes scream pain-pain-pain.

And okay, Harry actually gets why, since the other boy has lost his memories and doesn’t even know who he is. That would be bad enough on its own without throwing in the whole Death Eater prisoner thing. So, really, he does understand. He just doesn’t see why Erasmus has to take it all out on them. It isn’t their fault, they haven’t done anything to him. Harry is tired of people hating him for things that aren’t his fault.

Dumbledore thinks Harry can help this kid? He really doesn’t think so. He wants to, honest he does, but... he doesn’t have the energy to deal with this. He doesn’t want to deal with this.

“We’ll just give him some space,” Mrs Granger said after the third time Erasmus slammed a door on them.

Harry’ll happily give him all the space in Siberia.

-

Erasmus hates it here. The Grangers don’t want him here and he doesn’t want to be here. Nobody wants him. There’s nowhere for him to be. They don’t like him and they don’t want him and that’s just fine with him because he doesn’t care, honestly he doesn’t, and he doesn’t like them either. He doesn’t. He wishes he was back at Hogwarts. At least at Hogwarts even if there was all the magic and the adults and the fear, he had a room to himself. Here he has to share with Harry and if Harry doesn’t like him, well, who cares. That’s Harry’s problem, not Erasmus’s. But it means there’s nowhere to hide.

He wrenches himself out of a nightmare in the middle of the night with a gasp, and looks worriedly over to the other bed hoping he hasn’t woken Harry because he doesn’t want Harry to know about his weaknesses, he doesn’t want anyone to know. No one would care, and even if they did they wouldn’t help him. Other people knowing about your weaknesses just gives them a weapon, Erasmus knows that. Doesn’t remember how he knows, but knows it anyway.

Harry’s gone, though, and it doesn’t even occur to him to wonder why the other boy is out of bed at two in the morning, he just heaves a sigh of relief and turns his back on the room, tugging the blankets over his head and burrowing down under the warmth of the bedclothes as if they can hide him from all the bad things in the world.

Maybe it works, because he sleeps again, without nightmares enough to wake him.

It’s fairly early when he wakes up, only seven, and dark outside, but he doesn’t sleep much these days (he doesn’t know if he ever did) because being awake is better than being asleep. Fewer night demons. Funny thing about this household, he’s noticed, is that the kids are way more likely to get up early than the adults. He’s sure that’s not normal. He’d wonder what it meant, but actually he doesn’t care.

No one else in the house is stirring as he pads down the hall towards the bathroom. But Hermione’s bedroom door is open and through the doorway Erasmus can see Harry sitting in the chair by Hermione’s bed. She’s in bed asleep, face turned towards Harry, and Harry is slumped on the side of the bed, using his arm for a pillow, as asleep as she is. Erasmus pauses, surprised. And not worried, of course not, even though it looks like a scene from a hospital, the visitor fallen asleep at the side of a critically-ill patient. He wouldn’t worry about them, even if he thought there was reason to be worried. But it’s strange. And weird.

And in his sleep Harry is clutching Hermione’s hand like he thinks she’ll disappear if he lets go.

-

Above his head skeletal trees denuded of leaves reach fingers made of bare branches to the sky. Harry doesn’t look at them more than he has to because those long, bony fingers remind him too much of Voldemort. Better to keep his head down and focus on the soil under his hands and not look too closely at the trees lest he start imagining their malevolent eyes fixed on him. Trees don’t have red, angry eyes, Harry knows that. But his imagination doesn’t care.

“There,” Mrs Granger says, sketching out a rectangle in the air above an empty flowerbed. Harry nods and picks up the spade.

He likes gardening with Mrs Granger. It’s not like at school, all lessons and tests and you must remember. And it’s certainly nothing like gardening for Aunt Petunia, who snaps out orders, refuses to get dirt on her hands, and expects him to know everything instinctively and then shouts at him when he doesn’t. This is just him and Mrs Granger, while Mr Granger is inside giving Hermione piano lessons and Erasmus is hiding upstairs on his bed. Him and Mrs Granger in peace and quiet, while she explains what she’s doing and why, telling him her experiences and thoughts and plans, the reasons for her choices. He likes to watch her, dirt on her cheek under her yellow woolly hat, coaxing the winter-flowering pansies into life, planning what plants to shift to where, teasing weeds out of the cold soil with a rueful acknowledgement of the necessity but sorry for them too.

He likes knowing that what he does here matters to the plants, that he is helping them. He likes knowing that Mrs Granger likes him and is pleased with his help. He likes having somewhere he can belong. Crookshanks gambols past, batting along a fallen leaf like a hoop, whiskers forward and eyes bright, and Harry smiles.

“How far do I need to dig?” he asks, gently turning over the earth to reveal the bulbs that need to be split up and replanted for spring. It’s good to do real work, to have something to concentrate on, to pretend he can forget the things he can never quite forget. But Mrs Granger doesn’t answer and he looks up from the flowerbed to see tears cold and glittering on her cheeks.

“I’m sorry,” she says, wiping hastily at the tears only to have them swiftly replaced, so that all she accomplishes is to smear dirt across her face.  “I’m sorry, it’s just—You’re all so young and all so hurt. And I can’t help you, I can’t make it better. I want to, Harry, I want to so badly.”

Awkwardly Harry puts his arms around her, initiating a hug for the first time in his life, and lets her cry.

-

Harry has nightmares too, it turns out. Erasmus can’t help but notice, sharing a room with him. The first time it happens he lies there, frozen, with no idea what to do about it, while Harry thrashes about in his bed. He has no idea how to help, no idea how he feels about Harry lying there in the other bed, tossing and turning in obvious fear and pain and horror. But not screaming. Not screaming, just uttering a thin keening whimper that goes on and on and never stops even as it raises the hairs on the back of Erasmus’s neck with its note of pure, unadulterated panic.

And he just lies there, like he’s been turned to stone, hands clenched at his sides, staring up into the dark of the ceiling. Pretending he doesn’t see Hedwig’s accusing eyes. Pretending he’s asleep when Hermione rushes into the room and takes charge. Pretending he’s not relieved she’s there. But she is there and she has everything under control, calming Harry down, whispering reassurances, making everything okay.

Erasmus closes his eyes as Harry stops that awful keening, and anger boils somewhere down in his stomach. Why should Harry have nightmares? Nightmares are for people like Erasmus, not people like Harry. Harry is safe and protected and loved, he doesn’t deserve nightmares. It’s like he’s taken some mark of distinction from Erasmus, some prize that might have been unwanted but was at least his, fully and completely. And now it’s been taken from him.

There’s an old grief that hangs over this house, wretchedly familiar in its pain; there are shadows in the eyes of the inhabitants even when they should have nothing to hurt over. Why? What can they possibly have to hurt about, these happy people with family and memories and everything good? He’s the one who was dragged out of a Death Eater prison.

It’s not fair.

-

A spell caught Harry up midflight, before he’d gotten more than half a dozen gravestones away. And when the magic, gripping him roughly and unkindly, brought him back to throw him to the ground he lifted up his grazed face to see Hermione had been caught too. She gave him a look of anguished apology. It was his fault they were here and she was apologising?

“Bold,” Voldemort purred, and it might have been a statement of pleasure or disgust.

Slowly, dreading it but unable to resist, they looked up. Voldemort sat in a conjured chair, like the emperor of the graveyard. Harry hastily regained his feet, unwilling to let Voldemort treat him like a slave, and glared defiantly at him, wiping blood off his cheek onto his sleeve. Hermione was with him, standing close enough that he could feel her trembling but still with her chin high and her eyes narrowed. Harry took comfort from her nearness, from her own refusal to  be intimidated.

“Peter.” At the sharp command Pettigrew winced and scuttled forward, offering Voldemort his arm with a reluctance that would have been comical if it hadn’t been Voldemort. The man stood. The dark wizard Harry had unwittingly defeated once might have been returned to a body, but he was clearly weak and Pettigrew had to hold him upright. But that didn’t matter, he was still Voldemort.

He smiled. “Welcome, Harry Potter,” he said. “Our guest of honour.” His face was pasty white, like some creature pulled out from under a rock, and his eyes were red and hating. His nose was flat, with wide, flared nostrils like a snake and his fingers were inhumanly long as they played with Harry’s wand. And despite this, despite his twisted, revolting form, he exuded the same charisma that had marked the sixteen-year-old memory of Tom Riddle, that something about him that drew in followers even against their will.

Even when he was weak, leaning against Pettigrew (who sweated and fidgeted and looked horrified by the honour), he radiated power. Being weak, you knew, was only a temporary event and if you took advantage of his weakness now then he would make you pay fourfold when he retrieved his strength. Even when he was weak and trembling and couldn’t stand upright on his own, Harry was scared of him.

“And this one?” Harry’s wand was pointed at Hermione. Pettigrew mumbled something. “Ah, yes.”

Harry lifted his chin defiantly, felt Hermione stiff and determined beside him. Voldemort smiled. “I suppose you are wondering why you are here. Or perhaps how I am here. Do you know what important magical event happened recently, children?” They stood silent. “Come now, surely you are not fools.”

“Samhain,” Hermione whispered.

Voldemort’s smile deepened. “Samhain. When the boundaries between the world of the living and the dead are thin and the balance of life and death is so easily pushed towards life if one has the power and the knowledge. And so I am alive. With the bone of my unknowing father and the flesh of my faithful servant.” His hand tightened on Pettigrew’s shoulder and the smaller man winced, cradling his hand protectively. Harry caught the glint of silver and felt sick. “And now I will take the blood of my enemy and I will be strong again. In fact...” He studied them, looking pleased. “Both old enough, yet still young enough to be chaste. I will have blood from you both and grow even stronger.”

Harry was the only one who could feel the shudder run through Hermione. She, of course, understood what was going on better than he did. All he knew was that it was going to be very very bad.

Erasmus skipped lunch – why would he eat at the same time as Harry and Hermione, why would he force himself into the company of two people who don’t even want him around? (and of course they don’t want him, no one could ever want him) – so mid afternoon he creeps downstairs and lets himself silently into the kitchen to make a sandwich. He doesn’t put anything away when he’s done. Why should he? They don’t want him here, so why should he try to make them like him?

Crookshanks comes in through the catflap in the kitchen door, letting it fall closed behind him with a clatter, then sits on his haunches and watches Erasmus while licking a paw in calculated disdain. Erasmus scowls at him but doesn’t aim a kick at him even though the anger boiling in his chest wants to. There’s something inside of him, some part of him that he doesn’t remember, that screams at the idea of hurting something else. It cuts too close to home, hurts too deeply. Even when he doesn’t remember anything he still feels it.

The cat rubs his face clean on his paw then sticks his nose in the air and saunters off, pushing the door into the hall open and sliding through. Erasmus pulls a face at the unresponsive doorway, loathing the house and all its inhabitants. Through the open door, though, comes the faint sound of a voice. Curious, Erasmus swallows the last of his sandwich and nears it, leaning his hand on the wooden doorframe and closing his eyes, listening. It’s not a conversation, it’s the same voice going on and on, rising and falling in gentle waves that make tears suddenly prick at his eyes as if reminding him of some great treasure that he lost – or never even had.

He follows the sound down the hall to the living room and peers carefully around the door, holding a breath of air in his mouth and hoping no one will see him but unable to refuse the pull of that voice.

It’s Mr Granger’s voice, low and soothing. It’s Friday, so he’s come home early. He sits on the couch with a child under each arm and a book on his knee, reading aloud. It’s a kid’s book, like you would read to a five-year-old. Harry has his eyes closed as he listens, leaning against Mr Granger with a strangely old look of peace on his face. Hermione is looking at the vividly-coloured pictures with bright-eyed interest and, since Mr Granger’s hands are full, turning the pages. Crookshanks, curled up on her knee and adding the buzz of his purr to the warm sound of Mr Granger’s voice, is the only one to pay Erasmus any attention, and that is only one eye cracking half open to glare greenly at him a moment, before even the cat dismisses him, closing his eye and going to sleep.

Erasmus’s hand clenches on the door and the hurt and anger bubble up because he feels so left out, so not a part of anything. The door creaks under his fist, swishing against the carpet as it moves forward, and he flinches as if struck. Harry’s eyes don’t open, Hermione doesn’t look up from the page. But Mr Granger glances up, a swift, neutral glance, and never stops reading. Then his eyes drop back to the book. Just like that. So Erasmus goes in and sits down on the carpet and he listens.

Did anyone ever read to him?

-

“What are you doing here?”

Dumbledore looks undismayed by this reception, merely looking at Erasmus with a kindly eye while Harry looks between them, wondering just who this boy is. “I merely wished to reassure myself that you are settling in well and have everything you need.”

“Even if I didn’t, I wouldn’t ask you for it,” the boy rages. “I don’t want you here!”

“Erasmus, my boy—”

“I don’t want you here! All you do is lie! It’s all just lies! Go away!”

He runs, slamming the door behind him. Harry watches the boy storm out, watches Dumbledore’s crestfallen expression. What is it about this one boy that can make Albus Dumbledore look so hurt? Why should he look as if his grandson has just repudiated him when Erasmus is supposedly only an unknown boy removed from a Death Eater dungeon? What hold can such a boy have on this man?

He winces when Dumbledore turns to him. “How is he really, Harry?”

“He’s fine,” Harry says shortly.

“Please, Harry. I should like to know.”

So he can do what? Wave a magic wand and make it all better? Harry once thought magic could cure everything, but magic only brought him worse problems than any the Dursleys ever gave him. Magic can’t fix anything.

“How is he?” Dumbledore repeats, genuine worry in his voice. But Harry’s given up caring about Dumbledore. Too many hurts, too much broken innocence. He cares about two people: Hermione and Snape. And maybe Mr and Mrs Granger. But not Dumbledore. Not now. “How is he?”

Harry thinks of Erasmus. Of the dark nights when his cries wake Harry up, of how he despises everyone in this house, how he creeps around like a cowed dog half the time and the other half is slamming doors and throwing things. But even if he despises them, he hates Dumbledore. “He’s fine,” Harry repeats.

-

Then Dumbledore is finally gone and Harry can let go. He can allow himself to shake, he can allow himself to admit that all that magic, all that adult magic, is terrifying. He can allow fear. And there is nothing to do with that fear but live through it, so he lives through it, he suffers through the flashbacks to Voldemort’s red, laughing eyes, he sinks into the terror and the horror and the pain. He remembers.

He would have collapsed on the floor in a puddle of blood and vomit as the fear makes him sick to his stomach and the magical scars on his face react to the unleashing of his magic. Would have collapsed, but Hermione is beside him, keeping him upright, holding a bucket under his head as his body spasms, rubbing his back in mute comfort as the blood trickles down his face.

“What’s wrong with him?” The words come to him from a great distance, somewhere far beyond the blood and fear. Erasmus’s voice, belligerent but curious. Harry retches into the bucket and keens quietly at the intrusion of another magic, but his fear doesn’t increase. If he was feeling better this would make him curious, but he isn’t so it doesn’t. “What is wrong with him?”

Then Hermione’s voice, tightly restrained but cutting anyway. “He killed Voldemort. He saved you all. What more do you want from him?”

There are tears, mixing with the blood. Because everything’s going to be okay, Hermione’s here with him. Hermione looks after him, Hermione believes in him.

What more does he need than that?

-

Erasmus had been starting to forget Hermione even had a voice. She’s a mouse, sneaking around the house like Harry’s shadow, and he’s practically dismissed her as anything important. Just mute and mousey Hermione. But suddenly she yells at him. Bending over Harry, cleaning him up through the mess he’s making, she yells at Erasmus and suddenly nothing is what he thought. Hermione is not small and scared, she’s scary and powerful. Harry is not perfect, he’s bleeding and vomiting on the floor. Harry killed Voldemort. Voldemort is dead. Dead.

Erasmus hadn’t known that. He knew about Voldemort in a dim way with a spark of bright, burning fear that told him he’d once known much more, but he hadn’t known Voldemort was dead. And Harry killed him. Harry, no older than he, skinny and gangly and intense.

And he thinks, suddenly, that if Harry killed Voldemort, if Harry faced Voldemort, then maybe Harry has reason to have nightmares too. He stares at them, at the blood and mess, at the way Harry clings to Hermione and the way she cares for him. And then he flees the room because there is something too big and bright and horrible about seeing them like that.

 But he starts to watch Harry now, watches how much the others like him. How they all like each other. They’re a family, he’s realising, and so it’s no wonder he doesn’t fit in here, no wonder they don’t want him. Why would they want him intruding on their family? He wishes he had somewhere to belong like that, somewhere where he was a part of a family. He wonders if anyone ever loved him that much.

He’s pretty sure, even without memory, that the answer is no.

-

Erasmus has been unnaturally subdued since Dumbledore’s visit, and Harry is half relieved and half distrustful. It doesn’t seem likely that all that anger would just vanish. So when he looks through the window and sees Erasmus out in the garden, shoulders set tensely in his usual fury, some instinct of danger takes him down the stairs and out the back door.

They gave him space, but maybe space isn’t what he needs.

Standing there on the patio he watches quietly as the other boy stomps around the garden, attacking the sleeping hydrangeas and stomping on the winter aconite, kicking up the grey, sleeping earth. “What are you doing?” he asks.

Erasmus spins, glares, and turns on him in startled, sudden anger. “What do you care? What’s it to you! You know who you are, you don’t have no memories! You have family and memories, you have everything! I don’t have anything, I don’t have anyone, I don’t even know who I am! I don’t remember! And they all tell me lies, I know it, I know it’s all lies and they don’t care, they just keep on telling them to me as if I’m stupid, as if it doesn’t matter if I can see right through them! They lie and they break promises and I hate them! I want my life back, I want my memories! I bet he’s the one who tortured me, I bet it’s all his fault it hurts! He did this!” The words spill out of him, all the aching hurts that he’s never said to anyone here, maybe not to anyone anywhere the way they pour out of him like a desperate cry for help that expects no answer.

Harry hears him out in silence. And then he speaks into the deafening silence that rings in the absence of Erasmus’s aching voice, and he says, “It’s not Mrs Granger’s fault.”

Erasmus stares at him. And then he gives a little broken, hiccoughing laugh. “I guess not,” he says, as if he’s never thought of it like that. Then he looks around at the mess he’s made.

“We can fix it,” Harry says. Erasmus glances at him sharply, questioningly. Hopefully. “The garden. Here, I’ll show you.”

-

Harry and Hermione sat side by side, bound to a gravestone. Hermione’s warmth soaked into him and Harry leaned into her, feeling her lean into him in return, knowing she felt his trembling as much as he felt hers. He wished she’d managed to escape, both so she was safe and so she could send a rescue but he was glad she was here. Her warmth gave him strength, her courage gave him courage. If Hermione was here and not screaming then he could be just as strong. Her presence was the one point of reassurance in the whole of this nightmare. Harry vowed to himself he’d get her out of this.

They flinched together when Pettigrew approached, but the man’s fear of Voldemort overrode everything else and Harry doubted he even realised who they were, only that he’d been set a task and they were a part of that task. He pulled their arms out, Harry’s right and Hermione’s left, and their elbows knocked against each other. They tried to pull back in unison but a muttered spell froze them from elbow to fingertip.

A silver knife glinted in Pettigrew’s silver hand and Harry cringed in anticipation. One quick slash across their wrists dug into their flesh, bright red blood welling up. Hermione whimpered once with startled pain but Harry was more used to pain and managed to stifle his own yelp. Pettigrew didn’t seem to notice. He watched anxiously as their red blood dripped steadily into a stone bowl, splattering against the sides and casting red droplets over Harry and Hermione’s robes to be absorbed into the black.

Harry grit his teeth and hung on as his wrist burned in counterpoint to his scar and the blood was pumped out of his veins by his faithful heart. Pettigrew abruptly stood, taking the bowl away, and Harry could move his arm again.

Hermione slipped her hand into his, lacing her fingers through his. Their wounds met and twinged, but there was comfort in her touch. He glanced at her, but her wide eyes were fixed on Pettigrew, who was helping Voldemort sip weakly at their mingled blood. Harry shuddered. Gross. But Hermione was whispering, so that even Harry right beside her could only just make out the words – for all the good it did him. “Sanguinem tuum accipio, vitam tuam participio, potentiam tuam augeo.” 

He didn’t know what it meant, but a braid of magic wrapped around their wrists a moment, unnoticed by the men involved in the consumption of Voldemort’s nasty cocktail. And it didn’t matter what it meant because he trusted Hermione and so he stumbled his way through the same words. This time the braid of magic was much thicker and it was warm, wrapping warmth around him like a cocoon and warding off the cold of the gravestone at his back so that he suddenly felt sure they would survive this.

Then the sensation faded and the momentary burst of confidence went with it, leaving Harry alone in a graveyard with no wand, two dangerous adults, and only his best friend to help him. Hermione, who was looking at him wide-eyed. Before he had a chance to ask why, Voldemort stood. Without help from Pettigrew.

Erasmus sits at the kitchen table and stares at the wood under his balled fists, burnished and battered by generations of use. No one’s said anything about the mess he made of the garden, too much of a mess for even Harry to fix completely, but he keeps waiting for someone to mention it. And then the pain begins, he remembers that much. When you make the adults angry you get pain in return. But no one here seems to have learned that rule. That or they just don’t get angry. Either is too weird for him to get his head around.

But when he sneaks a look up at Mrs Granger she doesn’t seem to be angry, she’s just looking at him. “Would it help you to talk to a counsellor?”

He doesn’t understand the term and the confusion must show on his face, because she elaborates, “A psychologist.”

“I’m not sick in the head!”

“I know,” she says patiently. “But as she’s coming to talk to Hermione and Harry, I thought she might be able to talk to you while she’s here.”

Erasmus frowns. “They’re not sick in the head.” At least he doesn’t think so. Then again, all those nightmares, maybe they are. Maybe he’s been dumped in a lunatic asylum and no one thought to tell him.

“They were kidnapped by Voldemort,” Mrs Granger says. Erasmus winces. Red lights and red eyes and pain pain pain— “They don’t talk about it, but...” She closes her eyes and her hands tighten around her tea cup and Erasmus thinks that maybe there’s a reason for the way this house feels like pain. “We can’t make it better. But the counsellor can help make it not worse.”

We can’t make it better. It’s like the death of all hope and the beginnings of all hope all at once. It can’t be made better but he’s not the only one and somehow if he’s not the only one that does make it better.

“Maybe I’ll talk to her,” Erasmus says. “Maybe.”

-

To Harry answering the door is a test of his own courage. The not knowing who’s on the other side of the door is scary because there are so many dark figures lurking in his memories, built up by his imagination, that it’s hard to believe the person on the other side can be harmless. But Harry would rather confront that fear. He’s never found fear to get better by hiding and this fear is small enough to face. Plus, if it is something dangerous on the other side he’d rather it got him than Hermione or Mr and Mrs Granger.

He rubs at the faint scar on his cheekbone, gulps, and opens the door, aware that Hermione’s hovering back at the living room door. She’ll give him the chance to face his fears if that’s what he wants but she’ll keep an eye on him too. He almost smiles.

On the other side of the door stands a familiar woman, bundled up in the bright red woollen coat that always makes Harry feel better just to look at because it’s so cheerful against the grey skies. He relaxes. “Hi, Mizz Carter. Come on in.”

Mrs Granger introduces Erasmus and Mrs Carter while Harry and Hermione watch on. The counsellor is Muggle, of course, and has no knowledge of magic. Wizards don’t have counsellors. Sometimes Harry wonders if that explains Voldemort right there.

“He was captured and tortured by the same group that held Hermione and Harry,” Mrs Granger explains carefully, while Harry slips his hand into Hermione’s and feels the reassuring squeeze of her fingers in exchange, while Erasmus pretends not to hear, “though at a different time.”

Mrs Carter’s pale eyes are wide with horror. “I hope these people have been taken off the streets!”

“Oh, they’re locked away safely,” Mrs Granger says with firm, conversation-ending conviction.

The Kissed, locked away in their own heads, alive without souls, watching and waiting with nothing else to do. With nothing else they can do.

“The wizarding world is barbaric,” Hermione whispers, and Harry thinks of Azkaban. Of prisoners being tortured daily by government-sanctioned demons, of stolen sanity and broken souls. Of no second chances, no forgiveness. Of the blank, breathing Kissed who gain no clean death. Of the lost, abandoned dregs of society on a lonely rock in the North Sea, waiting for slow death or oblivion.

“Yes,” is all he says. It is enough.

-

Erasmus stares at her, this woman who wants him to talk, and scrunches down in his chair, trying to make himself small and invisible. He doesn’t want to talk. Talking would just make it worse. He has to get angry to talk, really really angry, even more angry than usual, and he doesn’t like being that angry. He’s tired of being angry.

The light bounces off her blonde hair and teases at his memory. Did he know someone with blonde hair? Did he know someone who bounced a quill off her chin the way Mrs Carter plays with her pen? What has he forgotten? This woman, she can’t get his memory back. She doesn’t even have magic. She doesn’t have anything.

So Erasmus sits there and wraps his arms around his stomach and watches Hedwig carefully walk from one end of the couch to the other and back. Why did he think this might help? There’s no help here. No one can help him.

But at least she doesn’t have magic. He doesn’t have to be afraid of her.

Erasmus closes his lips tight against any sound and sits there.

-

Harry looks at Ron’s red hair and thinks that sometimes he could believe red is the colour of pain and fear and evil. Voldemort’s eyes, the Cruciatus curse, Hermione’s blood dripping into a stone bowl, Snape’s blood leaking out his ears and nose. Red, red, red.

Red means pain. Red means hurt.

Red means betrayal.

“I was stupid, I know I was stupid. I mean, you’re Harry Potter, what do you need more fame for? I should never have said any of it. I’m really sorry, you must hate me. I’d hate me.”

Harry fumbles his way up out of his meditations on the colour red. “I don’t hate you,” he mumbles. Which is true. It is. But ‘not-hate’ isn’t the same as ‘forgive’. He doesn’t hate Dumbledore but he can’t forgive him for the lies. He doesn’t hate Moody but he can’t forgive him for being the face who sent him to Voldemort. He doesn’t hate Sirius, but he can’t forgive him for not being there when he needed him.

Mrs Carter is a bit worried that Harry won’t be able to move on until he can figure out how to forgive people. She doesn’t mean welcome them back with open arms, she doesn’t want him to forgive them to make them feel better. It’s nothing to do with them. She thinks he needs to forgive them for his sake. To stop holding on to his anger and resentment.

Harry can kind of see her point. Voldemort never forgave his dad and look what happened to him, twisted and inhuman and destroyed. But Dumbledore forgives everyone, and Harry’s nearly died every year he’s gone to Hogwarts.

Still, it’s something he thinks about.

Ron is still babbling his apology. “I should have believed you. I should have known you wouldn’t do anything like that, not without me! I was stupid and jealous and a total git.” Harry just looks at him as the words trip over themselves in their haste to leave his mouth.

And when he winds down and there is silence, Harry looks at him some more. Then he says one thing before he turns and leaves the room: “You didn’t believe me.”

Forgiveness may come one day. But not today.

-

Erasmus doesn’t understand how Harry and Hermione can go on as if nothing happened. He knows they have nightmares like him, he knows something bad and terrible happened to them when they were kidnapped even if he doesn’t know what it is. But they don’t seem to care most of the time. They play stupid kids’ games and they watch cartoons and they read books and they act as if nothing is wrong. Everything is wrong! Can’t they see that? How can they not know it?

Cooking is another thing they do. Cooking! Like this is a normal household full of normal people! Erasmus walks into the kitchen to find them preparing dinner. Harry stands at the workbench chopping industriously and Hermione stirs a pot on the stove. There are no words here, he has only come in to the middle of a long silence, but he feels like he’s interrupted something anyway. They turn to look at him and he winces, almost taking a step back toward the door. Hermione’s cheeks are flushed from standing over the stove and Harry casually lifts a large chopping knife, light glinting off it as his hand moves. There’s an array of knives in front of him, all bright and shining, and Erasmus tears his eyes away from them with an effort.

“Do you want to help?” Harry asks, and Erasmus shakes his head emphatically even before the question is finished because something in him scents the danger and he doesn’t care if he’s rude, he just knows that he shouldn’t go near those clean, sharp knives. Harry just shrugs. Hermione turns back to her pot.

Erasmus stands there and he watches Harry work, but he isn’t wondering at a fourteen-year-old boy who chops vegetables with the deft, swift, professional skill that only comes from long long practice. He’s watching the blade of the knife slicing easily through the tomatoes, catching the faint scent of metal, watching the juices bleed out, wondering what it would be like if it was blood instead of juice. His blood. Bright red, vibrant and vivid, spilling out in glorious colour across the wooden chopping board. Taking all his pain and anger with it.

Erasmus turns carefully and stalks out of the room, trying to keep his breathing even. Then he pounds up the stairs and hides under his bed and he shakes.

The image of red, red blood hovers in front of his closed eyes.

-

At breakfast Hermione hides behind the Daily Prophet, a few wayward curls sticking up to let them know she’s still there while she devours all the information inside. Mr Granger has his own newspaper, Mrs Granger is listening to the radio mumbling to itself on the bench. Harry shares out the bacon onto everyone’s plates and smiles; he likes his morning routine. On this morning Hermione giggles when she’s on the second page and they all look at her. Or rather, at the paper.

“What’s so funny?” Mrs Granger asks.

She appears over the top, a smudge of ink on her nose where she’s wiped newsprint off from her hand, and rolls her eyes. Harry steps around the table to take a look and skims down the article. He rolls his eyes too. “It’s some new theory on Voldemort’s death.” Around the table Erasmus is the only one to react to Voldemort’s name and his is just a slight flinch that Harry doesn’t think he even realises he’s made.

“Close?” Mr Granger asks, smiling.

Something about soul-splitting devices granting Voldemort immortality and pure-hearted sacrifice by Harry. He snorts and shakes his head.

And there it ends. He likes the Grangers. They don’t care how he defeated Voldemort, they don’t question him about what he did, they just want him to recover from the backlash. They are just what Harry needs and he’s incredibly grateful, but he doesn’t know how say that, so he just takes the eggs off the stove.

As he puts a fried egg onto Erasmus’s plate, he catches the confusion in the other boy’s eyes. It occurs to him to wonder if Erasmus even knows something happened to Voldemort.

-

The new ritual had improved Voldemort’s looks in no way. In fact, it might have made them worse, if only in subtle ways: redder eyes, wider nostrils, more slitted pupils. And if his charisma had been compulsive before it was overwhelming now. This was a man who had learnt to hone and use his charm much as Dumbledore had, putting the whole force of his personality behind it and using it as a weapon so that even as Harry was appalled and repelled he was also fascinated and attracted.

Voldemort had been scary when he was weak. With his power and strength returned he was absolutely terrifying.

“You are privileged, children, to see the rebirth of Lord Voldemort. It is more than you deserve, but I am feeling generous.” His eyes sparkled with dark glee. “Shall we play a little game, Harry Potter? With the mudblood first, perhaps.”

“You leave her alone!” Harry struggled fiercely against his bonds, to no avail.

Voldemort smiled. “Fire and determination. Admirable. Your parents had those traits too, boy. Before I killed them.” Harry snarled furiously, but of course it was useless. Voldemort dismissed him easily and lifted his wand to lift Hermione’s chin so he could study her face, bending close, nostrils flaring, threatening and terrifying. “Beg for your life, girl.”

She spat at him. Harry would always remember that. Voldemort, and small, terrified Hermione spitting in his face.

Voldemort’s eyes narrowed dangerously and he slashed at Harry’s bonds and threw a wand down at his feet. “Here, Potter. Let no one say Lord Voldemort does not allow his opponents the chance to die on their feet.”

He was freed, but when he plunged to Hermione’s side he was prevented from loosening her bonds by a ward. He stared at the wand at his feet. It was his own wand, but this could only be a trick and Harry stood there, staring down Voldemort’s wand, and didn’t stoop.

“Pick it up.”

“No.” Harry knew there was no fair fight here, there was no way he’d get out of this with his wand.

“Pick it up, Harry.”

“No!”

“Crucio,” he said. Casual, as if it was only a tickling spell. But under the red light Hermione started screaming, started flailing, straining against her bonds with such force she would surely hurt herself.

He dove for his wand. “Okay! Okay! I’ve picked it up! Stop it!” Hermione shrieked in pure animal agony. “Stop it!” Harry screamed, tears in his eyes, both hands on his wand to keep it steady. “Stop it! I’ll do what you say!”

Voldemort flicked his wand and Hermione went silent. She went limp too, sagging against her bonds.

“Hermione?” Harry whispered desperately, going on one knee beside her, shaking her shoulder. She didn’t shift. “What have you done?” He turned on Voldemort. “What did you do to her!” he shouted.

“Temper, temper, Harry,” Voldemort chided, smiling cruelly. “She’s not dead. Yet.”

Harry and Hermione go for a walk every day. Erasmus wouldn’t care, but Mrs Granger insists that he goes too. “Fresh air and exercise,” she orders, and Harry laughs and says there isn’t any fresh air to be had walking car-driven streets. Mrs Granger laughs back at him and shoos him out the door. Erasmus doesn’t get that. How can they laugh when they do know about the bad stuff?

Those first days Harry and Hermione always walked ahead of him, hand in hand, with Erasmus stumping along behind, not interested in joining them. They’re too wrapped up in each other, they don’t need him, don’t want him. He doesn’t want to be here. He doesn’t like it, doesn’t trust it. He doesn’t know this place, he doesn’t remember anything about it, he doesn’t know if it’s safe. Half the people in his shattered memories tried to kill him. It’s not safe to be outside, he knows it’s not safe. But he’s here and this is what he has to do because he’s not going to have anyone look at him with pity, so he never complains, he never tells them he’s scared, never refuses to go for a walk. It’s better to keep his fear to himself, because he’s not safe anywhere so why does it matter where he is?

But now he’s been walking with the other two long enough to see different things. He looks at their joined hands and realises that their fingers are clenched so tightly around each other that their knuckles are white. And then he looks at their faces, tense and watchful, and he realises that they’re scared too. They’re terrified. And they’re like that every day but they grit their teeth and they go out there anyway.

Only when Mr Granger comes walking with them on the weekends are they not scared. They walk one on either side of him, Hermione holding his hand and Harry just walking close, and they’re not scared when he’s there. The rest of the time they’re terrified.

Erasmus finds that somehow it’s better being scared when other people are scared with him. It‘s no less scary, but it doesn’t hurt so much.

-

“We never talk about it,” Hermione points out. There is only one ‘it’.

“What’s there to say?” Harry asks. “We were both there, we know what happened.”

“I suppose.” Her acknowledgement is reluctant.

Harry holds out for all of a minute before he sighs. “Do you want to talk about it?” he asks. He doesn’t like talking about it. Talking about it means thinking about it and he’d rather not think about it unless he has no other choice (nightmares, reminders, drifting thoughts... He thinks about it too often already).

Hermione is very quiet. Harry looks across the couch at her, watches the frown scrunch up her nose and the blankness creep into her eyes. Then she looks at him and he knows what the answer is. She doesn’t want to talk. But she needs to. “Sometimes I wake up and I think I’ll find that this was all a Cruciatus dream and I’m really still lying on the ground with a wand pointed at me and screaming. How do I know I’m not just gone mad? That’s what the Cruciatus does, it drives you mad.”

“I’m not a dream,” he tells her. He can’t give her any reassurance other than that because he’s no surer of his reality than she is. How does he know if this is real? What if this is one of Voldemort’s tricks? But he can’t live like that, so he tries not to. “I’m not a dream and this has to be real.”

“That’s what a dream would say,” she says. Her giggle hiccoughs into a sob and Harry wraps his arms around her.

“It’s okay. It’s over.”

“It’ll never be over,” she says and he knows she’s right. Even though he’s pretty sure this isn’t a dream and that it’s real, some part of them will always be trapped back there in that graveyard.

-

Boys his age stand over him, laughing. Erasmus is on the ground, pushing himself upright, putting his sleeve to his mouth to catch the blood.

“Gonna go crying to Mummy?” someone taunts and he knows with complete, hopeless certainty that no, he isn’t, because his mum doesn’t care, his mum never cared, and if he went crying to her she’d just cuff him over the head and send him away. He wants to be angry but all he feels is despair.

“Aw, poor baby doesn’t have a mummy.” This speaker is a woman, white face, black hair, maniacal eyes. “Poor itty bitty baby.” She laughs.

Then one of the boys is right in his face. “No one wants you.” The other boys laugh, the madwoman cackles. “Nobody wants you.”

And as Erasmus wakes with a start he realises the boy is Harry.

“It’s all right,” someone says gently. “It’s just a dream.”

“M-Mizz Granger?”

She sits on his bed, her hand on his shoulder as if she’s been shaking him, and Erasmus stares up at her. “Yes, only me. Are you awake now?” Her hand drifts to his cheek, lingers there a moment.

His mum never cared.

He knows it’s true. Doesn’t remember details, doesn’t remember even what she looked like, but knows it’s true. Tears prick at his eyes and he fights them back. No tears, no weakness, he won’t be weak. Suddenly he hates Hermione because she has parents who love her and no one ever cared about him. He jerks away from Mrs Granger’s touch, too angry, too desperately longing for it, to bear it any longer.

“Oh, Erasmus.” His name is a sigh. “Just let it out, you’ll feel better if you let it out.” Her hand on his shoulder burns through the fabric of his pyjamas and he tries to wriggle away, to hide his face.  “It’s okay, Harry’s not here. Just me. Let go, Erasmus. Let it all go.”

The pillow receives his first tears. But then Mrs Granger pulls him into her lap and rubs his back and holds him tight. Erasmus bawls into her embrace like a baby because it’s all too much. He’s so tired and so scared and he doesn’t want to know that his mum never cared about him. He wants to believe that she loves him, that she’s searching for him frantically. That she’s the one who’s holding him now, rocking him back and forth, murmuring into his hair, not hating him for waking her in the middle of the night. He wants to believe it, but he knows, somewhere in the back of his fractured memory, that she’s dead and she never would have held him anyway.

But Mrs Granger is holding him. He can pretend, just for a few minutes, that someone cares about him. He wants to pretend. He wants to believe.

 -

“It amazes me the three of you are as well-adjusted as you are,” Mrs Carter says with the simple frankness Harry has learned to expect from her. As someone who has been lied to by most of his authority figures, Harry respects that, even when she says things that make him angry. “From the little you have told me,” she shoots him a look and Harry shrugs half-apologetically, aware that their common disinclination to talk about their experiences combined with the need to not give away the existence of magic makes them frustratingly tight-lipped, “I wouldn’t be surprised to find you all gibbering under your beds every time I visit.”

Harry shrugs again. “There’s only so long you can be afraid for,” he says truthfully. “After that you’re just too tired to keep going. So we only gibber every other day.”

She smiles. “At least you’ve kept your sense of humour.”

He rubs a thumb over the scars on his palms. “Only sometimes.”

She’s wise enough not to push it. “How is Erasmus doing?”

“Good, I think. Well, better anyway. For what that’s worth. Sometimes he actually talks now, I guess that’s good. I mean, he doesn’t like us much, but he likes us better than his other options and I think he not-likes us less now.”

Mrs Carter pulls a face. “You mean he’s coming around, liking you better?” she tries to translate.

“Yeah.” ‘Like’ is too strong a word, but close enough.

“Well, that’s something, at least.”

He shrugs again. Small victories are all he has these days. He clings to his small victories. “Hermione and I went shopping the day before yesterday.” And wasn’t that terrifying. The trip on the bus surrounded by adults, not magical adults but so very many of them, the going into places where they didn’t know all the exits and potential hiding places. The library is okay, because they know the library (Mr Granger took them the first couple of times, so they could be safe). New places are dangerous.

“Well done,” she says simply, but with sincerity. She has some idea how big a step that is. “You mean you went into clothes shops?” She looks impressed.

Harry actually laughs. “Me and Hermione? No. Bookstores, all the way.”

“All the way?”

“Well, maybe a couple of other shops too. But not clothes shops.” No way. There are a lot of ways in which Harry is not normal, but that is not one of them.

It’s something of a relief to know that.

-

There is anger in the way he snaps the taps shut, anger in the way he yanks at the buttons on his shirt. Erasmus doesn’t know why he’s angry – at least, no specific why. He’s just angry. He’s always angry. It’s better to be angry than to be scared.

The bath water laps at his skin with flaming tongues as he lowers himself in, scalding in its heat. He doesn’t care. He welcomes it. Too-hot water flickers over his skin like the too-hot anger flickering along his bones. As he sinks down, the water sloshes and the level rises, little waves gulping at the white enamel and trying to climb out onto the floor but never quite succeeding. He glares at them and sinks lower and lower, going further and further under, sliding down under the water so that it engulfs him entirely. The gloing-gloing-gloing of water in his ears makes his scowl deepen but he welcomes the distance it brings to sounds, the strangely dislocated, far-away quality it gives to the footsteps walking past outside the door.

He watches bubbles rise up towards the distorting surface, letting out his breath in tiny bursts. And the dislocation doesn’t just extend to the sounds that reach him, it digs into his soul and wraps around him, distancing him from everything. Including himself.

And he wonders, watching the bubbles rise, he wonders why he doesn’t let out all his breath. Why he should worry about ever breathing again. It’s more peaceful just to lie here and never move again. He lets out more bubbles, a stream of shiny wobbling amorphous pockets of air soaring up towards the surface. It would be so easy. It would all be over, all be done; no more worry, fear, pain, loss...

So easy.

Erasmus lets out the last of his breath.

So very easy.

His lungs are burning, the pressure in his chest just like the pressure that always follows him, that unending pressure of things undone and things to be done and promises broken. If he just breathes in he can be done with it all. Just be done.

He breathes in.

Erasmus breathes deep of water.

And then there is five seconds of wild confusion as he chokes, as someone grips on to him and hauls him out of the water in great splashing wetness to drape him on the cold tiles like a landed fish. Flailing helplessly, he coughs, dragging desperately at the air in an attempt to draw in oxygen, choking on the water that he coughs up. Hands turn him over roughly, thumping him on the back.

“Don’t you dare!” Harry shouts at him. “You’re not going to die, that’s the easy way out! You coward!”

‘Coward’ stings, even when he’s drowning in a sea of watery air. Whatever else he is, he’s not a coward. He’s not.

Naked on all fours, dripping onto the tiles and coughing up water, he chokes and splutters while Harry’s fury fills the room and makes it almost impossible to breathe even as his magic roughly forces life into Erasmus.

“I won’t let you die!” Harry yells at him. “I won’t let you!”

So Erasmus is left to gasp himself into life, furious at Harry for saving him and furious at himself for being so weak and furious at the world for putting him here, leaving him here. And hurting, oh so hurting.

Hermione drapes a towel over him, thick and warm, and Mrs Granger pulls him into her lap, unconcerned by the water all around, and holds onto him as he gasps and chokes and sobs. His tears are of anger, pain, shame, rage; equal parts relief and regret.

A great sucking noise makes him jump violently, a noise like the monsters of the abyss howling for blood or like the draining of the seas, as the water pours down the plughole, taking all peace with it. Erasmus looks up through tears. Mr Granger stands there, the plug, still dripping, dangling from his hand.

What has he done?

-

Dying didn’t scare him. Not-dying does. What will they do to him? Will they lock him up? Will they send him away? Will they decide he’s too much trouble and just get rid of him? He doesn’t want to leave this house. He hates it and he hates the people but he likes them better than anywhere else. He doesn’t want to go. But he’s messed up now, he’s messed up big time, and he doesn’t know what they’ll do to him.

Apart from, apparently, put him to bed with a bowl of soup.

There’s no yelling. Just soup.

Erasmus eats three spoonfuls and then is promptly sick because his stomach is tied in knots. This can’t be it. Can it? Where’s the anger and the yelling and the pain? His whole being expects it, is tense in anticipation of it, and it doesn’t come.

It doesn’t come.

Erasmus doesn’t sleep that night, he just stares up at the roof. Harry doesn’t come in to go to bed, it’s just him and the shadows. In the morning he sneaks downstairs and puts on his warmest coat and goes outside onto the patio with his breakfast. That feels safer. He can see them coming that way, he’s got room to run. Maybe they won’t even find him.

But Mr Granger comes outside. Erasmus tenses, ready to run, but the man just sits down and opens up his paper. Erasmus slowly relaxes, watching some sparrows bickering over yesterday’s crumbs.

After a long silence the newspaper drops just far enough for Mr Granger to look at Erasmus over the top. “Why did you do it?”

Erasmus meets those calm, unaccusing eyes, then looks away. He studies a leaf, the veins, the striations, the variations in shadow and tint. He hasn’t thought about what he did, only the potential consequences. “I don’t know.”

Mr Granger nods and lifts the newspaper again. The sparrows shout insults, the wind paws at the bare oak tree, the clouds scud across the grey sky. And Mr Granger says nothing.

-

Finally Erasmus figures out that there isn’t going to be any yelling, let alone anything worse. He doesn’t get that. He’s just tried to kill himself, Harry was furious – and there isn’t going to be any yelling? Don’t these people know how it’s supposed to go? They all just go on as if everything is normal.

Almost normal, because at lunch the next day Harry says, “Hermione thinks you should tell Mizz Carter about the bath thing.”

“So tell her, then,” Erasmus spits angrily. Everyone is always trying to run his life.

“You have to decide to do it,” Harry shoots back. “We can’t decide for you, it’s up to you. But if you want, one of us can tell her for you.”

He hesitates. Remembers calm acceptance. “Can Mr Granger do it?”

“We’ll ask him,” Harry says.

But Hermione nods.

Relief is overshadowed by a terrible possibility. “I suppose you want to tell Dumbledore too,” he says sullenly.

The other two shake their heads, to his surprise. “We’re not your keepers,” Harry says. “We just thought Mizz Carter could help. And he’s not your guardian, he’s got no right.”

“Would you tell him?” he asks, daring in curiosity.

“No,” Harry says immediately. “But he’s messed with my life enough and I don’t see why it’s his business.”

“Neither do I,” Erasmus mutters.

Harry shrugs. “So don’t tell him, then.”

And apparently it’s just that easy.

-

“Do you want to die?” Mrs Carter asks him neutrally.

Erasmus jumps to his feet. “No!”

“Think about the question, please, Erasmus.” Her voice is brisk, not soft, and that steadies him. He trusts brisk, there is nothing to trust in soft. “Do you want to die?”

He thinks about it. Really thinks, about closing his eyes forever and never waking up, about no more nightmares, about the touch of Mrs Granger’s fingers on his cheek, about no more fear and lies, about the taste of cinnamon in the apple pie they’d had last night for dessert, about the mercy and terror of oblivion.

“No,” he decides slowly. “But everything was so hard and I was so tired and it was so easy just to let it all go...” He nips at his thumbnail with his teeth, then bursts out, “Harry called me a coward!”

“And are you?”

“No!” he says in instant repulsion.

“Please, Erasmus, at least think about the question.”

“Harry said—”

“I’m not interested in what Harry said, I want to know what you think.”

He remembers nightmares and fears and the weight of lies. How hard it is to go on and how easy it was to stop. But... “No,” he says quietly. Then, more firmly, “No.”

“Why not?” she prods.

“Because it was just that moment, when everything was too much. I’m not running away.”

She nods. “We all have moments of weakness. There’s nothing to be ashamed of in that.”

There is, Erasmus knows, but he doesn’t tell her that.

“Now, this may be the most unpleasant of all: Will you do it again?”

“No!”

“Erasmus.”

He remembers glistening metal and his voice is a whisper. “Maybe.” He tells her about the knives.

She hears him out in non-judgemental silence. “All right,” she says when he’s finished. “What I should like to do is this: I want to get the help of the others in your household.” That means telling them everything, and he flinches. “This isn’t a punishment, Erasmus, and we’ll only do it with your permission. But I think they would all be willing to help you identify temptations and help you resist them. You say you don’t want to die—”

“I don’t!” Most of the time.

“—and so we can get your friends to help make sure it doesn’t happen.”

He sits there, staring at her in open-mouthed shock, and for the first time she looks really and truly worried. “Erasmus? Are you all right?”

When he speaks his voice wobbles and he feels like the world itself wobbles because it’s all so new and different and strange. “Friends,” he croaks. “I don’t remember having friends.”

Her eyes are gentle, her voice is soothing. “Erasmus, you don’t remember very much.”

His voice is harsh and he feels like he’s made of cold hard flint, immobile, unbreakable, unloveable. “I remember having none.”

-

Harry doesn’t know how he feels about it all. He can’t exactly claim to like Erasmus but it’s still horrible that the boy tried to kill himself. Understandable in a sick sort of way, but horrible. He spends that night curled up next to Hermione in the middle of her parents’ bed, Mr and Mrs Granger either side of them like they’re a couple of terrified five year olds. He feels like a five year old, lost and useless. Dumbledore sent Erasmus here to try and help him and all Harry can do is let him try to kill himself. How is that helping anybody?

He doesn’t want to talk to Mrs Carter on her next visit but Hermione makes him.

Mrs Carter looks at him with calm, steady eyes. “He said you called him a coward.”

Harry winces. “I shouldn’t have said that.”

“It was an emotional moment. People tend to say things they regret.”

“Then why bring it up?” he demands. He doesn’t want to be here talking and he definitely doesn’t want to be here talking about this.

“Because I’m interested in why you said it.”

“Well I’m not.”

“And do you think that’s reason enough to drop the subject?”

“Yes!” But no one ever does what he wants, they only ever do what they want, and so he’s not really surprised when she doesn’t drop it. He holds out for five minutes, but that’s it. “I was jealous, okay!” he shouts at her. “I couldn’t let him die and I had to make him live, but I was jealous! I wanted to do that, I wanted to escape everything, but I never had the courage. It hurts so much and I wanted it to end but I just couldn’t. I’m the coward, not him!” Tears blur his eyes. “Is that what you wanted? Have you got it all now? Or do you want more dirty secrets!”

“I don’t want your secrets, Harry,” she says softly. He buries his face in his hands. “I just wanted you to know what you felt.”

He hears her footsteps, but to his relief they pass him by and go to the door. Then almost immediately Hermione comes pattering in and Harry reaches blindly out to her and she wraps him in a warm hug. “It’s okay, Harry.”

Harry remembers now why he’s never been able to try what Erasmus did. This is his reason why not. “I’m sorry, Hermione.”

-

Dawn rose on black-robed, white-masked figures that surrounded them like white-faced dementors. Sick and bleeding, aching horribly, and tied once again to the gravestone, Harry tried not to let his fear show but he knew too well that it did. The Death Eaters had returned to their master. Chastened, it was true, but once again at his side. He was so dead. Hermione was so dead. This was really really bad. “I’m sorry, Hermione,” he whispered helplessly. This was all his fault, all his doing. If he’d just stayed away from her she’d be safe in bed right now. If he hadn’t begged her for help with the Summoning Spell she’d still be in Hogwarts instead of here in a graveyard surrounded by people who wanted to kill her.

“This is not your fault,” she whispered fiercely, glaring at him, and he was amazed that even in the middle of all this she could still be so intent on making him feel better. He had to get her out of here because he couldn’t get the one person who had always supported him killed.

He just didn’t know how he was going to do it.

“And I’m sure you have all heard of our guest of honour,” Voldemort was saying. “Harry Potter. The Boy Who Lived.” He stood behind the gravestone Harry and Hermione were tied to, sneering down at them while the Death Eaters laughed.

“Sycophants,” Hermione muttered. Luckily, Voldemort didn’t hear her.

“He’s brought with him a friend, but I’m certain no one here will object.” He glanced around as if daring one of them to object and give him a chance to deal out punishment. No one took the dare. Voldemort rounded the gravestone. “In honour of our guests, let us celebrate my return.” He smiled at Harry as if he hadn’t just spent much of the night torturing him. “Let us play a game.”

There are lots of things Erasmus doesn’t understand. He doesn’t understand why he tried to kill himself, he doesn’t understand why Harry saved him. He doesn’t understand how he’s still alive. He doesn’t understand Harry. He really doesn’t understand Harry.

In the end he asks Hermione. There is no one who understands Harry so well as Hermione. “How did he know? I didn’t even know and I—” He cuts himself off. “But he was there right away.” Hands pulling him out of the water, thumping life back into him. Harry saved him from drowning but it doesn’t make any sense.

“Of course he knew,” she says, and her voice is a whisper he has to strain to hear with the kitchen table between them. “The house told him.”

He looks at her, but she doesn’t think she’s said anything strange, she just picks up Crookshanks and looks back at him across the table as if what she’s said is perfectly reasonable. And sitting here opposite her it’s almost hard to believe it isn’t. Nothing in this house is normal. He isn’t normal. Why should Harry be? Why should she be?

“Muggle witches used to say ‘blessings be upon this house’,” she explains into Crookshanks’s fur. “That’s what he’s done. His blessing, his magic, his protectiveness, his everything. It won’t let anyone be hurt here. And I don’t think anyone could do magic here except me and Harry. Maybe not ever again. He loves this house and he gave it life.”

Erasmus tries to fit this into his fractured world. “How can he do magic? He doesn’t have a wand.”

He’s seen Hermione’s wand with its dark stains in the wood that always make his heart jump into his mouth for a moment (or is it the wand itself that does that to him in the flash of unremembered memory of pain and fear and despair?). He’s never seen Harry with a wand.

“He has one.”

“I haven’t seen it.” He doesn’t mean to be accusing, he’s just lost and confused.

Hermione’s eyes are too old for her face. “No,” she says, “you wouldn’t have.”

-

Harry never got to play on climbing frames and other playground equipment as a kid because Dudley didn’t want him to have fun and quickly took over whatever Harry tried to play on. Besides, he never had any friends and friends are what make playing fun. Hermione never had many friends either, as an only child separated from her peers by her intelligence and love of learning.

So they’re both glad of the opportunity, even if it’s come a little late in life, to run around a playground with a friend, to play tag on the climbing frame and wriggle through the tunnels, swing on the monkey bars and pretend to be pirates defending their hideout.

Even Mr Granger joins in if he’s with them – and has proved particularly good at repelling imaginary invaders. Erasmus skulks around the edges of the playground scowling at them, kicking stones along and sneering at any particularly loud shouts. Harry rolls his eyes and ignores him. Doesn’t he understand the need to try to forget? Maybe not, since he’s trying so hard to remember.

The swings are Harry’s favourite, and he and Hermione challenge each other to see who can swing highest. It’s like flying, the one and only thing Harry misses from the magical world. He loves the whirl of the world around him, the sudden drop leaving his stomach behind, the attempts to touch the sky. He also enjoys jumping off the swing at the top of its swing but Hermione isn’t so fond of that idea.

Erasmus looks at them like they’re mad, even with pity as if they’re little kids who don’t understand how awful the world really is. But they do understand, of course they understand. That’s why they play so fiercely, to renounce that world and remake it into a better one. Even if it’s just for half an hour at a time, one playground at a time.

Harry is fighting for his life and his soul here. Maybe the danger isn’t as immediate as when Voldemort was holding a wand on him, but it’s just as real. And he is not going to lose.

-

All three children sleep at odd times of the day to compensate for sleepless nights. Erasmus finds that a little reassuring, proof that he’s not a complete freak, and the adults never mention it. So it’s not really surprising to Erasmus to feel his eyes leadening at three in the afternoon, and he doesn’t even try to fight the sensation, just lets his head sag back against the couch cushions and blinks sleepily at the afternoon cartoons on the telly. Between one blink and the next, time seems to jump in fits and starts until finally he blinks and his eyes don’t open again.

He’s not surprised to wake into darkness. He is surprised to wake on his bed, but then he figures they just probably wanted to get him out of their way, so it makes sense they would carry him upstairs. But it doesn’t make sense that they would then carefully tuck a blanket around him. Erasmus’s flickering memory-less memory suggests waking cold and stiff in a corner is much more likely. This is just strange.

His stomach grumbles quietly and he wonders what time it is. He’s probably missed dinner, but if he sneaks down into the kitchen he can get himself some leftovers. No one here seems to notice if he nicks some food – or they just don’t care. Despite himself he’s starting to believe the latter. Ignoring the light switch as unnecessary, he pads softly down the stairs, blinking into the shadows. The sitting room door is open and the flickering lights of the telly flash in the darkness, reaching out into the hall while canned laughter rings out. He stops at the doorway, glowering into the room, at the family picture of two adults and two children (and two pets) watching TV, the atmosphere warm and cosy and shutting him out, leaving him in the dark.

Then Mrs Granger looks up and sees him before he can hide. She smiles. “Coming in? We’re watching Friends.”

Erasmus hesitates. Can he? Should he? Dare he?

Then he goes in and becomes a part of the warmth.

-

“A letter for Harry,” Mr Granger says with interest, coming back into the kitchen with the post.

Harry frowns; even at the Dursleys’ he didn’t get post and that was when people knew where he was. But the name on the letter reads ‘Harry Potter’, care of the Grangers, and he supposes someone’s just making an attempt to get to him through Hermione. Post owls won’t find him. The reporters in the Prophet nattered on about unplottable hiding places for a while, but it’s not true. There’s nothing unplottable about the Grangers’ home, it’s just that magic won’t find him here. But ordinary Muggle means have.

He opens the letter and starts to frown. His frown becomes a scowl as he reads further. “Just a reporter,” he says, and tears up the letter. He’s had enough of reporters, had enough of the wizarding world. They just want the sordid details, like Aunt Petunia replicated a hundred thousand times to form a whole community of nosy, gossiping busybodies. They don’t care about the truth, they don’t want the truth. They’d hate him if they knew the truth.

Hermione retrieves the pieces of paper and looks at him.

“I don’t want to!” he says heatedly.

She looks at him some more.

Harry sags in his seat and glares at the table. “I know, I know, it’s rude not to reply and if I don’t say anything they’ll just get worse and worse – or just make everything up. Like they don’t anyway. What do I care?”

“Just say thank you for the inquiry but you have nothing to say at this time,” Mr Granger suggests, opening his newspaper.

“Or you could give a statement,” Hermione says. Harry’s glare jumps up to fix on her. “Say Voldemort is definitely dead—” Harry winces. “—and you’re in no danger. Give them something.”

It’s reasonable, he knows it is. Like it or not he is a public figure. And much as he hates to acknowledge it, Voldemort’s demise really is of concern to people other than him and Hermione. But he doesn’t want to be reasonable. He wants to pretend none of them exist.

Hermione’s still looking at him.

Harry sighs and holds his hand out for the letter.

-

The Boy Who Lived. Erasmus picks up Hermione’s copy of the Daily Prophet; it’s the first time he’s touched a magical object since leaving Hogwarts and he does so with great gingerliness, spreading it out on the table as quickly as possible so that he can read it without having to hold it. And there, like he’d thought he’d seen, is Harry’s name. But why? Okay, he knows Harry defeated Voldemort (somehow – how?) and maybe that makes him famous. He supposes that’s reasonable. But what’s all this other stuff?

He looks up. Mr Granger is the only one still left at the breakfast table, reading his own newspaper. “Does this mean Harry?”

Mr Granger glances over and nods.

Erasmus stares at the newsprint. Harry, famous? Harry, who never goes for a walk without Hermione and screams in the night and, well, Harry? “What does it mean? The Boy Who Lived? Why do they talk about him like that?”

Mr Granger gives him a surprisingly hard stare, then relaxes. “I’ll get Harry to tell you.”

“Um, no, that’s okay.” Erasmus doesn’t want to disturb Harry. No way. His curiosity isn’t that great.

He thinks that’s the end of it, but in the evening Mr Granger drops a book into his lap, bookmarked. Erasmus opens it to see the marked chapter is headed “Harry Potter: the Boy Who Lived” and there’s a picture of what must be a younger Harry, not much older than eleven. In the photo his eyes aren’t full of pain, and though there’s a hint of a shadow there maybe it’s just because of the way the light’s falling. This isn’t the Harry he knows.

“I don’t know how much you know about Voldemort,” Mr Granger says. He knows enough that the casual, unconcerned way the man says the name is unnatural. “It might help to read the previous chapter first.”

Erasmus looks at the cover. Modern Magical History (2nd ed). Harry’s in a book like this? He doesn’t understand. On the front endplate is a neatly-inscribed name: Hermione Granger.

He reads the book. He’s not much wiser, really, but at least he understands a few things. He doesn’t understand Harry and he doesn’t know what happened to Voldemort either time he died, but at least he knows where Harry fits in. All he has to do now is convince himself to believe it.

-

“No! Leave them alone!”

Erasmus jolts awake at the shout, striking out at his blankets to ward off a non-existent attack.

“Leave them alone!”

He jumps, and realises it is Harry shouting into the shadows.

“Hermione! Hermione! Professor! No, don’t! Leave him alone! Leave him alone!” There is such fear and anguish in his voice. Magic flares up in reaction to his fear, the hairs on Erasmus’s arms prickling as the power of it fills the room. Calling Hermione, he thinks, for she is there so quickly he could almost think she’d been waiting outside the door. Which is foolish. Probably.

It doesn’t matter, she’s here now and holding onto Harry, reassuring him, calming him down. Letting Erasmus off. Leaving him to wonder just what happened in that time that neither Harry nor Hermione ever speak of.

“Snape?” Harry whispers.

“He’s okay, Harry. He’s safe. Dumbledore said so.”

“Dumbledore.” It is strange to hear Erasmus’s own loathing echoed in Harry’s voice. He turns over to look into the shadows to where Harry and Hermione sit, a single shadow in the dark.

“I know,” Hermione says. “But he promised.”

“He has to be safe. He has to be.”

“He is, Harry, you know he is.”

“I couldn’t help him.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“They wouldn’t listen.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“I just want him to be safe.”

“He is.” Hermione rocks him back and forth like a child. “He is, Harry. Professor Snape is safe.”

Erasmus turns away and pulls the covers over his head. Who is Snape, that Harry should care so much about him?

-

 “Have you been taught how to duel, Harry?” Voldemort was laughing at him, that much Harry knew. Duelling etiquette didn’t matter, all that mattered was somehow surviving this. “First we bow. Bow, Harry.”

A force tried to bend Harry’s back, like a giant hand pressing down on his spine. “No,” Harry said through gritted teeth.

Voldemort gave him a look of feigned surprise. “No? Do you care so little for your friends, Harry?” He pointed his wand at Hermione. “Cruc—”

“No! I’ll do it!” He bowed deeply, trying to look at Voldemort sideways. “See, I’m bowing,” he pleaded. Leave her alone, leave her alone.

“So you are.” The smile curling Voldemort’s thin, bloodless lips was unpleasant in the extreme. “But I think you need a lesson in humility, Harry. I want more than a bow. I want you at my feet. Crucio!”

Pain, pain, pain... Harry had thought he was something of an expert on pain but the Cruciatus was, as he now knew too well, worse than he could ever have imagined. Worse than basilisk venom boiling through his body, worse than anything. Not that Harry was comparing at that moment, he was too busy screaming in agony.

When the pain let up he lay gasping on the ground. Somehow one hand still clutched his wand, but not through intent. Movement was simply not an option and so he didn’t try.

“Get up, Harry.” He didn’t move. “Get up!”

Angry magic hurled him to his feet and Harry stumbled, trying to stay upright as the Death Eaters laughed.

Voldemort’s smile was more like a snarl. “And this is the boy they thought had defeated me.” He gave a bark of harsh, unamused laughter. The Death Eaters went abruptly silent, too scared of his anger to dare even rustle their robes. Harry stood there, wobbling, clutching desperately at his wand, staring at Voldemort and wishing he knew what to do. This seemed to anger the man-creature. Harry saw it coming but couldn’t dodge in time. “Crucio!”

Oh Merlin, the agony, the pain. Harry screamed. He screamed and he screamed until the world was full of the sound of his voice and pain was just the same as screaming and he wasn’t sure if he was feeling the scream and hearing the pain or the other way around because they were so much the same. The screaming didn’t stop when the pain did, though. Dimly he was aware that that was Hermione’s voice. He knew he should move, should look for her, but he had no energy left for something so vast as moving or even groaning.

“Severus! See if he’s dead.”

Someone bent over him, impersonal in white mask and black robes. Whoever it was dropped something onto him. A ball like the one Moody had thrown at him.

“There’s a portkey ward,” muttered a familiar voice as hands roughly tugged at his hair, lifting his head. “But if you get beyond it say ‘Sanctuary’ and you’ll return to Hogwarts.” Harry stared up into black eyes behind the white mask. Then his head was dropped and the man stood. “He still lives, my Lord,” said Professor Snape.

Angry voices fill the house and Erasmus flees the top floor for the safety of the living room. It’s not free of them down here, but at least it’s further away from Hermione’s room where the argument rages. Erasmus curls up on the sofa and puts his arms over his head, trying to pretend he doesn’t hear them. Anger is dangerous, bad, hurting. Dangerous.

“Dammit, Harry, I was there too! Don’t you dare try telling me I wouldn’t understand!”

“I wouldn’t dream of telling you anything!” Harry yells back. “That would involve talking to you!”

“And what do you call this!”

“Telling you I’m never talking to you again!”

Somebody slams a door. Then, like an echo, a second door slams. Erasmus winces and curls into a tighter ball. There was a time he would have been glad to have Harry and Hermione at each other’s throats just to prove they aren’t perfect, to make them feel as miserable as he does, but now he just feels sick. Angry magic hangs thick in the air, pressing down on him.

“It will be over soon.” Mr Granger sits down beside him. Erasmus cautiously uncurls enough to point on eye in his direction. “Neither of them is very good at holding on to anger. Even as a toddler Hermione’s tantrums never lasted long.”

“They do this often?” he whispers.

“Not as often as I would have expected. I think both of them shout at Mrs Carter and that helps. Usually they don’t get angry at the same time, which helps too. Just our bad luck today, I suppose. Buck up, it won’t last long. Considering what you lot’ve been through, the occasional temper tantrum shouldn’t be too much to put up with.” He reaches forward and picks up the book Harry left on the coffee table. “Come on, you can explain this Quidditch thing to me again.”

-

Harry throws himself angrily onto his bed, boiling with rage, and howls into his pillow. If even Hermione is against him what does he have left? Nothing. No one. He’s furious at her and furious at himself for believing in her. How could he have been so stupid? There’s no one in the world worth trusting, the only person he can trust is himself.

He is a fool. A stupid, gullible fool.

He punches the pillow. Only it isn’t as simple as that, because his magic is furious along with him and so his punch doesn’t dent the pillow, it goes right through it, throwing pillow-stuffing into the air to be wafted about by angry magical currents. Harry stares at the ruined pillow, stuffing floating into his face and catching on his glasses, settling in his hair.

And then he bursts into tears.

He cries because he’s furious, he cries because he doesn’t want Hermione to leave, he cries because he has no one, he cries because what Voldemort did to him is still so close and recent even after nearly two months, he cries because he can’t even control his own magic. He cries.

When the bout of crying is done his face is stiff and sore with weeping, his eyes aching and gritty, his cheeks sticky with tears. His head aches ferociously and his clothes are damp with sweat and tears, bits of stuffing clinging to them like synthetic snow. Harry lies there for a long time, aching all over, but finally summons the strength to turn over. His stiff limbs creak as he moves them for the first time in quite a while and he whimpers. He’s so tired of hurting. So tired of pain. So tired of all of it.

A few exhausted tears slip out of his eyes despite his attempts to stop them and Harry wraps an arm across his eyes, blacking out the world, trying to pretend it doesn’t exist.

Then there are arms around him, pulling him into a familiar lap, wrapping him in a familiar embrace, surrounding him with a familiar scent. “I’m sorry,” he sobs into Hermione’s shoulder. “I didn’t mean it, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” She echoes his words back at him, crying into his hair, and they hold onto each other and cry and apologise. “I’m sorry.”

He doesn’t even remember why he was angry. Doesn’t remember what could make him hate Hermione of all people, Hermione who is everything in the world. He hates Voldemort. Hates him for bringing him to this, uncertain temper and fear and hurt. He’d thought it would get better. He doesn’t know if it ever will.

-

Erasmus remains fascinated by the telly. It doesn’t feel familiar, the way most Muggle things do, and he likes losing himself in someone else’s world. Even soap operas, as illogical and melodramatic as they are, are good to watch because the problems are all someone else’s problems. Erasmus doesn’t mind problems when they don’t weigh down his shoulders. Harry and Hermione turn their noses up at soap operas, though they always come to watch cartoons, so Erasmus gets the tv to himself in the mornings. Even the ads are interesting because some of them are funny and because some of the inventions Muggles come up with to replace magic are fascinating (Hermione’s already sold him on exercise books instead of scrolls and he’ll take a torch over a Lumos spell any day because the torch doesn’t need magic).

This day his turning on the telly wakes up Crookshanks, curled up in the two-seater, and the cat sits up and eyes him contemplatively. Forgetting the tv, Erasmus holds his breath. Oh please, oh please, oh please. He doesn’t move a muscle, scared that one air molecule shifted in the wrong direction will scare the cat away. Crookshanks licks a paw thoughtfully and glances around the room, but Erasmus is the only human about. Then, just before Erasmus passes out from lack of oxygen, his lungs burning, the cat condescends to step onto his lap and curl up. Erasmus remembers how to breathe and cautiously pats his head with one finger. Crookshanks bunts the finger with his nose and then tucks his nose under his tail and begins to purr quietly.

Emboldened, Erasmus dares to pat him properly, running his hand down from head to tail. Crookshanks may be an ugly cat, dispassionately considered, but his fur is soft and his purr is soul-warming and to Erasmus he is the most beautiful animal in the world.

“I nearly kicked you once,” he whispers. “I’m glad I didn’t. Ow!” For Crookshanks dug his claws into Erasmus’s knee, not enough to draw blood but enough to make it obvious it was no accident. “I didn’t actually do it!” One green eye opens to glare at him, as if to say even thinking it is a crime. Then the cat flicks an ear and closes his eye again – and Erasmus realises he’s never stopped purring.

“I’m sorry I thought it,” he says. “I was just really angry but it wasn’t your fault. But I didn’t do it, I couldn’t. I’ve been kicked too many times; I couldn’t do it to you.”

He likes to think the cat’s purr increases in volume. He’s almost sure it does.

Erasmus falls asleep with a cat purring on his lap and even if he wakes with a crick in his neck and stiff knees it’s worth it. There are no nightmares.

-

Harry will always think of the day Erasmus came into the kitchen for lunch holding Crookshanks and actually smiling as the day when things turned around. Maybe it wasn’t really that day. Maybe it was an earlier day or a later day, or maybe there wasn’t any day at all but just a slow progression. But that is the day he’ll think of as the day when things turned around. After that there are fewer outbursts, there is more willingness to participate. That is what an animal can do. Harry knows. That’s what Hedwig always did for him, his one friend at the Dursleys, his second friend ever, right after Hagrid, the first person who would listen to his problems and not judge him for them.

Hedwig is happy here at the Grangers. They don’t insist she stays locked in her cage, they’re happy for her to wander around the house and satisfy her curiosity. Harry sometimes wonders – very briefly because it hurts to think of it – what it would have been like to grow up in a house like this. To grow up knowing he was loved, knowing he was appreciated, knowing he was a part of the family. To not be the shame of the family, the black sheep, the unwanted one. He would have grown up with confidence, without loneliness. Hedwig would never have been shut away in her cage like a carrier of the plague.

If his parents had lived—

But no, that’s too painful, so he doesn’t think about it. He just thinks about Hedwig being happy now. About Crookshanks in Erasmus’s arms and the wide smile on the boy’s face as he experiences, as if for the first time, the unconditional acceptance of an animal. It’s better to think about the good things. Sometimes, he almost thinks that he’s finding that easier and easier to do.

But he doesn’t think it too loud in case someone decides to take it all away.

-

Mrs Carter doesn’t sigh as they sit in silence. She looks perfectly willing to go on sitting here in silence all day. Erasmus is the one who finally breaks.

“What do you want?”

“I want to help you.”

“You can’t.”

“No. But maybe I can help you help yourself.”

He snarls but says nothing. The only help he needs is his memories back. The old familiar ache thrums through him. Who am I? What have I forgotten? What was I before this?

Silence falls again. Lingers. Breaks.

“Sometimes I hate him,” Erasmus admits lowly.

“Who?”

“Harry.”

Mrs Carter looks surprised and not surprised. “Why?”

“Because he has memories. Because he’s important to people. Because he’s everything I’m not.” He contemplates the tabletop, studying the grain of the wood. “Because I want him to like me and I don’t see why he should.”

-

Hermione worked out later that Voldemort probably only tortured them for an hour then, playing with one or the other, revelling in his strength and power and showing off to his Death Eaters, but if that was true – and it was Hermione, so it must be – then it was the longest hour of Harry’s life. He wouldn’t have been surprised if it had lasted a week. But finally Voldemort got tired of playing cat and mouse with them. Harry wasn’t relieved, because he was pretty sure this only meant worse to come.

If there could be worse. But one thing Harry had learned was that there could always be worse.

So there Harry stood, fighting for Hermione who was bound once again to the gravestone, yet knowing he was going to fail, standing opposite the Dark Lord who had oppressed his parents’ generation. Sweat slicked his grip on his wand and fear made his knees knock. But his wand stayed in his hand and his hand stayed steady.

 “And now, Harry, we duel.”

“Accio wand!” he shouted, the last spell he’d learnt still vivid in his mind. But at the same time Voldemort said, “Caedo!” The spells met. Strange things happened.

Priori Incantatum, Hermione told him much later and they wondered why Ollivander had never mentioned the possibility despite knowing what wand Harry had. At the time all he knew was that somehow he was still alive and that even Voldemort was scared by the strange beam of light that connected their wands, by the singing phoenix song and the shimmering golden shield.

Harry bent his mind to forcing those beads of light toward Voldemort, desperately sure that whatever would happen when one hit a wand could not be good. Voldemort, for the first time, looked uncertain of his own power. “Lucius!” he shouted. “Your wand!” At his wobble in concentration Harry got the beads a good deal closer to him, but Mr Malfoy’s wand came soaring through the strange gold field and Voldemort caught it. He aimed it.

Despite his efforts (and he tried, oh he tried), the vicious burning hex was enough distraction that Harry lost control. The first bead hit his wand. It exploded. Harry shrieked, his world blood and pain and splinters, as the magic drove his wand into his skin. He beat the pain back and found himself on his knees, aching, bleeding hands held out in front of him, blood dripping down his face, and Voldemort smiling down at him triumphantly. “So ends the boy hero.”

“No!” Hermione shrieked from somewhere beyond the glittering shield. Harry raised his hands in futile defence.

 “Potter!” came a desperate shout in an unexpected voice as Voldemort snarled a curse. “Catch!”

The wand Snape threw sailed through the shield and Harry instinctively reached out to catch it, closing his fingers around it with a spasm of pain but holding onto it grimly, knowing this was his only chance. “Protego!” The shield blazed in front of him, turning back Voldemort’s spell, but only just. It bounced onto the golden field which shattered in a splatter of phoenix notes and left Harry and Voldemort once more exposed. Hermione darted forward. Voldemort’s eyes narrowed.

Spinning wildly as the Death Eaters closed in, Harry pointed Hermione’s wand at them, Hermione at his back, holding onto it with both hands to prevent the blood from loosening his grip, waiting for the first attack.

“So, Severus,” Voldemort snarled. “It is true, then. Dumbledore’s spy is truly Dumbledore’s man.”

Snape threw his white mask to the ground and trod on it. The snapping of it sounded frighteningly clear in the sudden stillness. “Yes,” he said simply, and came to stand beside Harry.

Erasmus wakes in the dark, gasping against the night demons. The lingering sense of failure almost overwhelms him: he knows, with bitter certainty, that somewhere in his lost past he has failed so utterly that the shadow of it haunts him even here where he is groping in the mists of lost memory. “It was just a nightmare,” someone whispers, and there is the touch of a hand on his cheek. Erasmus relaxes a little as Mrs Granger gently smoothes his hair, sitting on the bed beside him and looking down at him, but he knows that it wasn’t just a nightmare. That somewhere in the depths of his amnesiac mind some small part of him holds onto secrets of who he was and what he was. That he has failed, failed so bitterly that maybe he deserves to be here, lost and confused and hurting.

Some instinct turns his eyes to Harry. Hermione is in the other boy’s bed, pressed up against his side, using his chest as a pillow with her arm over his waist while he holds onto her like a security blanket, both of them asleep but clutching onto each other desperately even so.

Erasmus casts a wary look at Mrs Granger, for he knows parents as angry figures that children have to be careful not to enrage. She reads his silent Don’t you mind? and sighs, though she continues to run her hand through his hair. “No, I’m not angry. Sometimes it’s the only way they can sleep. I don’t pretend to understand what they’ve been through, what any of you have been through. All I can do is be here for you and pray that it’s enough. But I hope, Erasmus, you never have to understand the terrible experience of being a parent who knows her child is in pain and yet is unable to do anything to help.”

You do help, he almost says. You and Mr Granger, this place... It’s like the one safe place in the whole world.

But he doesn’t know how to say any of that, so he just clutches at her hand and holds onto it the way Harry holds Hermione, and falls asleep with her at his side.

-

Harry has no real objection to the regimen of study Hermione finds necessary. Firstly because it’s Hermione asking him to do it, yes. But also because he will never be found weak again.

The TriWizard Tournament found him wanting, then Voldemort found him wanting. There is strength in knowledge, protection in knowledge. Harry would rather never have anything to do with magic again, knowing in too much detail just what magic is capable of, but he also knows too well that magic is a part of who he is and he can never truly escape it. If he can’t escape then the only thing for him to do is to learn everything he can so that he can protect himself and Hermione. Ignorance is weakness. Harry can’t afford weakness.

He stares at a Potions textbook, looking unseeingly at a list of ingredients while the rustle of Hermione’s page-turning seems to fill the world. “Where do you think he is?” There are two people in his world he has to protect above all others and yet he can only protect Hermione. He can’t even find Snape.

Hermione lifts her eyes from her book and watches him, biro paused on paper. “I don’t know. But Dumbledore says he’s safe and he has yet to actually lie to you.”

“He lies to Erasmus.”

The words hang between them. Hermione drops her eyes to her book and silence reigns. “Yes,” she says finally. “He does. But he doesn’t lie to you and you’re the one he told.”

“Erasmus knows he does it, you know.”

Silence again. Out in the garden a pair of blackbirds bicker briefly. “I know,” she says quietly.

“What are we going to do?”

Hermione drops her pen and sits back in her chair, shoulders slumping in unwilling defeat. She meets his eyes squarely. “I don’t know.”

-

Erasmus remembers dementors. Why? Why should he remember dementors? He’s only fourteen, he couldn’t have been in prison. But maybe he was, maybe he’s a terrible, terrible person. Maybe he’s a murderer and that’s why Dumbledore won’t tell him the truth. He tried to kill himself, after all; why couldn’t he have killed someone else?

He tries to remember that Professor McGonagall thinks she knows who he is, that she seems to like him anyway, but he doesn’t remember it very well. That is only one small thought that is buried under all his fears, under the knowledge that his mum didn’t like him, under the certainty that he failed at something important, under the fact that he has no memory.

“I’m scared,” he whispers into the darkness one night.

“Scared of what?” He has his eyes closed, so Harry’s voice is a whisper out of the shadows, not attached to a real person. He doesn’t have to fear what a voice thinks of him.

“All the things I don’t know. Am I a murderer, am I a demon, did I do something bad? Did I deserve to be hurt? Maybe I deserve all this, I just don’t remember it.”

“No one deserves this. No one.”

He rolls over to look at him. “But what if I do?”

Harry stares at the ceiling. “You can’t have done anything worse than me.”

A familiar flare of anger burns inside him. “How would you know?”

Harry looks at him and in his eyes are Avada Kedavras and death. “I’m only fourteen and I’ve killed three people.”

Erasmus flinches. Not from fear of Harry but from the horror embedded in the other boy’s voice. From the pain and the aching loss of innocence in his face. From hurt for Harry.

Even when he closes his eyes Harry’s words echo in his head and he curls into a ball because he’s so tired of all this hurt all around him. I’m only fourteen and I’ve killed three people.

They’re only fourteen. The world shouldn’t hurt this much.

-

It’s almost disturbing, Harry thinks, the way Dumbledore watches Erasmus. Like a hunger, a desperate need for something undefined. Erasmus doesn’t notice, intent on just getting out of the room before Dumbledore can speak to him. But Hermione sees it and she exchanges a look with Harry before she follows silently after Erasmus.

“You should tell him the truth,” Harry says. Dumbledore doesn’t flinch, just meets Harry’s eyes with a look of innocence as if he has no idea what Harry could possibly be talking about. “You should.”

“This is best for him.”

“Says who?” Harry asks fiercely. “Him? Or you?”

“He is in no fit state to make these judgements, Harry.”

“Can’t you give him the chance?”

But Dumbledore’s face is set and Harry knows there are no words he can possibly say that will change the man’s mind. “I will not fail him. Not this time. Never again.”

Harry files the words away for future consultation with Hermione and moves on. He knows he won’t change Dumbledore’s mind but fights on anyway. He has always fought impossible battles – Voldemort would still be alive had he not. “He’s the same age as me. It seems like you respect me a whole lot more than you do him.”

“You are you.” Harry stiffens but Dumbledore continues, “Not the Boy Who Lived, not Voldemort’s Bane, but Harry Potter. Despite my earlier reluctance to admit it, you are no longer a child.”

“And Erasmus?”

“He is fourteen years old, with no memory, no family, and no home. Would you have me put his life in his hands? I have no desire to control him, Harry, but I cannot in good conscience leave him to make the decisions which will affect the rest of his life when he is in no condition to make sensible choices.”

Harry can only think it’s a really really good thing Dumbledore doesn’t know about the whole suicide episode. “What about us? We can help him.”

“You do not have all the facts.”

“Then tell him! Tell us! Tell someone!”

But he won’t, Harry can see that. He thinks he’s right and Harry doesn’t know enough to be able to tell him he’s wrong and have him actually believe it. He feels sick, because he knows how much Erasmus hates not knowing who he is, he suspects how scary it is to not know who you are. There is a wrong here that Harry wants to right, but he doesn’t have the power. He’s failing again, too weak again. Found wanting. Again.

“I hope you know what you’re doing,” he says quietly.

“So do I, Harry.” Dumbledore looks weary and beaten down. “So do I.”

The conversation is over and Harry stands up. But he looks down at Dumbledore, sitting old and tired and strangely unmagical on the Granger’s Muggle couch, and he says, “I won’t let you do to him what you did to me.”

-

It is Hermione who convinces Erasmus to at least hear what Dumbledore wants him to say, very reluctantly and against his will. He doesn’t sit down, he stays at the door, ready to run, ready to escape, and Dumbledore watches him like a hunter would watch a wild animal, very careful not to make sudden moves and scare him away.

“I know my presence brings you no pleasure,” the man says gently, “but I thought you should like this. Harry’s antipathy to magic notwithstanding, you will require one in the future.”

It is a wand, dark-wooded and slender. Darker stains mar the wood, making him shiver in unexplained horror as he lifts his hand to his nose as if he thinks it is bleeding. There is no blood and he can’t remember why he thought there would be. No blood, just that wand, still and silent and watching. Erasmus looks at it sitting in Dumbledore’s hand and makes no attempt to reach out. “Where did you get it?”

“It was entrusted to me at one point for safe-keeping. But I believe it may suit you.”

He remembers wands. He remembers bright lights and bright pains. No faces, just the light and the pain. And the wands. An explosion, bright and fierce; he lifts his hand to cover a scar that isn’t on his cheek. He remembers wands. Wands only bring pain. Harry knows that, Hermione knows that, Erasmus knows that. Dumbledore doesn’t know it. But Dumbledore doesn’t know anything. “I don’t want it.”

The expression on Dumbledore’s face is unreadable. Erasmus would like him better if he showed his anger, like Harry does. Just once, to prove that he’s human. So that Erasmus isn’t left waiting for the bomb to explode. “Then I shall leave it with Mrs Granger until such time as you feel you do want it.”

“I don’t want it!” Erasmus shouts at him. Why doesn’t he ever listen? “I don’t want it, I’ll never want it!”

He knows what wands can do. He doesn’t want that power. He doesn’t want that pain.

-

“Crucio!”

Harry’s attempt at a shield of course made no difference – the curse struck Snape in the chest. He staggered and went down to his knees with a strangled scream, but Voldemort lifted the curse so swiftly that he didn’t actually fall.

“Stop it!” Harry shrieked.

“Remember that pain, Severus? You’ve tasted it often enough before. And yet you betray me!” Several Death Eaters stepped forward as if expecting to share in the blood and Voldemort snapped, “Back! I will deal with him!”

Harry tried to step in front of the next curse but Snape shoved him back into Hermione and took it. He held out against the pain better than either Harry or Hermione, but even so he gave way to a full-throated scream that made Harry’s hair stand on end. “Leave him alone!” He and Hermione tugged at Snape, trying to pull him away.

Voldemort didn’t even seem to notice them, but he lifted the curse. “What do you have to say for yourself, Severus?” he demanded of the man lying sprawled on the ground.

Snape stared up at him. “I hate you,” he said, his voice low and hoarse. Harry shoved Hermione’s wand at her and picked up Snape’s, then the pair of them helped Snape shakily to his feet, Harry leaving damp bloodstains on his sleeve.

Voldemort absently shot a Crucio at Harry, and for a moment he spasmed in incredible pain. “You betray me for this boy, this brat cowering on his knees before me in fear and snivelling terror.”

Snape’s face was pale and wan but the word ‘snivelling’ jerked his backbone. “Yes,” he said, head high, without remorse.

“Hold them!” Voldemort snarled, and hands gripped onto Harry and Hermione, holding them in place even as they fought desperately. While Snape was cursed. Cursed and cursed and cursed.

“You’re killing him!” Hermione shouted. “Leave him alone!”

“Stop it!” Harry yelled.

Nobody listened. Voldemort glared and cursed. The Death Eaters laughed. Snape spasmed and screamed until the blood tricked from his nose and ears, dribbled out of his lips from his bitten tongue.

“Look at your protector, Harry,” Voldemort sneered. “Weak. Pathetic. And he thought he could save you from me.”

Harry didn’t understand why his most-hated teacher had tried to save his life. But the ball Snape had given him bounced against his leg in his pocket and Snape’s wand was still gripped in his sticky, bloody hand.

Snape lifted his head weakly off the ground. “I... will not... bow to... you.”

“You will beg me for life,” Voldemort promised him.

“You will not have the boy.”

“I already have him.” Voldemort smiled and turned his wand toward Harry. “I have him. Crucio!”

Harry braced himself for the unbraceable. But Snape was there. Snape was in front of him, taking the curse, knocking him out of the hands that held him as people shouted in confusion. Snape snarled “Run!”

Erasmus's new wand disappears without reference to him. He doesn't care; in fact he's glad. Let someone else take responsibility for the horrid thing. It's hard enough being here and being alive. He doesn't need more problems. Life provides enough of its own...

He just wants a sandwich. That’s all.

But the jam jar lid refuses to come off and Erasmus’s frustration grows in startling leaps. Everything is wrong in his life and now a stupid lid chooses to defy him? He smashes the jar on the floor in sudden rage and jumps at the sound of shattering glass. Then he stares at the mess he’s made, feeling sick to his stomach. He’s done it again, let everything overwhelm him, given in. How can he expect to control his world if he can’t control himself?

He crouches on the floor, staring at the broken jar, watching the light dance over the sharp corners on thick-soled feet, watching the oozing red strawberry jam slide down the glass like thick blood dripping off a glass knife. He reaches out slowly and picks up a large shard of glass, holding it close to his skin, watching the play of light, aware of the pulse beating in his wrist. Wouldn’t it be better if he just—

“Erasmus?”

He starts, drops the glass with a clatter, and tries to swallow, licking suddenly dry lips. He tries to say “Hello, Hermione,” but his voice won’t work.

“Here, let me help.” She goes on her knees beside him and begins to clean up his mess.

“I’m stupid!” he blurts out. “An idiot!” He shakes, he trembles, with the thought of what he could have done if she hadn’t come in. He doesn’t want to die, he really doesn’t want to die. It’s just that it would be so easy, so much easier than this. Than the fear and loss and pain and empty echoing halls in his head where there should be memories. He’s shamefully glad she came in but he hates her for seeing him like this.

She sits back on her haunches and studies him silently. He can’t meet her eyes and pretends to be fascinated by the task of picking up glass.

“You need to stop holding on to what you’ve lost and start realising what you’ve got.” It’s possibly the longest sentence she’s ever said to him.

He laughs, harshly. “What, like you do?” She’s as lost as he is. He’s seen her fear, he knows she hardly leaves the house. He’s a mess but he’s not the only one. That’s not as comforting as it used to be.

She blinks, nothing more. “I have Harry and my parents. I’m alive.”

“And what have I got?” he demands, jealous. And for all he’s bitter and biting he wants a real answer, is desperate for a real answer – but believes there is none.

“You’re alive. You’re safe. And you’ve got us. Maybe you don’t want us but you’ve got us all the same.”

He looks at her. “It’s not that easy.”

She shrugs, and for a moment she looks like Harry. “Nothing worthwhile ever is.”

-

 “Bye, Mizz Carter.” Harry closes the door behind her and heaves a sigh of relief.

“You don’t trust her, do you?” Mrs Granger says, and he spins, startled and raising his hands defensively before hastily lowering them. “No, you trust her not to attack you,” she acknowledges before he can protest. “But you’re only willing to talk to her because she doesn’t know ‘Harry Potter’ means anything more than a teenage boy with issues. And you’d never tell her the truth.”

Harry shrugs. It’s true enough.

She sighs. “I wish your life had been easier,” she says softly. He holds very still and looks at her. In her eyes he sees her regret at his lack of trust and her knowledge that it can’t be helped. “I am afraid,” she whispers, “that you will never be able to trust anyone new again.”

Most of Hogwarts hated him for being champion and only Hermione believed he hadn’t put his own name in the Goblet. Ron wasn’t speaking to him. Moody, whom he trusted, sent him to Voldemort and wasn’t even really Moody. Harry’s trust has always been a desperate sort because he’s never been loved, he’s never had anyone to trust. He wanted to, so he put up with the Heir of Slytherin nonsense, he put up with being hated for being champion, he’s never objected while the wizarding world oscillates between loving him and loathing him. But this is too much. He risked everything to trust them and they betrayed him: he will not give them that power over him ever again. In his most desperate hour only two people stood by him. Only two.

Tears wink in Mrs Granger’s eyes and she pulls him into a hug, holding onto him with some of that desperation Harry remembers too well. “Why do you trust us?” she whispers.

“I don’t. I mean I didn’t. But Hermione did. Does. And I trust Hermione.” He pats her back awkwardly. “Hermione is my family. That makes you my family.”

-

The dementors close around Erasmus, ragged cloaks dragging shadow in their wake, sucking all the warmth out of the air, all the goodness out of his world, drowning him in despair. He’s holding a wand and he points it at them and splutters “Expecto... expect... patron...” But his voice dies under the weight of horror pressing down on him and the wand falls from his hand. His knees buckle and the dementors swarm around him, giants in soul-destroying black. He stares up as the nearest dementor reaches down to him in parody of a sweet embrace, and it pushes back its cowl to administer the Kiss and Erasmus screams.

The dementor wears his face.

He wakes from fear into fear, knowing someone else is in his bed. There is presence and warmth and the feel of a body lying beside him. He knows it. He knows too that it is Harry, for Harry is unmistakeable.

So Erasmus lies there, still and stiff and afraid because every instinct, every faded memory, tells him that things strange and unusual lead only to pain. But Harry only whimpers in echo of Erasmus’s own nightmare and twists his fingers into the bedspread. There is comfort in Harry’s weakness, because it lessens Erasmus’s own. “It’s okay,” he whispers. “It’s okay, Harry.”

Harry stiffens, then his eyes half-open; Erasmus can see the faint gleam of them in the dark. “ ‘Rasmus?”

“You were having a nightmare.”

Harry nods absently. “So were you,” he says sleepily.

Erasmus doesn’t know anything about brothers. But he thinks this is what having a brother must be like. He smiles; slowly, as if he’s forgotten how to do it because it’s been so long. But he smiles.

So they sleep back to back as if defending each other from the world and Erasmus’s dreams are calm and quiet and restful.

-

The kitchen is empty but the red glow of sunrise diffusing through the window tells Harry all he needs to know. He makes a pot of tea and pours two cups, taking them out to the front door. Outside, on the step, Hermione sits. She takes the cup with a grateful murmur and Harry sits down beside her.

They can’t see the actual sunrise from where they sit, too many buildings and trees in the way, but low clouds fill the sky and make the whole world glow with rosy hue, like a rose-coloured filter on his glasses, burnishing Hermione’s hair and waking warmth in the concrete and turning the bare tree limbs to fire. It’s too like blood for Harry’s taste. He’s had enough of blood.

He and Hermione sit there as the sun rises, as the red turns to a gold just as vivid, just as world-filling, as if the whole world is alight with molten gold, as if King Midas has been let loose in it. Hermione’s skin glows with it as if she’s made of living gold and Crookshanks’s fur blazes orange.

“Mum used to wake me up for sunrise,” Hermione says quietly. “She always said a sunrise is a new beginning. That a whole new day lay ahead of us filled with adventure and interest and the unknown. She made it something magical. I’m trying to believe that, Harry, I’m trying to remember how it felt. I don’t think I can.”

In the oak behind the house a thrush sings his heart out in greeting to the morning. They sit in silence.

The door opens and Mr Granger looks down at them. “You two do realise teenagers are supposed to stay in bed until noon, I trust?” They both shrug. “Never mind. Come in, Mum’s cooking breakfast.”

Harry slides his fingers into Hermione’s as they stand and she looks at him. “Maybe we can’t believe in today,” he says. “But maybe we can believe in tomorrow.”

She looks at him. Looks at him, as the golden glow fades out of the world and leaves them lost in reality. She almost smiles. “I might be able to do that.”

-

The rain pounds down onto the pavements as if trying to drown the world. Erasmus doesn’t like it. Hermione does, to his surprise; she actually smiles. Harry doesn’t care about the rain, as if so long as it's not a dangerous environment it isn’t important enough for him to care. As if he’s too used to discomfort to complain. As if he doesn’t even see that there could be a reason for complain.

Erasmus pulls his yellow raincoat close around his neck but Harry and Hermione let their hoods fall back and spin around laughing like children, letting the rain splash onto their faces and soak their hair. He watches them spin and feels a pang of envy. Envy? For their childish stunts? But he does, he envies them. He wishes he could let go like that, relax like that. But he doesn’t know how to join them, so he just trudges along behind them and smiles faintly when Harry stomps in a puddle and splashes Hermione so that she squeals.

It’s almost... fun.

The concept is alien, but intriguing. Welcome.

Still, it’s good to get back to the house, get out of the rain. It’s good to be home.

Erasmus freezes in the act of hanging up his raincoat. Home? Since when? Okay, so this house is the closest he has to a place to belong, but still, home? In his confusion Harry and Hermione get ahead of him, leave him alone in the cold, empty hallway. Slowly, confused, he goes to change out of his wet things, and when he finishes, pulling on dry socks, he’s no less confused but a bit more accepting.

When he comes out of his room the house is silent even though it’s Mr Granger’s day to be home early. Where is everybody? Erasmus searches the house, growing more confused and maybe a little scared. Have they abandoned him? Have they decided he’s too much trouble and they don’t want anything more to do with him?

But behind the door he’s never been through at the back of the house he hears a strange noise, almost like a motor. A whirring sound, a clackety-clack. What could it possibly be? And dare he investigate? Maybe this is home now, but it’s not his house. The soft sound of Mr Granger’s chuckle decides him and he pushes the door open – and enters Wonderland. It’s a Lilliputian world, every detail perfect – and miniature. He stops and stares.

A train like the Hogwarts Express, only in rifleman green instead of red, chugs its way through rolling green hills while Harry, Hermione, and Mr Granger watch over it custodially. Or at least they were watching before Erasmus entered. Now they’re looking at him, and he flinches. But they’re not upset at him for intruding; they drag him around, pointing out details, showing off their little world. And he’s not angry, not resentful, no, he’s fascinated. This miniature reality awes him.

“It’s magic!” he says spontaneously.

Harry, for the first time, gives him a real and genuine smile. “Yes, it is.”

-

So close, so close. But so far.

Magic captured him, held him down. Beside him Hermione sobbed just once in pure despair. Harry struggled weakly against the restraining magic but it only gripped tighter. Painfully tighter. Harry choked on a sob of his own and thought wildly that he would never like magic again.

“Bring them!” Voldemort snapped and the Death Eaters gleefully dragged the three of them back through the graveyard towards their master.

“Sanctuary,” Harry mumbled desperately in a froth of snot and tears and blood, trying to grip the ball in his pocket. “Sanctuary, sanctuary.” But nothing happened.

If he said it often enough would it work, would he be safe?

“Sanctuary.”

He just wanted to be safe.

“Sanctuary.”

Snape bobbed into his vision, blood-matted hair, blood-streaked face. Fear and anger warred in his eyes.

“You shouldn’t have done it, Professor,” Harry said through bloodied lips. He didn’t want Snape to die too.

“I promised,” Snape hissed angrily and then they were separated again.

And dumped in front of Voldemort. Who smiled deeply and scarily so that Harry trembled. Anything that made him that pleased had to be bad.

Harry was still – somehow – gripping Snape’s wand and no one bothered to take it from him. That was how little he mattered. He held on to it, though. Mostly because he’d forgotten how to let go. By this point Harry was clinging to his defiance with his fingertips. He was so tired, so hurting, so scared. If Voldemort had said “Let me kill you now and Hermione goes free” Harry would have been grateful for the offer of death. He didn’t know how much more of this he could take.

“Did you think you could escape?” Voldemort demanded. “No one escapes Lord Voldemort.” His red eyes narrowed. “No one.”

I have. Harry was too tired to say the words but he looked at Voldemort with that knowledge in his eyes and Voldemort glared and grimaced and turned on another victim.

“Why did you betray me, Severus?”

“Because you betrayed me.”

Anger lit Voldemort’s eyes. “Crucio!”

Snape spat up blood. “You betrayed the dream,” he insisted through gritted teeth. “There is no glorious new world under your rule, only blood and death and suffering.”

“Silence!”

Snape coughed, rattling in his chest, but his voice went on, weak and insistent. “You betrayed the dream.”

Hermione tosses in her sleep, features pinched, hands reaching for something lost or warding off some horror.

“I’m here, Hermione,” Harry says. But he doesn’t say ‘it’s okay’ because he can’t lie to her. But he can sit with her, he can help her fight off the night demons.

“Harry?” He looks up into Mrs Granger’s warm, tired eyes. “You should get some sleep.” He shakes his head. “I can sit with her.”

“I’m okay. I don’t mind.”

They’ve had this argument often enough that she doesn’t press it. But she looks down at Hermione, smoothing wayward hair off her daughter’s face, and she says, “You’re a good friend, Harry.”

“I got her into this!” he hisses, barely managing to keep his voice down. Hermione whimpers and he grips her hand.

“You’re getting her out again.”

He looks up at Mrs Granger, up into her face alive with love as she looks down at Hermione, and says the truth: “I don’t think we’ll ever really get out of this.”

There is no surprise in her face. “But at least you have each other.”

“I won’t leave her,” he promises. “No matter what.” He looks at Hermione, remembers all she’s done for him. “I won’t.”

Mrs Granger’s hand is warm and heavy on his shoulder. “I know.”

-

Mr Granger teaches Erasmus how to make models and he spends happy hours in the smell of glue and paint and plastic. He discovers an unexpected deftness in his fingers, discovers a skill and precision he didn’t know he had. Here is something he can do right, something he has control over. Something he can do.

He doesn’t have Mr Granger’s experienced cleverness, of course, but he can create trees and buildings that look real, more real than Harry or Hermione’s. The first time he realised that, he was scared, scared they would hate him for it, but they both exclaimed over his little barn, investigating every detail and congratulating him without jealousy.

Erasmus feels like he’s spent a lifetime fighting off the darker emotions from all sides, even if he doesn’t remember it, and that now he’s come out of the furious storm into safe harbour.

To his own surprise, he smiles at least once every day.

When Mr Granger gives his barn pride of place in the new landscape, Erasmus thinks he’ll burst with pride. And discovers, with all the awe of an explorer stumbling across a mythical city, that he’s happy. There are still nightmares, there are still a hundred thousand things that are bad and terrible, but down at the very core of him some small kernel of him holds onto joy.

-

“Kids?” The three look up at Mrs Granger, Harry and Hermione from their Snakes and Ladders and Erasmus from the book Harry is quite sure he hasn’t been actually reading. “We have a visitor.” Mrs Granger looks at Hermione. Hermione glances at Harry. He grimaces, but shrugs resigned acceptance. Standing, he gives her a hand up off the floor.

Sirius slinks into the room, looking unsure of his welcome, and all three children wince at the intrusion of magic. In the corner of his eye Harry sees a flicker of silver – or is it a rat’s tail vanishing out of sight? He looks hastily but sees nothing.

“Harry?” Sirius asks. “What’s wrong?”

There are no rats, no silver hands. “Nothing,” he says, and watches Sirius warily. It’s not Sirius’s fault but the first time they met, the main time they met, was because of Pettigrew. Harry can’t separate Sirius and Pettigrew.

Sirius doesn’t want to accept ‘nothing’ but he pretends to anyway. His eyes travel around the room with the instinctive wariness of a hunted fugitive – something Harry understands too well and suddenly he realises that maybe Sirius isn’t so different from him, running from horrors that—

“Who’s that?” Sirius barks suspiciously, glaring at Erasmus.

Harry instinctively moves closer to the other boy as Erasmus tenses, chin lifting in a gesture of scared defiance that reminds Harry too much of Hermione in a graveyard. “Erasmus,” he says. “He’s staying here.” And then, because Sirius’s glare doesn’t let up and Erasmus is shaking and he has to say something, anything, to break them up, “Dumbledore sent him here.”

The fact that Sirius immediately relaxes and dismisses Erasmus as no threat makes Harry angry. Who is Dumbledore that nearly everyone around Harry should think him the arbiter of right? Why why do they listen to him so blindly? Someone should have stood up to him long ago; someone should have saved Harry from his mistakes. But here is Sirius, once Harry’s last hope at family, doing the same as nearly every other adult Harry has ever known. But Harry has a family now. He has Hermione. He has Snape. Mr and Mrs Granger fought Dumbledore for him, they didn’t let Dumbledore take him away. He doesn’t need Sirius.

Honestly, Sirius isn’t a big part of his life. Harry only met him last year, saw him face-to-face once, wrote him a few letters, spoke to him in the fire. Sometimes Sirius seemed hardly more than a dream of hope for a brighter future. Harry’s only hope for a brighter future.

But Harry doesn’t need him for that future. It’s that realisation that lets him relax a little. Because it’s true, he doesn’t need him. Which means he can take the time to sort things out in his head. He can do this properly.

Sometimes it seems like all he knows of Sirius is defined in negatives. He’s not a criminal after all. He’s not the traitor who got Harry’s parents killed. He’s not the one who’s going to rescue him from the Dursleys.

He’s not the only adult who belongs to Harry.

And that freedom means that Harry can afford to take the time to figure out who Sirius really is. If he wants to. Harry looks at this man, this stranger, and he doesn’t think he owes it to the parents he never knew. He doesn’t think he owes it to Sirius. But he thinks he may just owe it to himself.

-

 “Letter for Erasmus,” Mrs Granger says, holding it out across the breakfast table. He hesitates then puts his toast down and takes it. The thick parchment crackles under his fingers and he almost drops it in loathing. He doesn’t want anything to do with them. He’s almost happy here in this house, why do the magic people keep chasing him? It’s like a nightmare in which some creature is hunting him and he can never escape, but this is real life and the hunter won’t give up, he’ll never be free. He can’t wake up.

Harry gives him a small nod of reassurance and Erasmus sighs but breaks the seal on the back of the letter, wondering absently what the postman thought of the envelope.

Dear Erasmus,

I hope you are well, or at least as well as can be expected.

Professor Dumbledore is determined you shall once more attend Hogwarts when you are further recovered and so I will send a book to assist you in getting up to speed. I understand the Headmaster has restored to you a wand, so there will be no need to find you one before your return to schooling. If, however, there is any other way in which I can be of assistance, please don’t hesitate to contact me and I will do all in my power to be of use. Please relay my regards to Miss Granger and Mr Potter.

Sincerely,

Minerva McGonagall

Return to Hogwarts? Erasmus shrinks into himself, trying not to panic. He doesn’t want to go back to Hogwarts! He doesn’t want to go back to all that magic, all that pain. He likes it here. Why won’t Dumbledore leave him alone? Why won’t he just let Erasmus stay here when he’s almost safe, safer than he’s ever been? He just wants to stay here.

-

No one asks to see Erasmus’s letter, or even asks what is in it. That’s what Harry likes about the Granger house, that people are there for you if you want them but leave you alone if you don’t. At the Dursleys, at the Burrow, someone would have asked. And while Harry appreciates the Weasleys and is grateful to them, he is too self-contained to be comfortable with that way of life. Maybe if he’d grown up in a different household things would be different, but... he prefers this way.

It’s like being given the Order of Merlin when Erasmus shows Harry the letter of his own free will.

(They talked about giving Harry the Order of Merlin once, when he was at St Mungo’s begging Hermione to fight for life, fighting for Snape; he asked if Hermione would get one, if Snape would get one. They stopped talking.)

Harry doesn’t ask Erasmus if he’s sure he wants Harry to read the letter. Harry knows about the struggle to let people in and he knows how much the decision costs. He won’t insult Erasmus by questioning him. So he reads it. And frowns a little at a couple of curious wordings but feels a pang of something a little like gratitude and a little like affection that Professor McGonagall would think to remember him and Hermione.

“Why won’t they leave me alone?” Erasmus is sharp, bitter. A violent contrast to his recent softening, a return that Harry doesn’t like.

“McGonagall?” he asks. “Or Dumbledore?”

Erasmus wraps his arms around himself. “Both,” he says very quietly.

Harry re-reads the letter carefully. “Dumbledore won’t,” he says finally. “But maybe she just wants to help. Some people do, you know.”

Erasmus’s head shoots up at that and he gives Harry a hard look. But Harry doesn’t flinch, because it’s true and it’s a truth he sometimes has trouble believing himself. Erasmus can’t hold his eyes and looks away again. Harry’s not meant to hear the whisper of “She can’t help me.”

“Maybe it’s a clue,” Harry says. “You said she thought she knows who you are.” For the first time Erasmus looks actually interested.

-

Professor McGonagall’s promised book arrives via a disgruntled owl that can’t get near the house and flies around the garden until Mr Granger goes out and takes its burden. Erasmus unwraps the package cautiously. It’s a potions textbook, second hand from the wear on the cover, and he knows a flare of anger that everything he owns, from family to memory, is second hand. But Professor McGonagall is someone he almost trusts and he doesn’t think she would have done this without a reason, so he opens the book. It’s been written in, there are notes made in the margins in a spiky hand. Harry frowns and looks closer. “Isn’t that...?”

Hermione stares at the book. She stares at Erasmus. She pulls out her wand (Harry and Erasmus both flinch) and stares at that. Then she races out of the room.

Erasmus half stands, but Harry pulls him back down and shakes his head. “You won’t catch up to her. She’ll come back when she’s found what she’s looking for.”

“But what did she do that for?”

Harry shrugs, as if this is as normal for Hermione as reading three books a day. “She figured something out. She’ll tell us when she’s sure.” He smiles, a little wry, certainly fond. “You’ll get used to it.”

Erasmus can’t help the warm feeling of acceptance that comes from the assumption he’ll have the time to do so.

Hermione comes back into the room in a rush, holding the wand Dumbledore left for Erasmus in one hand and her own wand in the other. She stops just in front of the door, so suddenly she nearly trips over her own feet, and she stares at Erasmus as if she’s never seen him before. “I know who you are,” she whispers. “I know who you are.”

They stare at her. She meets Harry’s eyes. And Harry swears, like a sharp slap, and Erasmus and Hermione wince. “He couldn’t have. He wouldn’t.”

“You know his magic is strange,” Hermione says.

And Harry closes his eyes in anguished acceptance, swaying under the influence of heavy shock.

“What?” Erasmus demands, scared. “What is it? Who am I?”

Hermione looks at him, and the look in her eyes makes him shiver. “Severus Snape.”

-

Snape screamed under the Cruciatus curse, a hoarse animal howl that seemed to go on forever. And the funny thing was, it was almost worse to hear him scream than it had been to hear Hermione because Snape was an adult, Snape was always in charge, and if he was screaming that meant he was none of the things Harry was used to him being and that was one too many changes, almost enough to tip Harry over the edge into madness.

He put his hands over his ears, Snape’s wand jabbing him in the side of the head, and the scream went on. On and on and on while Hermione shuddered beside him and Voldemort laughed. Laughed. Who could laugh while that scream was scraping down Harry’s bones?

Finally the screaming stopped.

Harry lifted his head.

Snape lay there, still and white under the too-red blood.

Voldemort laughed. “Is he dead? Potter!” The word was a whip. “Tell me if he’s dead!”

Harry stared at him stupidly, hearing the words but almost failing to comprehend. Then Voldemort pointed his wand at Hermione and clarity hurriedly returned. Slowly, cautiously, Harry crawled the painfully long trip of two whole metres to where Snape lay.

He still held onto the wand, but Voldemort didn’t care. He wasn’t a threat. The Death Eaters just laughed him as he tried to rouse Snape. “Professor? Professor!” He shook the man’s shoulder desperately. He couldn’t have gotten Snape killed. Not another death. “Professor!”

The faintest of moans, and Harry didn’t even notice the tears dripping down his cheeks. “He’s alive.”

Voldemort smirked and launched into a lecture to his worshipping disciples while Harry wiped futilely at Snape’s blood-drenched face with his still-bleeding hands. The healed gash on his wrist tingled.

Harry stilled. And then slowly he stumbled through the words Hermione had said earlier. Snape started under his hands when he began, but he stared up at Harry and mouthed the words in echo until Harry had finished and felt that same tingling healing as before. Though he was too weak to speak, the look in Snape’s eyes was clear: Potter, what have you done?

Hedwig’s trip to Hogwarts must have been her fastest flying ever, because their angry letter to Dumbledore brings him much sooner than anyone expected. All three of them wince at the sudden blaze of unwanted magic. Anger flares up inside Erasmus’s chest and he struggles to hold it in because he thinks if he lets go he will cry and if he starts crying he’s not sure he’ll ever stop. “Is it true?”

“Erasmus—”

“Is it true?” he shrieks.

Dumbledore opens his mouth, closes it, closes his eyes, and sinks down onto the couch. “Yes.”

Erasmus leaps to his feet and strides around the room. He was sure, sure Hermione was right, but he’d hoped that somehow, this once, she was wrong. He doesn’t know how to deal with it, so he doesn’t, he just paces around as if moving fast enough can keep him ahead of the revelation. “Why? Why?”

“It was the only way to protect you.”

If he gets much angrier he’s going to burst. “To take away everything I am and leave me with nothing? How is that protecting me!”

“They were going to have you Kissed.” There is real and genuine horror in Dumbledore’s voice and Erasmus pulls up short. He can’t bring himself to look at Dumbledore, but he meets Harry’s eyes. He hasn’t had time to deal with this yet, to realise just what it means to be Severus Snape. To realise it means he was a Death Eater. Sentenced to death. Evil. Harry’s eyes narrow as if he’s reading that thought in Erasmus’s face and Erasmus also remembers that Snape is one of the few people Harry ever talks about. If Harry likes him, he can’t be evil. That is more of a relief than he wants to examine right at this moment.

He summons the courage to look at Dumbledore. “You had no right.”

“I had to protect you.”

“You killed me!”

“Erasmus—”

“No, I’m not!” His voice rises hysterically. “Apparently I’m Severus! But he doesn’t exist anymore because you took that away from him!”

“Had I not acted you would have been Kissed—”

It is the look on his face that silences Dumbledore, not anything he says, because Erasmus just stares at him. Stares and stares and stares. And then finally he says, “If I’d been Kissed I would have had my soul taken. How is what you did any different?”

-

Harry stares at the two wands on the coffeetable, Snape’s and Hermione’s, Erasmus’s and Hermione’s. Matching wands with matching stains – Harry’s bloody hand prints.

Snape is alive. Alive.

Harry tries to reconcile the fact that one of the very very few people he actually trusts is the fourteen-year-old boy pacing around the Grangers’ living room in hopeless, useless anger. It’s difficult to do. Erasmus is the lonely, angry boy who is only just learning that the world doesn’t have to be entirely made of pain and fear. Snape is a bitter, angry man who stood by Harry when no one but Hermione was there to support him. Erasmus is not Severus. Not to Harry.

But even if he doesn’t believe it in his heart he knows it in his head and one final barrier crumbles. Erasmus is a fellow refugee from the world. But Snape, Snape gave up everything for Harry. If Erasmus is Snape, he can be trusted. If Erasmus is Snape, he is Harry’s. And Harry has so little that he defends that poor hoard fiercely.

“You should have told him,” he tells Dumbledore in a fierce undertone.

Dumbledore looks pained, as if he never doubted that Harry would understand once he knew the truth. But Harry has been that boy, ‘protected’ from the realities of his world, sheltered and shielded. Lied to. Lies only make finding out the truth hurt worse. A hard truth is, in the long run, kinder than an easy lie. And Harry will not, can not, understand another way of seeing the world.

If Dumbledore tried to explain about preserving innocence, about protecting childhoods, about trying to let children be children, Harry wouldn’t understand. Harry has never been a child as Dumbledore understands the term. And so they stand on opposite sides of an uncrossable gulf and shout to each other as the wind whips their words away.

Harry stares at Dumbledore and, for the first time, realises that he will probably never understand the man, however he tries.

It’s almost a relief. He doesn’t have to understand. All he has to do is protect what is his. That means Hermione. That means Snape.

That means Erasmus.

-

“Erasmus—Severus. Please, I did it for the best.”

“Will my memories come back?” Erasmus isn’t sure what he wants the answer to be. This great vast hole of a memory isn’t comfortable, but he’s not sure he wants to remember Severus. He’s not sure he likes Severus very much. And having the memories of an adult while trapped in a child’s body wouldn’t be much fun. Still, the gaping holes in his brain are no fun at all.

“Most probably not,” Dumbledore admits. “You must understand, I never intended for you to know the truth. I wished you to have a second chance at life, a happy one this time.”

Erasmus gives him an incredulous look. Happy? With no memories and no knowledge of who he is? Did this man ever actually think his plan through?

“I wanted only for you to be safe. In retrospect, leaving you with Miss Granger and Mr Potter was not a wise plan for the purposes of keeping your identity a secret, but I knew they would protect you, perhaps even help you. I wanted you safe. Nothing more. Even if you hate me, even if you never speak to me again, I will be satisfied so long as you are safe.”

Never speaking to him again sounds like a great idea to Erasmus, but even without Severus’s memories he knows the man well enough to know that isn’t going to last, no matter how much he might wish it.

“Why?” That is the most pressing question, isn’t it? Of all the options, why do this to him? Why turn him into this?

Dumbledore’s hand goes unconsciously to his left forearm. “You bore Voldemort’s Mark.”

burning, aching, angry skull

Erasmus looks down. His hand has done the same as Dumbledore’s.

“As long as you bore that Mark no one would ever accept you. You would be Kissed or, at best, kept in Azkaban for the rest of your life.” Dementors, reaching for him in his dreams; Erasmus shudders. “There is no way to remove the Mark. Therefore the only way to be rid of it was to return you to a time before you had it.”

Erasmus stares at him incredulously. “You could do a permanent de-aging but not get rid of a tattoo?”

“He bound it to your soul, Severus.” Dumbledore closes his eyes, pain in his face. “He bound it to your very soul. It was damaging enough that it was there, to remove it would—I would have been better to kill you.”

“So why didn’t you?” Erasmus mutters.

Dumbledore’s eyes open wide, he stares at Erasmus. “Severus, I couldn’t.”

“Erasmus,” Erasmus says. He’s not Severus. He never will be again.

“Erasmus, yes. But this was the only way to remove the Mark without destroying you. There are many things I have done wrong but for this I do not apologise.”

Erasmus wraps his arms around himself and wishes he could just disappear. When he speaks his voice comes from very far away. “I don’t remember and I’m never going to remember. You took that away from me.”

-

The atmosphere in the house when Dumbledore leaves is stifling. No one talks. In deference to Erasmus, maybe, but Harry really thinks they’re all just too scared to put anything into words. If they put it into words it will become real. If they face the dragon in the room it will turn on them. If they talk about it they will have to believe it is true.

Even Mr and Mrs Granger are silent. They know who Snape was from Hermione’s letters home from school. They know who Snape is from Hermione telling them a little about the graveyard and from Harry’s fight to free him. And they know all too well from being here in this house that Erasmus has enough to worry about without confirmation Dumbledore’s been lying all along. Without needing to be a forty-year-old man in a fourteen-year-old’s body.

Dumbledore, Harry thinks with a sullen, tired anger, thinks about What Is Best, all the time, for everybody. But he never thinks about what people have to live through as a result.

And he lies. He lied that whole time and never gave them the courtesy of acknowledging it.

Harry feels very very old. The house, worried and upset, presses down on his mind as if it wants to make everything better but doesn’t know how and he buries himself in its magic as if in a blanket, cocooning himself off from the world.

And the silence goes on and on.

No one cooks dinner. Mr Granger goes to the fish and chip shop down the road and they all sit silently around the table eating and not meeting each other’s eyes. When Erasmus leaves the table and hides in his room, no one moves for a long time.

-

Erasmus lies on his bed, sobbing into his pillow in desperate, useless anger. Someone sits next to him and he rolls over to look up at Hermione, her face concerned. He angrily shoves the hair out of his face and glowers at her. “Why did he do it? Why would he lie to me?”

She folds her hands in her lap and stares down at them. “I think he loves you,” she says quietly. He flinches and scowls. “I know, but... Have you seen how he looks at Harry, desperate and hoping, lost and confused? He looks at you the same way. Even your name...”

“What about my name?” he demands.

“ 'Erasmus’ means ‘beloved’. Maybe it’s just a coincidence but—”

“But this is Dumbledore.”

“Yes. I think he loves you and Harry, he really does, but he’s been in charge of the world so long he doesn’t know how to be in charge of people, he doesn’t know what to do with love.”

“So he just messes us up.”

Hermione purses her lips a moment, then meets his eyes. “Everyone messes up the people they love. Dumbledore... just does it on a grander scale.”

“I’m not going to forgive him.”

He expects a lecture, pointing out all the reasons why he should do just that, but Hermione nods. “No,” she agrees, and there is in her face a fierce, implacable certainty. Not anger or hatred, too cold and rational for those emotions, yet somehow scarier for that calm, detached determination. She has decided, carefully and for all the right reasons, to feel this way.

Erasmus is glad he’s on her side. Glad, too, that she agrees with him. One small knot in his stomach starts to unwind.

Hermione watches him with calm, steady eyes. “Understanding,” she tells him, “is not agreement. And it is not forgiveness.”

-

“We discovered that someone does know who Erasmus is,” Harry tells Mrs Carter.

“You’ve found out who he is?” she asks in delight.

“We can’t tell you,” he says immediately. “It’s too dangerous.” If the wizarding world found out, if someone discovered that Severus Snape was still around, was hiding in a vulnerable fourteen-year-old boy... Harry doesn’t like to think what would happen. He’s failed Snape once. He’s not going to fail him this time. No matter what Dumbledore says. “But Dumbl—He didn’t tell us. He didn’t tell anyone. He knew who Erasmus really is all along and he didn’t say a word.”

She hears him out in silence as he makes what explanation he is willing to make. “And how does that make you feel?”

He hates that question. Loathes it. Is sick of it. Answers anyway. “Angry.”

“Not hurt?”

“No.” And that is true. Too many lies, too many disappointments. Dumbledore has lost his ability to hurt Harry. He doesn’t know if that pleases her or saddens her.

“Why are you angry?”

“Because he lied. Because he should have told Erasmus the truth. Because he has no right to make our decisions for us.”

She watches him and he knows she hears more than his words but he doesn’t mind because she never uses it against him. She just tries to help. In Harry’s world, that’s rare. “Is that all?”

He pauses, and then he says slowly, “Because he hurt Erasmus.”

-

The three of them, weak and injured, propping each other up, battered and bloody, nevertheless were still standing in defiance of Voldemort and his Death Eaters. It was no wonder half of Voldemort’s lackeys were laughing: they must have looked like no threat at all, like a trio of rabbits defying a pack of lions. If the Death Eaters all acted together the three of them would be dead instantly. But they were laughing, they wanted to play. And so Harry and his friends were still alive.

Cats played with mice in the same way – and sometimes the mice escaped. Harry had a feeling he, however, was the dead kind of mouse.

Voldemort circled them with a dramatic flourish, enjoying himself, drinking in their fear and weakness, revelling in their hopelessness. Then suddenly he pointed his wand at Harry. “Crucio.”

Despite himself, Harry cried out at even the brief pain and the Death Eaters rustled with laughter like it was a show. Snape caught the wand as if fell from his hand and hauled him up with shaky arms.

Harry felt naked without a wand, even though it was no real use, but there was no time for feeling because Voldemort, with the air of a Muggle conjuror with an appreciative audience, aimed an Avada Kedavra at Hermione. Snape pushed her behind him in order to take it himself.

Harry screamed “No!” and thrust out his hands as if he could somehow catch the green light.

A shimmering phoenix shield sprang up in front of them. Voldemort laughed. And then the spell hit the shield. The golden light absorbed the curse. The unblockable curse. The power of it bled into Harry’s hands like fire and he wrapped his fingers around his burning palms.

The Death Eaters stared. Voldemort stared. And Harry realised with slow, dawning wonder in a second that seemed to last a small eternity that he still had his wand. It was just that now it was a part of him.

It takes three days after Dumbledore drops his bombshell in their midst before Erasmus finally meets Harry’s eyes.

He thought things would be better if he ever found out who he was. Somehow he thought that would make everything better. Everything would make sense and he wouldn’t be scared any more, he wouldn’t hurt any more, he wouldn’t be angry any more. He would get his memories back and he’d find out it was all imagination, that his mum loved him and people wanted him and he’d never failed at anything. He would go back to his real life and he would be happy.

He should have known it wouldn’t be like that. Not for him. He doesn’t get a happy ending and he should have known.

But he didn’t. And he was wrong. He knows who he is now but he has no answers, only more questions. No memories, only more fears. What was he, what did he do?

How much of this does he deserve?

So he looks up from his lunch and finally meets Harry’s eyes and he asks, “Who am I?”

“You’re Severus Snape.”

“What does that mean?”

Harry thinks about this carefully. “It means you’re a hero.”

It means, Erasmus knows, that he’s a Death Eater vilified by the world he once lived in, but Harry says he's also a hero. Harry likes Snape.

“I don’t know why you hated me so much but saved my life,” Harry says. “I guess I never will. I don’t care. You never betrayed me, you were there when I needed you.”

It means you’re a hero.

It means, Erasmus thinks in amazement, that he’s not a failure.

-

“It’s true, isn’t it?” Harry asks Hermione. Begs Hermione. “He is Snape.”

“Dumbledore said—”

“Dumbledore lies. All the time.”

That is the moment the last stone in Dumbledore’s pedestal crashes to the ground. When Harry says out loud the truth for the first time. It doesn’t matter why, why Dumbledore lies, why Dumbledore does anything. The truth of it is that he lied. There’s no trust left there. Harry feels sick, because Dumbledore was a hero once, Dumbledore was the Defender of Harry’s World, and if there’s no hero left then Harry has to be his own hero and he’s not that strong, he’s not that brave.

But Dumbledore betrayed his trust. And Harry doesn’t have the ability to put that past him. He’s been betrayed too many times.

“He could have made it up. He could have planted all the evidence so we’d come to that conclusion.” Harry’s learnt to question, to wonder, to investigate. To not take anything at face value. Sometimes he feels wearily angry about that. “He could have made it so we thought we had all the clues and we put them together just how he wants.”

Hermione doesn’t try to be rational, she doesn’t ask why Dumbledore would do such a thing. Which is good, because Harry’s in no state to be rational. She just says, “We have our own proof.”

He looks at her. And he starts to smile.

-

“I was never scared of you,” Harry explains it to Erasmus. “I was never scared of your magic. I thought it was just because you’re a kid and it’s the adults who are scary, but Ron’s magic is scary too.” He hates that, being terrified of the boy who’d once been his best friend. So much fear. “But I was never scared of your magic. There’s only one other person like that, and that’s Hermione.”

Blood-binding, Hermione explains. She bound herself to Harry because she didn’t know if it would help but she knew they needed every bit of help they could get and Harry, trusting and unknowing, bound himself back – and then bound himself to Snape, who, for reasons unfathomable, reciprocated.

She doesn’t explain further, doesn’t explain how their magics were for one glorious moment twisted together. That isn’t something to speak of, not yet, and Harry is glad she doesn’t speak of it. One day, he knows, the words will have to be spoken, the secret unwrapped, but not this day. The relief makes him feel kindly towards the world, even Dumbledore, for one shining moment.

“Your magic doesn’t know ours,” Hermione says instead of explaining further. “You got turned back, so it’s not bound to us anymore. But our magic knows yours. That means you’re him.”

“What does that mean?” Erasmus asks, looking between them, a little scared, a little lost, a little joyous in the strange dark way of having a tiny candle suddenly spring to life in a great blackness. Harry knows that joy, knows the clutching at small blessings in a cursed world. Small things become great when there are no great things.

Hermione looks at him thoughtfully. Harry holds his breath. Erasmus’s eyes plead for hope.

“It means,” Hermione says carefully, “that you belong here.”

-

Harry has a scrapbook full of newspaper articles that reference Severus Snape. Even if they’d been about someone else they would have been bad. But when he knows they’re really about him, about who he used to be, Erasmus is terrified. How can a whole world hate him so much? Was he really so terrible, so horrible? The only hint of relief in those articles is the mention of Harry and Dumbledore fighting for him. Even Dumbledore. He hates the man, yes, but if he will fight for Severus then Severus can’t be so terrible.

Mostly, though, it’s Harry’s fight that helps. Harry thinks he’s worth fighting for. Thought, even then, that he was worth fighting for. Erasmus tries to hold onto that thought.

Hermione won’t let him read more than a couple of pages of the scrapbook at a time and even when he scowls at her for it he’s grateful too. He needs to know, but it hurts to read that stuff. He doesn’t even know them, how can they say all those horrible things about him?

In between pages Harry and Hermione tell him about the Severus they knew. Erasmus likes those times because he sits there, Crookshanks on his knee or his chin on his hands, and he watches them talk and their faces light up with memory. Slowly their eyes become wider, they start to look younger. In memory they don’t hurt anymore and the world is still full of wonder as they laugh and toss memories back and forth: “Do you remember? What about the time? Oh, the look on his face!”

And Erasmus listens.

No one tries to call him anything but “Erasmus”, even now they know who he is, and that’s fine with him. He’s not Severus. He knows that now. Severus is who he was, but if he no longer remembers that person then he is not him. He is Erasmus. Besides, he’s not sure he wants to be Severus. Harry is kind, and of course Harry likes Severus, but he’s also honest and Erasmus doesn’t like the sound of Severus. Nor does he like those fragments of memory that live in the back of his head and surface in his dreams. Severus was bitter and angry and alone. Erasmus is angry, but he isn’t alone. Even without memories, Erasmus is a better person to be than Severus.

-

Mrs Granger comes into the living room where they’re watching cartoons and Harry and the others look up, startled. “Dumbledore’s coming up the path,” she says grimly. “Do you want to talk to him?”

The way all three of them freeze and stare at her in horror is answer. Her face shutters off and she turns on her heel as the doorbell rings.

“Ah, Mr Granger,” they hear Dumbledore’s genial voice. “Good afternoon.”

Harry closes the door. Firmly, definitely. Wishes there was a lock. Through it they can hear the murmur of voices, Mr and Mrs Granger’s getting louder but Dumbledore’s, as always, calm and quiet.

Crookshanks and Hedwig take up stations at the door, hackles raised. Hedwig clacks her beak loudly, angrily, and Crookshanks’s tail is fluffed out like a bottlebrush and his ears are back. The three children huddle in the corner, the telly nattering on unheeded. They don’t want Dumbledore. Not yet, not when the wounds are still so raw and bleeding. They can’t deal with him. Harry closes his eyes and grips Hermione’s hand and prays that Dumbledore will just go away. He doesn’t want to talk to Dumbledore, however much Dumbledore may want to talk to him.

“After everything you’ve done to them!” Mrs Granger’s voice demands with a sudden jump in volume.

Dumbledore’s calm, reassuring murmur is met with another angry but indistinct outburst from Mrs Granger. Then a twang of magic ripples through them, feeling like the noise of a wooden ruler being slapped against a table, and a smug feeling emanates from the house.

“You damn hypocrite,” Mr Granger says, not so much loud as fierce and carrying. “You may be able to force your way into any other house in Britain but you’re not getting into this one without permission.”

Dumbledore’s murmur again, sounding genuinely apologetic.

“You’re always sorry,” Mrs Granger says straitly. “It doesn’t change anything.”

The front door shuts firmly and definitely.

Harry’s fingers are tight around Hermione’s; he holds his breath.

Mr and Mrs Granger come in alone. Hermione runs into her dad’s arms and he wraps her in a bear hug and lets her sob into his chest. Harry and Erasmus stand very close together, stiff and scared and alone. Then Mrs Granger pulls them into her embrace and holds onto them as if she’ll never let them go.

-

Avoiding Dumbledore helps a little, but not enough. Erasmus is so on edge, waiting for the next blow to fall, waiting for the next thing to go wrong. It hurts, it all hurts so much and he’s so tired of having to deal with it all. Erasmus is a better person to be than Severus, but that’s not saying much. And he doesn’t want to be Erasmus any more. He wants it all to be over,. The pain and the fear and the worry and the crisis on top of crisis. He’d say there wasn’t anything bad left to happen, that surely he’s hit the worst, but he’s too realistic to believe it. It can always get worse and he’s just waiting, waiting, waiting, for that new horror to descend.

He thought things were getting better. He was wrong.

He wants it to stop. He’s too tired to cope anymore. He doesn’t want to cope anymore. And so when he finds himself alone in the kitchen it’s like a godsend, because his gaze falls on the knife block and he knows that if he pulls one out, that big chef’s knife, say, it will glitter and glisten in the afternoon sun, the light will run across the metal in invitation, and it would be so simple, so easy, to run the blade up each wrist, along those pulsing, beating arteries, and…

It would be so easy. And yet he doesn’t move.

He stares at the knives, at the dull matte black of the handles in the wooden block, each ornamented in shining silver just the colour of the hidden blades. And he doesn’t move.

It means you’re a hero.

Heroes don’t try to kill themselves.

He can almost feel the weight of someone’s worried gaze bent down on him and looks around furtively. And then slowly looks up to the wooden-beamed ceiling. Harry loves this house and he gave it life, that’s what Hermione said. The house is watching him, worried.

Harry doesn’t want him to die. Harry thinks he’s a hero.

Erasmus... doesn’t want to die.

He walks away.

-

-

“Potentiam tuam augeo,” Hermione whispered. And under her words Snape’s hoarse voice echoed her, half a syllable behind.

The new scars on his battered hands tingled as power flowed through them. Harry clenched his fists around the itch of power on his palms and – fell.

There were three of them, of course, but somehow the three of them were one as well. He was Hermione’s fear, his own panic, Snape’s bitter guilt. He was Hermione’s determination, his own acceptance of the inevitable, Snape’s willingness to die to end this here and now. His own  persistant doggedness, Hermione’s knowledge, Snape’s determination to never bow to Voldemort again. The magic welled up inside him; their magic was his magic, their strengths added to his strengths and balanced out his weaknesses as he balanced out their weaknesses. For one strange, bewildering, uplifting moment, he lived in three bodies, breathed with three pairs of lungs, saw with three pairs of eyes.

And Harry, who had grown up with no one and nothing to call his own, felt for that wonderful, terrifying moment that he would never be alone again. Then Voldemort moved and the moment was over and Harry knew they were about to die. But the power, the magic, that was still his, three sets of magic joined together in this moment with one shared goal.

-

-

They go Diagon Alley, the three of them in a tight nervous group. Harry and Hermione say it’s because Harry needs to get some money out but when Mr and Mrs Granger offer to pay Harry says no. “I need to do this. I can’t let them win.”

“Who?” asks Mr Granger.

“Anybody.”

Erasmus wonders if Harry’s been fighting so long he’s forgotten how to stop. It’s a test. Harry and Hermione, they’re testing themselves. Always testing. Always pushing. And he goes with them because... he doesn’t know why. Because he wants to be as brave as them, because he wants to test himself. Because he’s not going to hide.

He hates it. It’s not the magic, which is horrible enough, magic everywhere, drowning him. But that’s not the worst. The worst is the people. People staring, whispering, shaking hands with Harry – and always asking the same question: How did Voldemort die?

And the reporter. The reporter. He doesn’t know how she finds them so fast but she is there, eyeing Harry with a rapaciousness that makes Erasmus uneasy. He wants to remember, yes, but he doesn’t want to have his memories splashed across the papers for the world to look at. Harry doesn’t deserve this.

She flourishes her quill and smiles toothily, sublimely unaware of the three of them flinching as she focuses on Harry. “What do you have to say about Snape now he’s escaped – and nearly killed Dumbledore in doing so.”

“He didn’t nearly kill him!” The reporter dismisses this attempt at accuracy. Harry’s jaw tightens and the anger flares brightly in his eyes. “I’m glad he’s free.”

The reporter actually looks shocked, like a real human being instead of an insatiable shark. “He’s a Death Eater!”

“He saved my life!” Harry grits out. “He tried to die for me!”

He storms off, Hermione and Erasmus right behind him, and even a reporter has no chance of following them.

Erasmus never asks, like the others do. He knows he has no right, knows that if Harry doesn’t talk then he shouldn’t be pushed because Erasmus knows how much it can hurt to talk and he won’t do that to Harry.

But sometimes he looks at Harry, thin fourteen year old with demon-haunted eyes, and the question rises up unbidden. How did you defeat Voldemort?

-

Harry knows he shouldn’t have gone to Diagon Alley. It was stupid; he should have known better. And so they flee, away from the questions and the adulation and the magic, even though they never made it to Gringotts. Back home, away from the streets and the magic and the prying eyes and the nagging questions, the same question over and over again. Back home and the house reaches out to him in welcome and Harry almost weeps because this is home, this is safety, this is his shelter. No one follows him as he runs up the stairs and he’s glad of it. He needs this moment alone with no one but the house and the sound of their voices as they put things away downstairs.

There’s no one in his room asking questions of him. No one demanding the answers he cannot give them. He soaks up the undemanding silence and wishes he could stay here forever. He can’t, of course.

“Harry?”

“What?” he snaps, and instantly regrets it. Mr Granger isn’t the one he’s angry at.

Mr Granger just pats him on the shoulder. “Mrs Carter’s here.”

Harry winces; Mr Granger’s hand tightens on his shoulder in silent comfort. For one moment a vast, deep envy wells up inside him for Hermione, who grew up with this support, with this love. Why couldn’t he have had this? Didn’t he deserve it too? But he has it now, even when he doesn’t deserve it. That has to be worth something.

He takes a deep breath and goes downstairs to face the counsellor.

“I hear you had a... bad experience this morning,” she says carefully.

Harry scowls down at his hands in his lap, not wanting the memory. He hates them. He hates them. Always pushing, always demanding. He murdered for them, what more do they want from him? Why can’t they all just leave him alone? Hasn’t he done enough? Does he have to give them every last piece of himself, all those shattered shards he’s gathered up so carefully?

It cost him nearly everything to destroy their monster and he’s worked so very hard to build it all back up again, to try and put himself back together. One good push and it will all come toppling down. Why do they keep trying to push?

“Why do they disturb you so much?”

“Because they want to know everything. Everything. And I – can’t.”

“Can’t? or won’t?”

“Can’t. I can’t.” He looks at her desperately. “I just can’t.”

“I don’t blame you.” It’s only a figure of speech really, but she takes the words and returns them to meaning and suddenly it’s there: she doesn’t blame him. She doesn’t get angry at him for not telling her everything, she doesn’t dig and demand and ask-ask-ask.

The relief of that almost makes him cry. And frees his tongue enough to say, “I wouldn’t tell them even if I could.”

“Why not?”

“Because they would hate me.”

“Why would they hate you?”

“Because I’m a murderer.”

“You’re not a murderer, Harry,” she says gently.

Harry just looks at her. “He’s dead, isn’t he?”

-

Erasmus is still shaking, even though it’s half an hour since he left Mrs Carter. Hermione is playing scales on the piano, over and over and over, as if the repetition can take away the pain. Crookshanks is affronted – he can’t sit on her when she’s playing the piano – and sits on Erasmus instead, kneading his knees vigorously and turning his back on Hermione. Erasmus buries his fingers in the cat’s fur and tries to concentrate on the texture, on not feeling anything at all.

Harry comes out, pale and thin, looking like he’s fading away. Hermione’s fingers go still on the piano keys.

“Are you okay?” Erasmus asks uselessly.

Harry shrugs tiredly and runs his hands through his hair, exposing the scar that burns like a brand on his forehead, the scar that everyone today looked at before they ever looked at Harry. Erasmus has seen it a thousand times before but this time he actually looks at it. Stares at it. “Who are you?” he asks.

Harry looks at him, green eyes solemn and dark underneath the lightning bolt brand. And finally he says, “I don’t think I know anymore.”

Anger flares up in Erasmus’s chest, startling in its suddenness. Harry has memories. How dare he say that! Erasmus is the one who doesn’t know. But Harry hasn’t finished speaking.

“They made me into their weapon. Now they don’t need me anymore. So what does that make me?”

“You’re not a weapon, Harry,” Hermione says, sharp and fierce as she shuts the piano lid with an angry snap.

“No?” He’s not arguing. He’s pleading.

Erasmus goes cold. How can Harry possibly think that—

“I killed their monster for them. That’s all they needed from me.”

Erasmus looks at him, pale and fading, and feels a sudden, heart-stopping fear that now Harry thinks there’s no reason for him to be alive. It’s one thing to know himself half-ready to die, he’s not ready for Harry to be the same. To be as broken, as weak.

Harry glares at him, but it’s not really anger, it’s pain, pain, pain. Pain that makes him lash out. Erasmus knows about that all too well. “Do you understand?” Harry demands. “I didn’t kill him, I destroyed him. Murder... I think I could have handled murder. Murder is just taking a life. I took his soul.” He turns away, stares fiercely out the window. “I’m a dementor.”

Erasmus is quiet for a very long time. And then he says, “I would have done it.”

Harry laughs bitterly. “No. You wouldn’t. Because you don’t understand.”

Erasmus matches anger with anger. “Then make me understand!”

“I can’t!” It is a wail of the deepest despair. “You’ll hate me! If Snape had known what I was going to do with his magic he never would have given it to me. If all those people out there knew what I did they wouldn’t want to give me medals. I don’t want you to hate me, Erasmus.”

All this time he’s been worrying about Harry hating him and Harry’s worried about being hated. Erasmus’s world is turned on its head.

“I don’t hate you, Harry.” They both jump and turn to Hermione. Her chin is up, her eyes are narrowed, and her arms are folded. “I know what you did and I don’t hate you. You’re not a dementor. You’re not evil. And I don’t hate you.”

-

I don’t hate you, she says. And Harry believes her with a simple, childlike faith. Hermione has never lied to him. Hermione always tells him the truth.

He sobs, just once, choking on it and not caring. He’s a dementor, he knows he is, knows how terrible it is what he did, but it’s acceptable because Hermione accepts it. Hermione accepts him. It’s okay then, everything’s okay. Not great, not perfect, but okay. And Erasmus deserves more than his anger, so Harry turns back to him and gives him a weak smile of apology.

“I’m not normal. Nothing about me is normal. It never will be. Even for a wizard I’m not normal. I can’t use a wand. Not like everyone else.” He holds out his hands with the thick ropey scars across the palms so that Erasmus can inspect them. “This is my wand.” Erasmus stares. “And the magic, it comes so easily. Even when I’m terrified of it. I want to be normal but I can’t be normal.”

I can’t be normal. He’s never admitted that before. Never admitted that maybe this is normal for him, that maybe he can’t go any further. And it hurts, it hurts like an angry burning wound through his heart, but somehow it’s also a relief. He’s not normal, he’ll never be normal. And that’s okay, because it is who he is. Hermione loves him anyway. Mr and Mrs Granger like him all the same. Mrs Carter accepts him just as he is. And Erasmus, Snape, Erasmus is still here, not running away.

Epiphanies are strange things. Scary and uplifting all at once, world-changing yet so simple. Harry almost smiles. “I’m not normal,” he says. “And it’s okay.” He sits down and looks at Erasmus. “I’m going to tell you what I did.”

“You don’t have to—”

“You deserve to know. You were there.”

So Erasmus listens, as Harry tells for the first time how Voldemort died.

-

-

The Death Eaters weren’t laughing anymore. The circle closed in. Harry heard Snape swear very very softly, almost like a caress. Curses flew. In a slow motion, dreamy world, Harry saw them coming. He lifted his hands gently, easily, as if he had all the time in the world, and the magic poured through him. It filled him up, joyfully, unrestrainedly, and flowed out of his hands at a thought, so much easier than when his wand had been separate from him.

The curses rebounded off the shield, ricocheting back onto Death Eaters and dropping a number of them right then and there.

It all seemed so easy, so perfect. He was invincible.

Then the world sped up. The Death Eaters attacked again. And the spells dug into the shield as if into his skin, the pressure built up – and under the combined effort of the Death Eaters even the phoenix shield fell. It dissipated in a backlash that drove through Harry’s body and made him howl.

Somehow none of the spells hit him, but Snape went down, Hermione went down. Snape was frighteningly still, but Hermione, crumpled at Harry’s feet, tried to rise.

“Enough!” The Death Eaters paused at Voldemort’s order. “Surrender, Potter, and perhaps we will allow you a painless death.”

He was lying, Harry knew it. Voldemort was going to make them pay, and Snape and Hermione were already fallen. But Harry wasn’t just scared now, he was angry. And the power, the power of three joined magics, was still his.

The history books might later talk about his determination to save the world from the return of one of the most feared Dark Lords, about his courage, about how he was a Hero. But the truth was he was just a scared boy who desperately wanted to save the two people at his feet. He didn’t care about the world, he didn’t care about anything other than this moment and this fear. Voldemort could have had the world if only he’d left Hermione and Snape alone. But he didn’t, and so the course of history was changed.

There was no logic in it, only fear and anger and horror and the most recent spell Hermione had taught him: “Accio soul!”

The results were horrifying.

Voldemort stiffened, shuddered, collapsed. As his Death Eaters cried out in disbelieving horror, grey mist oozed out of his skin, sickly and foul, rising up above his spasming body. The mist fought and writhed, trying to return to its home, but Harry clenched his hands around his wand-scarred palms and willed the spell onwards. He channelled all his magic, all Snape’s magic, all Hermione’s magic, into this one final battle, knowing that if he lost they were all dead. The mist poured out faster, forming the shadow of a body, a man, while Voldemort screamed in agony. He felt Voldemort dying. Felt the destructive magic as if he, Harry, was the one being dismantled atom by atom. He screamed in horrified agony but he didn’t give up.

For Hermione. For Snape. For the two people that made up his world in this moment, the two people who stood by him, the two people who had given him for one shining moment a place to belong.

The mist grew solid, formed a real body that writhed in pain, reaching out to Harry, begging, pleading.

“No!” Harry screamed, and the soul-ghost exploded.

With one final unearthly shriek Voldemort was dead. Gone. Destroyed.

Harry stared at his dead body and shook like a leaf. Then he looked up. The Death Eaters were staring at him. Not in anger, not in fury, not in hatred. In fear. Fear of what he had done. Fear of him.

One fled, then another, then all, the sharp cracks of apparation around him like machinegun fire, and Harry realised the truth of what he had just done. The horror of what he had just done.

What had he done?

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.

-

-

“You should talk to Mizz Carter,” Harry says. “She can help.”

“I don’t need a shrink!” Sirius snaps defensively, hunching his shoulders, narrowing his eyes. Warding off the world, as if the Grangers’ sitting room is full of enemies and not just Harry.

It’s a pride that Harry understands: don’t let them know you’re weak, don’t give anything away, because if they know you’re weak they’ll strike. The Dursleys did that. Voldemort did that. Dumbledore does that. The wizarding world does that. But Harry has learnt now that there are more important things than holding onto some tattered shred of pride, no matter how well it’s served you in the past. That sometimes, with some people, it’s okay to admit you’re not strong. It is a hard lesson, but he’s learnt it. He doesn’t know how to teach it, though.

“You need help, Sirius.”

“I don’t need help! Especially not from some Muggle woman!”

Harry looks at him, staying very very still. Then he stands up and walks away.

“No, no, Harry, I’m sorry.” Sirius chases after him but doesn’t dare to touch him. “I didn’t mean it, I’m sorry. Harry, don’t go.”

Harry stops in the doorway and looks back at him. Sirius’s eyes are pleading, desperate. Azkaban has taken its toll, put shadows in his face, written wildness in his eyes, so that it’s hard to believe he’s younger than Mrs Granger. Sirius believes his sanity is intact; Harry’s not so sure.

“You need help, Sirius.”

Sirius can’t hold his gaze. “Maybe,” he admits to the carpet, very quietly.

Harry nods, and goes back to his seat.

Silence, while Sirius regathers his pride and his courage. “I’m...I’m glad you’re going back to Hogwarts,” Sirius says. “Your dad – he would have wanted that.”

Harry shrugs. “I wouldn’t know.” He doesn’t mean anything by it, but it hurts Sirius anyway, and he feels guilty for that.

For a moment he wishes... He wishes a lot of things. But wishing doesn’t change anything.

Harry sticks his hands in his pockets and looks at his toes. Then he looks up at Sirius. “I’m not my dad,” he says. “I’m not ever going to be. I can only be Harry, and sometimes I’m still just figuring out who that is. But...” He bites his lip, and knows he picked the habit up from Hermione. “Whoever Harry is, I think he’d like you around. Maybe... Maybe you could come visit over the holidays?”

Sirius smiles, gaunt and hopeful, shadows lifting from him so that Harry can almost see the young man who laughed at his parents’ wedding. “I’d like that, Harry.”

-

Hogwarts castle looms above them like the towering fortress of Azkaban. Like a prison whose gates will soon close on him, trapping him forever. Erasmus shudders into the carriage seat. The other two are not smiling, even as they stare up at the looming castle.

“I used to call that place home,” Harry says. He looks away.

Those are the only words spoken for the rest of the ride. Even when they enter the castle through the imposing main doors, they don’t speak. Hogwarts is too bright with magic, pressing down on them from all sides, terrible bright magic that surrounds them, suffocating them, burying them under the threat of terrible, terrible pain—

Hermione’s hand closes around his, and Erasmus gasps in shock as the panic lifts off him and suddenly he can breathe again. “Hogwarts means no harm,” she tells him, her eyes intent and fixed on his, and he clutches at her hand like a lifeline and focuses on her eyes, on seeing nothing but Hermione and Hermione’s familiar, reassuring magic.

“Listen,” Harry says, and his voice is full of wonder.

Erasmus closes his eyes and listens. And he realises what Harry and Hermione have realised, that in some dim way Hogwarts is like the Granger’s house, that someone a long time ago loved this place as Harry loves the Granger’s house and managed a faint echo of Harry’s achievement. The castle is not alive, but in some quiet way it is looking after them.

Erasmus heaves a long, long sigh. He might almost survive this place after all.

-

Dumbledore comes into the hall, smiling in welcome, and the three of them instinctively close ranks, stopping very still, elbows touching, staring at him. Erasmus feels the shudder that runs through Harry despite the way the other boy’s head stays high and his gaze stays firm. He straightens himself, offering his own slim strength in reassurance, and catches Harry’s flicker of a grateful look towards him. Then Dumbledore approaches. Where the three of them are small and insignificant in the magnificent entrance hall, Dumbledore acts like the centre of the world, seeming to fill even that huge space with his presence.

“I trust your journey was comfortable,” he says in kindly greeting.

“Do you welcome every student individually to Hogwarts?” Harry demands.

“You know, Harry, that you are not ‘every student’.”

“I want to be. Just... Just leave us alone, okay?”

“Harry—”

“Look, we’re here, and we’ll stay. But...”

but we don’t trust you, we don’t want you, we don’t need you

Dumbledore seems to shrink into himself. “I never meant to hurt you,” he says quietly, and his eyes won’t meet theirs.

“We know,” Harry says. “But you managed it anyway.”

-

They turn by unspoken consent for their commonroom. It is like the longest trip in the history of long journeys. So many halls, so many corridors, so many portraits... So many people.

He remembers this place – but only as Erasmus. He doesn’t remember it as Severus. With a quiet shudder he keeps close to Harry and Hermione and they flank him protectively, defending him from curious eyes, shielding him from whispers, and he tries to focus on them and nothing else. People stop to look; their steps speed up.

“Professor!” Hermione gasps, the three of them stopping hastily before they can run into Professor McGonagall.

She nods to them. “Miss Granger, Mr Potter, it is good to see you well.” Her eyes settle on Erasmus and her lips soften out of their stern line. “Erasmus. I am glad to have you here again, no matter your form.”

It is acceptance. Pure, unadulterated acceptance for him, whoever he might be and whatever he might be. For a fleeting moment Erasmus looks up into her eyes and thinks he might just be able to do this.

-

They walk up the stairs. So many steps. Harry feels like they’re walking up to their doom. Walking to the gallows. Then someone appears at the top of the stairs, starts to go down, and sees them. Freezes. Stops dead still and stares. Ron.

He winces when Harry looks at him, cringes under Hermione’s steady gaze, doesn’t look at Erasmus. “Uh, sorry, I—” He stops, stuck there at the top of the stairs, caught between longing and a desire to escape, his eyes fixed on Harry in despairing, hoping confusion.

“I don’t hate you, Ron,” Harry says into the fraught silence.

They look at each other. He doesn’t want to wonder what Ron sees when he looks at him, so Harry focuses on what he sees. The freckles, the family red hair. The innocence still in his eyes. The shame and worry and hope and fear. And he remembers friendship that might not have been unwavering but was still real and wanted and longed for. He knows that even if there are some gulfs that may never again be crossed, Ron is important to him.

“I forgive you,” Harry says.

They walk on and leave Ron staring after them.

-

“Potter!”

Erasmus winces at the angry, imperative voice; all three spin, wands in hand. Harry is the first to relax and lower his hand; reluctantly, Erasmus follows his lead. “Malfoy,” Harry says blandly.

“My father’s in jail!” Malfoy spits, stalking up to them.

“I know,” Harry says quietly.

“It’s all your fault!” There is hatred in the boy but aching pain too. Erasmus recognises it too well. He tenses, not knowing what he will do if the boy attacks but knowing he will do something. This time he is not hiding and not running. Not if Harry is in danger.

Probably not even Malfoy knows what he would have done if left to his own devices, but Professor McGonagall appears at the top of the stairs and even in his hatred the boy isn’t stupid enough to bring her wrath down on his head.

“I didn’t put your dad in jail,” Harry says quietly. “I didn’t make him make the choices he did.” Malfoy sneers. “But,” Harry continues, unruffled, “I’m sorry he’s in jail, Malfoy.”

He is completely sincere and even Malfoy reads that. The boy gapes stupidly at him. “I wish it hadn’t turned out that way,” Harry adds and then Professor McGonagall is upon them, looking stern and saying “I hope there is no problem here?” in a voice that says that if there does happen to be a problem she is quite able to solve it by giving them an even bigger one to worry about.

“No problem, Professor,” Harry says, and the look in his eyes would be innocent if not for the fact that Harry is never going to look innocent again. He walks away and Erasmus and Hermione follow.

“You don’t mean it, do you?” Erasmus asks. “That you’re sorry about Mr Malfoy?” He has enough grip on current events to know Lucius Malfoy is no loss to society.

Harry looks at him – and for an absurd moment Erasmus wishes he’d seen Harry just once with innocence in his eyes. “I’m not sorry Mr Malfoy’s in jail,” he says, and there is a flintiness in him that should be frightening, “though I wish it wasn’t Azkaban. But I am sorry that Malfoy’s dad’s in prison.”

Erasmus understands the distinction, he just doesn’t understand why.

“What if it was Mr Granger?” Harry asks. “Mr Granger who was in prison. Maybe you understand why he has to be there, or maybe it makes no sense because he was just doing what you were brought up to believe in. But he’s in prison and it doesn’t matter why because all you know is you miss him and you want him back because he’s important to you and he was always good to you.” Hermione slides her hand into Harry’s and her eyes sheen with tears that will never be shed. “That is why I’m sorry Malfoy’s dad’s been locked up.”

Erasmus doesn’t want to think about Mr Granger in prison – but he understands. And maybe is even a little bit sorry for Malfoy. Loathes him, but pities him too.

-

The students in the commonroom stare at them blatantly, at Erasmus as much as Harry and Hermione, and the three of them hastily cross the room. And stop at the bottom of the stairs. “I’d better put my things away,” is all Hermione says, but Erasmus sees the look she exchanges with Harry and knows the two of them never realised just how much of a distance Hogwarts will put between them.

Harry swallows. “Yeah,” he says quietly.

Hermione goes up the stairs alone. Harry stands there a moment and watches her go, then he looks at Erasmus. “Come on.”

She’ll be okay, Erasmus wants to say. You’ll see her every other hour of the day if you want. Or maybe he just wants to say Let’s go home. But all he says is “Okay,” and follows Harry up the stairs.

It’s a dorm room. It has beds (too many beds, and Erasmus panics a moment, wondering how he can possibly survive all those people) and walls and windows. There isn’t a lot more to say, unless you want to mention the curtains. It’s just a room. And it feels cold, cold and lonely even with Harry right beside him, to stand in a room without the warm, almost unnoticeable presence of a friendly house watching over his shoulder. He wants to go home.

Hermione silently joins them after a couple of minutes just as Erasmus is carefully putting Mr Granger’s parting gift on his bedside table: a photo of the five of them, two adults, three children. The closest thing he has to a family. The closest thing he’s ever had to a family.

No one says anything as she helps them hang up their robes, all three taking time over the task, anything to delay the inevitable moment when they have to go back down those stairs and face the world. Face what they have done.

-