Harry Potter sat on the edge of his bed, his naked feet grazing the cold floor as his legs swung back and forth. If asked how long he’d been doing that, he would have been hard-pressed to reply. Long enough that his feet had numbed from the cold, at least.

The house at 4 Privet Drive in Little Whinging, Surrey, was deadly quiet around him. At a little over four in the morning, the shuffling of his bare feet on the hardwood floor was the only sound disturbing the silence. But it was quiet enough that Harry was certain it wouldn’t disturb Uncle Vernon’s sleep.

Somewhere in the back of his mind, the young wizard knew he ought to be doing something else. Sleeping was probably what was expected of a fifteen-year-old teenager on holidays at four in the morning, but Harry couldn’t indulge in it. Sleep meant closing one’s eyes—and nothing good ever happened when he did that. There was nowhere to hide in the dark, and then the nightmares would find him, vicious beasts that they were. And then he would scream, kick, fight, and beg, and—

Uncle Vernon disliked it when he had nightmares. He’d made it quite clear to his freak of a nephew that he had better kick the habit real fast—or face the wrath of his pudgy fists. So, Harry did; he stopped sleeping, only indulging in minute-long catnaps when his tired brain demanded it. The now interminable nights dredged on as the boy alternated sitting by the window with sitting on the edge of the bed as he waited for the first light of dawn to rise above the row of houses down the street.

A familiar flutter of wings drew his attention away from the wall he’d been staring at since he’d sat down, and Harry’s feet stopped shuffling.

“Hedwig!” He said the name like a small prayer as he sat up and moved to the window to let in a beautiful snowy owl. She’d been his for years, ever since he started school at Hogwarts when he was eleven. Faithful and kind, she was his only friend throughout the long summer weeks where he was forced to wither away in Surrey for his own safety—or so he’d been told.

“What have you got for me, girl?” Harry asked the bird as he untied the missive tied to Hedwig’s leg. The colour and size of the parchment letter was a dead giveaway for its author: Ronald Weasley, Harry’s best friend from school. Unless Hermione Granger had stolen the ginger-haired boy’s ink and paper yet again.

Returning to the bed with the snow owl now perched on his shoulder, Harry bent down to open the bedside table drawer to get some of the breadcrumbs he’d secreted away for such a purpose. “There you go, girl,” he said, handing the bird a handful. “It’s not much, I know, but it’s the best I can do right now.”

Hedwig peeked at the proffered food without complaining. If she’d come back from the Burrow—the Wesley household—Harry had little doubt that she’d enjoyed far better treats earlier that day. He waited until she’d gotten the last crumbs down her beak to unfold the letter, which had come from the brightest witch of her age, Hermione Granger.

She’s staying with Ron, then, thought Harry as he sat down on the bed. And he could just picture it—his two best friends laughing their days away at the Burrow. Hunting down gnomes in the garden alongside Ron’s elder brothers Fred and George in the morning before returning inside for some chicken roast or something under the watchful gaze of Mrs Weasley, the kindest, warmest mother Harry had ever known. And then, an afternoon spent playing wizard’s chess or cribbage in the cluttered but welcoming, crooked-looking home in Devon where Harry so desperately wished he could spend his time away from Hogwarts.

But Harry had stopped begging to be allowed to spend his holidays with his friends, eventually realising that there was no sense asking for something he wouldn’t get. Headmaster Dumbledore had decided that he needed protecting, and the blood-wards that stood around 4 Privet Drive seemed designated to do just that. Thus, it had been decided that the home of Vernon and Petunia Dursley would become his very own personal hell every summer.

Flipping the piece of parchment open, the young wizard saw that it was another ‘Dear Harry, I hope you’re well,’ kind of letter. He’d been getting a lot of those this summer. His replies had been a careful rotation between variations of ‘I’m fine,’ ‘not bad,’ and ‘doing okay, thanks.’

He couldn’t fault his friends for asking, but he wasn’t willing to disclose the truth to them. He refused to ruin their summer with his maudlin thoughts and dreadful guilt trips. Besides, it wasn’t as if any of them could do anything about it, anyway. Sirius was dead. And Harry was the reason his godfather had fallen through the veil the night he’d come to the Ministry to try and save one Harry Potter from what he’d been led to believe was the clutches of Lord Voldemort. And no amount of well-meaning friends that said, ‘Hope you’re doing good, mate,’ would soothe the kind of ache he now had to live with.

So, Harry pulled out a piece of parchment of his own and a quill, and he set to write out his reply.

“Hope you guys are having fun—can’t wait to see you back in September,” he finished before signing his name beneath the last paragraph. Hedwig had gone back to her cage to sleep; so, he left the letter on his bedside table for now.

***

The sun rose as hours ticked by, and at six-thirty, Harry padded down the stairs and into the kitchen. He turned on the coffee machine so it could warm up and opened the fridge to get several eggs and some butter. The flour and sugar, Harry got from one of the hanging cupboards, and less than ten minutes later, he had a pan heating up on the stove and enough dough to make the correct amount of pancakes that were expected from him. He had timed the coffee machine to start to grind beans at exactly six fourty-four, when he knew his uncle and aunt had already been awoken by the ringing of their alarm clock. It would take more to rouse his cousin Dudley, but thankfully, that was Aunt Petunia’s job.

Breakfast was served a little while later, and Harry withdrew from the conversation and the world entirely. He munched on the single pancake he was allowed, without tasting it, and washed it down with tap water before excusing himself and leaving the room.

In Harry’s book, it was progress that the Dursleys let him go without a word. Before, he’d been forced to stay until everyone was done eating and then do the dishes. Him being allowed to leave the table early was another thing that had changed this year. Before, when he still had a godfather who loved and cared about him, Vernon Dursley’s words had affected him. But now that he’d returned to their household with a broken, gaping wound in the place where his heart used to be, insults and barbs had much less of an impact. Or perhaps it was that the Dursleys knew that nothing they could come up with could hold a candle to how bad the boy felt inside.

So they left Harry to drift through his days, stuck in the morose fog that followed him from sunrise to sunset.

***

Having completed the rest of his morning chores, Harry left the Dursley’s home a little before eleven o’clock. With no particular destination in mind, he followed his feet as they led him down Privet Drive, and then onto a familiar gravel path. Minutes later, he ended up at the Little Whinging playpark. It was surrounded by fences and had a swing set, a carousel, three slides, and two benches. It wasn’t as pristine as it once had been, but Harry couldn’t care less. He sat on the only swing his cousin Dudley and his gang hadn’t destroyed, starting a slow going back and forth motion. The monotony of the action had a soothing effect on him, and his eyes drifted close on their own accord.

It wasn’t long until the dreams found him again. The Ministry hallways… Death Eaters surrounding him… Members of the Order of the Phoenix Apparating… Spells and hexes flying about… Sirius—

A gasp escaped the boy’s lips as his eyes flew open, and he was greeted with the strangest of sights. There was a red can of soda floating inches away from his face. It wiggled from left to right an instant, and Harry’s eyes followed along its edges until they settled on pale white fingers, and he then realised it wasn’t magic that made the can of coke float, someone was holding it out to him.

“Want some, then?” a woman’s voice asked in a tone that told him this wasn’t the first time she’d asked him that question.

Curious eyes blinked up as his gaze rose along the stranger’s arm to discover a slightly oval face with lean features and azure-blue eyes. The thirty-something woman’s lips were turned up in a loose smile.

“I’m sorry,” Harry muttered, shaking off the last remnants of his nightmare.

With an amused chuckle, the dark-haired woman shook the can in his face again. “You look like you need some, lad. Do you want it?”

Harry did, he realised. He had no idea how long he’d been at the park, but he was parched. And while this was no pumpkin juice, a sugar-filled coke sounded like the next best thing at the moment. He took it with a smile of his own and popped it open with a sincere, “Thanks.”

“You go right ahead, lad.” The woman leaned back against one of the swing set’s support beams, crossing her arms over her chest.

Harry studied her as he gulped a mouthful of the fizzy drink. She was clad in a tight pair of denim jeans and a navy hoodie, and her hair was braided in a long plait that rested on her shoulder. Though Harry had never met her before, he felt no wariness in that stranger’s presence. Everything about her screamed Muggle, from her worn-out, off-white Converse trainers to her black leather wristwatch. The only jewellery she wore was discreet silver creole earrings, and she had little makeup on. A faint sheen of lipstick and maybe some eyeshadow in a very natural tone, it seemed, but Harry was never really sure about those things.

“I’m Leen,” she said before pointing at an area left of her. “I live two streets that way.”

“Harry.”

“I’ve never seen you here before. Has your family just moved in?” she asked. “Mind you, I only ever drop by on Fridays. I’m at work for the rest of the week.”

“What do you do?” asked Harry. He wasn’t really curious, but he needed to be sure his instinct had got it right—that she was a Muggle.

“Clerk for HM Treasury.” She shrugged in a ‘what can you do?’ kind of way. “Up in Epsom.”

“Oh, it can’t be that bad,” Harry objected, though he had no idea what that kind of job could be like. Uncle Vernon didn’t seem to like the Treasury Department as a whole, though, and he liked having to pay taxes even less.

“I’m a glorified paper-pusher.” She laughed. “And sometimes, I think a trained monkey could do the typing as well as me, for how repetitive it is.”

Harry chuckled at the image her words conjured up. Her loose demeanour and easy-going smile, coupled with the can of coke he kept sipping from, had him feeling more relaxed than he’d felt in weeks.

“What about you?” she asked. “Student?”

Harry nodded. “At St Brutus’.” When he saw the woman frown at the name, he elaborated on the lie his uncle and aunt had come up with to explain his month-long absences to the neighbours. “St Brutus’ Secure Centre for Incurably Criminal Boys—it’s an institution for people like me.”

“Is it?” she asked, with an expression that Harry couldn’t decipher.

“So I’ve been told.”

Her reaction wasn’t the one the Dursleys’ neighbours usually had when Aunt Petunia told them where he supposedly studied. Instead of the step backwards and guarded features Harry had expected, the woman brought one of her hands up in a poor attempt to hide her growing grin. Did she not believe him?

“Unless it’s badly named, I don’t quite believe you,” she answered, seeing Harry’s puzzled expression. “You don’t strike me much as a hooligan wannabe. Why would you pretend to attend such a place?”

If only you knew, he thought bitterly. “Looks can be deceiving,” was all he said.

Something of the internal struggle and pain he felt must have filtered through on his face, for the smile left the dark-haired woman’s face and her onyx eyebrows drew closer together. “Everything all right, Harry?” she enquired with what felt like genuine concern in her voice.

He nodded, averting his gaze, familiar lies all but ready to tumble out of his lips. But something deep within him reined them back in. “Not having such a good year,” he said instead, a close enough approximation of the truth.

“S’alright, lad. Life is made of ups and downs,” she replied, taking a step closer, and he looked up at her. There was warmth in her gaze, and Harry realised he’d missed having someone look at him with anything close to genuine kindness. He was lonely, an emotion he’d felt for weeks.

Even as his eyes began to pool with tears, he couldn’t look away.

“Whatever you’re feeling right now,” she explained, “it won’t last forever. I’m sure life’s got loads of nice surprises in store for you.”

Harry had serious doubts about her Zen life philosophy, but he held his tongue. He knew just what life had in store for him—war and a fight to the death. A prophecy uttered before he was even born told him as much.

Instead of pouring out more of his bleeding heart onto this kind stranger, Harry forced a smile onto his lips as he nodded, standing up. “Thanks,” he replied. “For the coke—and the kind words.”

A smile returned to the woman’s lips as she nodded her goodbyes.

“You were right. It was just what I needed,” he called out over his shoulder before tossing the empty can in a nearby bin and departing. He made it to the gravel path before the first tears broke the barrier of his eyelashes, and it took him the entire walk back to the Dursleys to realise he couldn’t remember what that kind woman’s name was.