“My Tall Man is my Daddy now,” little Harry quietly told Captain early the next morning.  Severus was still asleep, but the small boy didn’t mind waiting for him to wake up. 

“Always and forever?”  His small pink friend asked.

“Yeah,” he whispered, holding the bear to his chest tightly as he tried to deal with the warm feelings shooting through his body. 

. . .

Although some things were going well with his small charge, the same could not be said for all facets of the tiny boy’s life. 

In order to get the child up to a more normal weight, Severus had been forced to supplement his meals with a nutrient potion that helped the lad’s body better process the food he was eating.  Unfortunately, Severus was having trouble finding the right dosage, given the age and extreme malnourishment of the boy in question. 

At first, the amount he was giving Harry resulted in constipation bad enough that the child nearly couldn’t walk the next day.  It was apparent to Severus that there was far too much—ahem—bulk within that concoction, so after getting the child’s immediate problem cleared up, he had taken them back to his private lab to experiment a bit more. 

Within his lab, he had cleared a small spot off of one of the counters and then transfigured the top into something more similar to a cushion.  After adding a few charms to keep the boy in place and out of danger, he put the boy there with Captain and the beginning Potions book while he worked. 

“Daddy,” the child said one day not too long after the disastrous constipation incident. 

“Harry?”  He turned from chopping ingredients to look at the boy not more than an arm’s length away. 

“Is dat, dis?”  The lad asked, pointing a tiny finger at the book in his arms.  The textbook had been a bit too large for the boy to maneuver, so Severus had simply shrunk its dimensions a bit.  Besides, the pictures were the important bits, given that the boy couldn’t read yet.

Or so he thought.

He moved to where Harry was sitting and looked at the book in question. 

“Is that dis?”  The child repeated; pointing again once he was in viewable range. 

It was a picture of ginger roots being cut into smaller pieces; which also happened to be the exact ingredient that he was currently slicing. 

“I ‘member dat smell,” the child told him solemnly, green eyes turned trustingly up towards Severus’s own dark amber ones. 

Surprised at the lad’s accuracy, Severus only could nod dumbly.  Many of his third years had still not yet managed to identify between the smells of daisy roots with ginger roots, but as his son had correctly pointed out, ginger was a very distinctive odor. 

“Is dat for my tummy?”  The boy asked perceptively, green eyes staring up intelligently at him. 

“And why do you think that, young man?”  Severus asked with a smirk, picking the child up and carrying him on a hip to look at his potion. 

“’Cause ginger helps tummy aches?” 

“Indeed,” Severus said, a small proud smile working its way over his face.  “But how did you know that?”  He asked, somewhat perplexed. 

“Oh!”  His son chirped excitedly.  “’Cause my book told me so!” He explained, with a soft clap of his hands. 

“Your book?”  Severus raised an eyebrow.

“Yeah daddy, dat potions book you gave me,” his child said with a happy look up at him. 

“Did I read that part to you already?”

“Nuh uh,” the boy shook his head in the negative.  “It tolds me itself.”

“You mean it spoke to you?”  Severus was now officially confused. 

His son giggled and Severus couldn’t help but smile back at the innocently happy expression.  The boy hadn’t giggled but once or twice since living with him, but each and every time had been something related to the two of them. 

“No.  I looked at it and saw what it said!”  The child looked expectantly back up at him, and understanding suddenly filled his brain.

“You mean you read it?”  He asked, trying to keep the amazement from showing in his voice. 

“Yeah,” his boy nodded, resting his head back down against Severus’s chest. 

“You can read?”  Severus asked, carrying the lad back to his cushioned spot. 

“Some,” the child admitted softly, before peering back up at him hopefully.  “But some words don’t make no sense and I never had no one to help me,” he said sadly. 

“What words?”  Severus asked, rising quickly to the challenge his son had just thrust at him.

After that, they read together a little each day, and every night Severus would make sure to ask his son if there were any words he wanted to ask about before going to sleep.  As he told Harry with an almost serious look on his face, it was important to get all of one’s vocabulary straight in one’s mind before falling asleep. 

“What happens if you don’t first?” His son asked with a bit of trepidation. 

“Muddled words and bad spelling,” he answered solemnly, before breaking up the moment by tickling the child into a bout of runaway giggles. 

. . .

Albus and James sat in his old childhood home and watched in silence as his mother argued wildly with his father.  The man had witnessed his youngest going from bad to worse over the past months and had finally reached the end of his tether.  He was going to go and confront those boys and their parents and make them understand the hideousness of what they had done to his family. 

Albus looked at his father—his papa—with no small amount of bitterness.  What the man was saying was all fine and good, but his father hadn’t bothered to stop and think about the potential consequences of his actions; like being put in Azkaban for attacking three muggle families for seemingly no reason. 

“Oh Percival,” he muttered under his breath to his father, “You stupid fool.”

It was safe to say that he was surprised at the amount of anger still present in his heart from his father’s actions and resulting abandonment of their family. 

“Kendra, as your husband it is my right—nay, my duty to uphold the honor of this family by any means that I see fit!”  His father had and was arguing to his wife.

“And how will Ariana do without her father in her life?  What about Al and Ab?  How can you just leave them behind for your ridiculous sense of justice—your so-called honor!?”  His mother had and was shouting back.  Then and now he could tell just how close she was to tears. 

Albus walked around to the other room where he and his brother had listened to that ghastly fight on that day so very many years ago.  As he had remembered, there they were, up against the cracks of the door, listening in horrified attention. 

He crouched down beside his own younger self and observed the boy that he had once been.  The younger Albus’s nose had not yet been broken by an angry younger brother.  It was still thin, but it was straight.  His younger self was crouched down with his hands on the floor and his ear just beside the vertical crack that ran between the door and the doorway.  His eyes were slightly unfocused as he listened intently, and his mouth was slightly open from a combination of shock and horror.

Below him, his brother Aberforth—or Ab, as they often had called him in those days—was laid out on the ground, listening at the horizontal crack between the door and the floor.  He was three years younger than Albus, but at this age, three years was very noticeable. 

Albus took one more look at the two eavesdropping brothers and then turned on his heel and walked out the room, only to find the ghostly form of James waiting for him on the other side of the door. 

“How old were you two?”  James asked him with a nod of his head towards the now closed door. 

“Ten and seven,” he answered quickly, not really in the mood for discussing such painful memories with a dead man. 

“I wouldn’t have pegged you for a redhead,” James said with a chilly grin.  “Nor your brother for a blond,” the other man added when he failed to respond. 

Albus shrugged.  There wasn’t much he could say about that.  His hair, like his brothers, had started turning silver in his eighties, and then finally had gone completely white in his nineties. 

“Where was your sister during all of this?”

That was actually a good question.  Where would his sister have been during a monumentally upsetting experience such as this? 

He didn’t verbally answer James’s question, but instead turned quickly to the left and headed off down the hallway to where his youngest sibling’s room had been.  Finding the door quickly, he opened it and stepped through to find Ariana in the floor playing with some paper dolls.  He remembered that his mother had enchanted those same paper dolls to get up and interact with Ariana, but not to respond to any other members of the family.  They had been just for their sister, and no one else. 

Of course, as he and Ab had both argued, why would they have wanted to play with their sister’s stupid ol’ dolls anyway? 

He looked down at the bent head of his sister and was hard pressed not to try and speak to her.  Even if he could, what would he say?  It was not as though he could offer apologies for something he hadn’t even done yet, and to a girl who was mentally disturbed too.

Ariana looked up then, staring directly at the spot in which he was standing, and he quite nearly jumped.  He remembered that Ariana had started talking to herself or her imaginary friends—or what have you—sometime after the incident with the muggle boys, but he hadn’t remembered it starting so soon. 

“Who are you?”  The look in the little girl’s eyes was very sharp, and forced himself to let out a breath that he hadn’t been aware of holding. 

“You can see me?”  He whispered shakily. 

“Of course I can see you,” the very young Ariana answered easily.  “Can’t you see me?” 

“I—I can see you,” he said very softly, his eyes wide with surprise. 

“Well, then what’s your name?” 

“Brian,” he whispered, mentioning one of his many middle names in the place of his real.  He was no longer sure if this really was just shadows of the past, like in Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol,” or actually the past itself. 

And of course, James was nowhere to be found.  

. . .

Little Harry was caught in a dream that he couldn’t escape from.  His auntie stood over him, screeching about how worthless and disgusting he was, while he begged and cringed at her feet, pleading for forgiveness for whatever unforgiveable thing that he had done this time. 

“Nasty boy, nasty freak!  How many times have I told you that freaks aren’t allowed to sit on the furniture!?  Freaks aren’t allowed to sit at the table!!!  Freaks aren’t allowed to be part of the family!   Nobody wants a dirty horrible freak like you!”

He cried out aloud, and then suddenly the dark had broken around him and warm arms were holding him close, stroking his back soothingly.  He gasped out a sob and turned his face into his Tall Man’s chest, trying to hide from the very real image of his auntie’s angry face. 

“Hush, little one.  You’re safe now.  I won’t let her get you, I promise.  Would you like your bear?”  He felt his small fuzzy friend being pressed into his arms and he grabbed onto it too. 

“You keep me safe?”  He begged through his tears, needing very much to hear his Tall Man’s reassurance. 

“Always,” his daddy promised, pulling him up to rest his head on his Tall Man’s shoulder. 

“Always and forever?” He sniffled, calming down some now.  He could feel his daddy’s heartbeat next to his own and it just felt right. 

“Until the end of time,” his daddy whispered in his ear and he nodded his relief back against the man’s shoulder.