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?