The bath was just what Harry hadn’t known he’d needed. The water, an odd purple tint after he’d added the prescribed amount of Bruise Reduction Serum, was hot and calming. Harry sunk into it up to his chin and closed his eyes.

Some time later Harry got dressed as the water gurgled down the drain. It was strange, he thought, how he hadn’t really noticed the bruises from the crash until they were gone and it was suddenly much more comfortable. He rubbed his hair until it was mostly dry, then hung up his towel. 

Going downstairs again, the stairs creaked as he walked. When  he peeked in at the parlour door, Dumbledore beckoned him inside. 

“Sit down, Harry,” he said. Snape and Mrs Weasley were there too, and Harry felt rather watched as he took a seat on a chair. It wasn’t a you’re-in-trouble kind of watching, strangely enough, but it was still enough to make him squirm a bit.

“Hi Mrs Weasley,” he said. “Is George alright?”

When she smiled at him, the skin around her eyes crinkled. “Yes, dear,” she replied. “The healers soon fixed him up. Though he and Fred and Ron are in a great deal of trouble for stealing Arthur’s car.”

Harry fitted his hand into the gap between the cushion and the side of the chair. So really, it kind of was his fault that Ron and the twins were in trouble. 

“— have some things to ask you,” Mrs Weasley was saying. Harry blinked to clear his head, then looked up at her again.

“Ron said you weren’t getting your mail?” she said, looking encouraging. “Something about a house-elf?”

Harry nodded. 

“So it had nothing to do with… your...relatives?” she asked, delicately.

Not liking where this seemed to be going, Harry dug his thumb nail into his index finger. “The house-elf was called Dobby, and he didn’t want me going back to school so he stole all my letters to make me think I had no friends. Why’d you ask?”

Mrs Weasley didn’t answer him— her glance flitted away, to Dumbledore.

“Harry,” the man said seriously, looking him in the eye over the top of his gold-rimmed spectacles. “There have been some concerns raised about your life with the Dursley family.”

There it was— though the few people who had asked before, back in primary school, had always come at it more obliquely. Harry felt pinned by Dumbledore’s gaze, a twitching, frantically fluttering moth. He did not move. 

“Oh,” he said dully. 

“Could you tell us about them?” Dumbledore asked.

From the moment when Ron had blurted out about the bars on his window, Harry had known that this must be coming. He’d shoved that knowingness to languish dustily in the back of his head, however, because if he’d acknowledged it then it would have been admitting that there was something wrong.

“Uncle Vernon works at Grunnings,” he said. “He’s hoping for a promotion, and he tells golfer jokes. They aren’t funny. Dudley goes to Smeltings, and he likes video games. Aun—”

Snape scoffed. It was an incredulous sound, one that jerked Harry’s attention to the other man, who so far had not said anything. But then the boy had to look away, because the expression on Snape’s face was far too intent and knowing for comfort.

“Aunt Petunia likes knowing what’s going on in the neighbourhood,” Harry continued, looking at his knees. “She always does a roast on s—”

“Enough,” Snape said quietly, leaning forward. “ Enough of that, Potter. You are being deliberately obtuse.”

“She always does a roast on Sundays ,” Harry said, louder. “And—”

But he couldn’t go on, for some reason— he’d meant to say something about how Uncle Vernon always said that his aunt made the best roast dinner in Surrey, but it stuck in his throat. Looking at Mrs Weasley had been a bad idea, because her eyes were sad and calm and he just couldn’t say it, though it was true…

Seconds passed. Harry looked anywhere but at the adults, picking at his cuticles.

“You know what the headmaster meant,” Snape said softly, in an increasingly dangerous tone. “An utter imbecile would have known what he meant. Are you so rude as to ignore him? To lie to him?”

Harry pressed his tongue into his upper left canine, letting the sort-of-hurt of it ground him. “I’m not lying ,” he said. “And I’m not being rude. You’re being rude— you interrupted me—”

“Harry,” the headmaster said quietly, cutting off the boy’s rising voice. “Harry.”

Lowering his head, he said, “Yes, sir?”

“Let me tell you what we know,” Dumbledore said, still very quietly. He waited until Harry gave a reluctant nod, then said, “There were bars on your window before the Ford Anglia pulled them off. There was a cat-flap installed in your bedroom door.”

Harry was silent. 

“You did not go home for any of the mid-year holidays, nor receive any Christmas presents from them. Mrs Weasley has mentioned the thank-you note you wrote for the jumper— she told us she remembered saying to Arthur that you seemed just so happy, it was like you’d never had a present before.”

So?

“Fred Weasley said there were five different locks on your door— on the outside of your door. Your school-books were locked away, as was your owl.”

But—

“ Ronald Weasley said your clothes are all too big for you. He said you looked half-starved— and I am inclined to agree with him on that point. Mrs Weasley told us he’d written to her mentioning how he’d never seen you receive a letter at school from your relatives,  and that you had made several off-hand comments concerning their lack of care.”

Harry opened his mouth, then closed it again. 

“I am sure there would be more,” Dumbledore said gently. “You will not be going back there, Harry, no matter what you say. I will be speaking with Hagrid, and Professor McGonagall— and your primary school teachers— but that is more than enough to lay charges of intentional neglect on your relatives. You do not have to speak about it, but is there anything you wish to say?”

“They don’t like magic very much,” Harry said eventually. “I think it scares them.”

I scare them , he didn’t say. But he knew that was probably why they hated him so much— that, and just some plain hatred simply because it felt good to hate someone and feel that they were better than him.

Dumbledore sighed. “That does not and could not excuse them,” he said wearily. “Believe me, child, in no way could you— or anyone— deserve to be treated in that way.”

Harry ducked his head away, even more uncomfortable than before. He could feel his cheeks heating up. 

 “But I was ungrateful to them,” he mumbled, scuffing his foot on the carpet. “And it doesn’t matter, anyway.”

He was speaking the truth when he said that. How the Dursley’s had treated him— the dirt, the  embarrassment, the guilt of it— didn’t matter to Harry. He had Hogwarts, and Ron, and Hermione. The Dursleys were just there, and though they weren’t nice to him he could understand why, sort of— and anyway at the end of the summer there would always be Hogwarts. 

“So ungrateful that they locked you in your room with multiple locks?” Snape said, lip curling. “Forgive me, Potter, if I believe—”

“Well, I don’t care what you think,” Harry said defiantly. “It was fine. They were fine. My room was fine. It was better than—”

He cut himself off, feeling his hands shake. He’d almost… 

“Better than what , Potter?” Snape asked, rolling the words over his tongue. “Better than what? Because as I was saying before you so rudely interrupted me, you will have to forgive me for believing that a child could never act ungratefully enough as to warrant being locked in a room for weeks with insufficient food and bars on the window.”

Harry wanted to tell him, well, I did , but knew better than to say anything more. Besides, it seemed that all of them had caught the idea of what he had been going to say, if not the specifics of it. Mrs Weasley had raised a hand to cover her mouth, her cheeks pale.

“Albus,” she whispered.

And Dumbledore was looking at Harry, still, though now it was somehow an even weightier gaze than before.

“I see,” he said.

There was silence. Harry shifted, wishing he could curl up his legs onto the sofa and pretend he wasn’t there— but he knew it would not work.

“As I said, you will not be going back there,” Dumbledore said after a while. “Mrs Weasley has invited you to stay for the rest of the summer.”

Ron’s mother smiled a wobbly smile at him, and said, “It would be our pleasure.”

It turned out that the rest of the summer wasn’t quite true. This was because Harry was to spend the rest of the week with Snape, while the Weasleys added another room to the Burrow— which was the name of their house. Harry thought the name suited the family— imagining the house, he knew it would be warm and cozy and a bit mad, because of course Fred and George were living there.

“The extension charms need a few days to settle into the house,” Mrs Weasley had told him. “But we need a room for you, because Ron’s is really too small to share. After Charlie moved out, the house subsumed his and Bill’s old room into the kitchen and the living room—”

“The house — what, ate their room?” Harry asked, incredulously.

Mrs Weasley made a flapping motion with her hand. “There’s so much spell-work in the walls of the Burrow that it has a mind of its own. But in any case, it’ll be ready then. 

When she’d flooed away after promising to return for him on Friday evening, Harry was fed lunch— an awkward, polite but rather silent lunch of sandwiches with Snape and Dumbledore— before Snape sent him out into the yard.

The car had been removed by a muggle tow-driver, but Harry stared at the spot where it had been. The piled stones that had made up the garden wall were scattered; a bush’s branches were snapped and squashed, and a poor rosemary plant was utterly crushed. 

Harry tried to heft the stones back in place, but they wouldn’t balance properly. So he just gathered all the debris from the accident and piled it together neatly-ish, then lay on his back amid the thick grass and thought of nothing at all.