Chapter Text
As the sundays of summer dwindled away, Privet Drive hummed with the sound of mowers; the rhythmic rumble of engines and the scrape of their rollers as they turned upon the rows of concrete drives along the close reverberated off the white, pebble-dashed walls of houses and their single garages, bouncing away up into the cloud-streaked summer sky toward the distant plane soaring overhead. The mowers chugged across each identical sloping square of garden, turning shaggy green grass into neat, verdant lawn stripe by alternating stripe, and from where Harry crouched in the fresh manure among the roses bordering the front wall of the house, the smell of petrol, cut grass, and manure congealed into a thick, suburbian stink.
‘Ow. Shit. Ow. Fuck.’ Harry pried the branch of rose off his forearm with small stabs of pain, tugging the little thorns out after it, and chucked it into his old plastic bucket of deadheadings. ‘Fuck.’
Aunt Petunia set her basket of flowers down with a sharp sniff. ‘We did not raise you to swear like some drunken Polish immigrant. If you can't behave like a respectable member of the neighbourhood, you'll never amount to anything.’
Harry sighed under his breath and inspected the beads of crimson welling from the nicks in his arm. ‘Yes, Aunt Petunia.’
I learnt all these words from your darling little boy, not that you’d ever believe that.
She tutted. ‘And stop mangling my roses, boy. One sharp, neat cut, or they can get diseases.’
‘Yes, Aunt Petunia.’ He dabbed the blood off on Dudley’s fertiliser-smeared old tracksuit and snipped off another dead branch with his pair of battered blunt old secateurs, squeezing them shut over and over until it finally came off.
Aunt Petunia stared down her nose at him, wrinkling it into a sharp little frown. ‘If you’re done with that, spray them to make sure those horrible aphids don’t come back, then get back inside and clean yourself up quickly. Dudley will be home soon, so don’t use much of the hot water; he’ll want a shower after coming back from the club.’ She stalked off.
The club? He was probably down by Tesco nicking trolleys with Piers Polkiss again.
Harry dropped the dead branch and the secateurs into the bucket and snatched the spray up, squirting sharp-smelling white foam over all the green stems. ‘Poor aphids,’ he muttered. ‘What harm have they ever done to anyone?’
The pudgy figure of Dudley and his tall skinny sidekick, Piers Polkiss, burst from the path between the fences opposite the garden, falling about sniggering as they yelled.
‘Ayyy.’ Piers caught sight of Harry. ‘Mate, your cousin’s home, you ain't said nothing to me about that.’
Dudley scoffed. ‘What’s there to say about him? All he does is help mum and dad, and stay in his room. Got no friends, do you, Harry?’
Harry ignored him.
Piers tutted and shook his head. ‘Oi, Big D’s talking to you, mate. Don't be rude, yeah.’
‘Right,’ Harry said. ‘Because Big D’s got such great manners. I’m sure Princess Diana’s going to come by and collect him any day now.’
Piers snorted.
‘Fuck off,’ Dudley snapped.
‘Yeah, see, he'll fit right in at the palace. We’ll miss you, little Diddykins. Every morning, we’ll put a grapefruit out in your name and take a minute’s silence.’
‘I ought to clock you one,’ Dudley growled, eyeing the thick, damp layer of fertiliser compost covering the rose bed.
‘Nah, ain't worth it, mate. Your new shoes are bangin’. Don't want them covered in all that shit.’ Piers jabbed a thumb up the street. ‘Got to grab your bag quick, ain't we? Or your parents will ask where you been.’
Dudley glanced into the garage. ‘Yeah, nobody cares what he says anyway. He's just mad because his boyfriend dumped him, always yelling and crying about Cedric in the night.’
A flash of anger seized Harry.
‘Ha, gaaaaaaay,’ Piers crowed. ‘Come on, Big D, my dad’ll be back from the pub soon. Gotta get in and out before that, ain’t we?’
They ambled away, swiping at the hedges and flowers, kicking at the bins on the pavement as they went.
What a pair of pricks. Harry hacked another dead rose branch off and chucked it in with the rest.
‘Hurry up, boy,’ Aunt Petunia hissed, sticking her head out of the garage. ‘You need to finish up and get in and out of the shower before Dudley is home.’ She snapped her fingers at him twice. ‘Give me that bucket. I’ll sort those out. You get inside. When you’re clean, there are leftover spam sandwiches in the fridge that I brought back from the neighbourhood association you can have.’
Sounds delicious. Harry winced as she snatched the bucket from his hand and trudged back toward the house, stretching the ache out of his back. Bloody hours bent over those stupid flowers and then I get spam. He tugged his battered, thorn-ripped trainers off and tucked them into the corner, squishing them into the half-space between the footrack and the door with a grimace as a twinge spasmed across the small of his back. And all so Mrs Ackworth has to pause on her afternoon stroll and pay Aunt Petunia some two second phoney compliment. So stupid.
Harry plodded up the stairs and into the bathroom, wrenching the shower on. It sputtered and groaned and steamed, filling the room with a faint burning smell as the pipes heated up. Dragging off his loose track-suit, pants, and sweat-soaked, baggy, brown t-shirt with a long sigh, he ducked into luke-warm water and scrubbed the brown juice of rain-soaked, wilted roses off his hands with his nails.
So bloody stupid. Voldemort’s out there now, he's back, and all these people care about is whose roses look better and how the council haven't filled in a pothole perfectly.
Harry’s nail caught the thorn scratch across the back of his hand and tore a fresh little bead of bright blood from it, but the shower swept it all away.
He'll kill all of them. Everyone. Dread wrapped two fists of ice around Harry’s spine; his heart stuttered in its cold grasp, shrinking back into itself like a snail into its shell. I could go back in a month and find they're all dead. Hermione, Ron, Sirius, Mrs Weasley. All of them. He could’ve killed them all already and I wouldn't know anything but what bloody Mrs Ackworth thinks about the roses.
‘Oi!’ Vernon pounded on the door. ‘Don’t waste water, boy, it’s not free, and Dudder’s will want to get cleaned up after being at the club.’
‘Yes, Uncle Vernon.’ He smeared soap across under his arms and sprayed it away, twisting the water off and stumbling out into a cold towel.
Nothing’s free here. Except spam fucking sandwiches. And I hate spam even more than Dudley hates grapefruit.
Harry rubbed himself dry as the shower dripped into the tub below and dragged his underwear back on, slipping back across the landing and into his room before Uncle Vernon or Aunt Petunia reappeared. Flopping onto his small bed, he buried his face in the pillow with a groan and closed his eyes, letting the weight fall off his feet and the aches fade.
Sleep’s soft embrace drew him down into a gentle, timeless peace, cradling him there in simple soporific bliss, cocooned beyond the reach of fear or fatigue. But Harry felt it start to slide, slipping away like water through his fingers, felt himself sink further, plunging from that quiet gentle black into restless darker, deeper places.
And he took a long breath of cold air somewhere among the snow-draped firs of a frozen forest, his bare feet numb in the thick ankle-deep white drifts.
‘Pitiful.’ Voldemort’s whisper stilled the forest like the breaking thunder of a storm. ‘Beneath even contempt .’
A little whimper echoed through the silent trees.
Harry turned, taking a single step forward as he raised his wand, his loose black silk robes sweeping across the snow.
Beyond the steady tip of pale crooked yew, a soaked trembling wizard in torn, ragged fur-lined robes crawled alone across the churned snow at the forest's edge, dragging himself over the roots with small choked sobs toward the sun setting behind the ridge. One worn leather boot hung from his right foot, half-off, but the other lay strewn in the disturbed snow, and little grey stone trolls danced across his sodden black sock.
‘You crawl away like a mouse. Where is your magic? Where is your might?’ The yew wand twisted. ‘Face Lord Voldemort. Face Death.’
The wizard froze, clinging to the ground, but Voldemort's magic ripped him from it and threw him to the snow at Harry's feet.
‘Please,’ the wizard rasped in a thick eastern accent. Frost and ice clung to his ragged grey beard about his mouth, and little drops of bright crimson trickled from his torn and scratched bald head and cheeks, freezing before they reached his neck. ‘I told you where to find Igor, my lord. I told you everything. Let me go.’
‘You are weak, Erik. Useless to Lord Voldemort.’ Harry felt Voldemort's thin smile creep across his face. ‘You do not even have the sense to be loyal. Avada kedavra.’
An eerie green flash tore through the trees, and away up into a clear sky dyed pink and gold and orange by the sinking sun. The wizard’s head flopped back, staring up at the sky with blank, glassy blue eyes.
Voldemort turned away, his footsteps crunching through the snow, but something held Harry in place, pinned him where he stood before the wizard's corpse. Dread stirred, a creeping, clinging, clammy cold that swelled up and spilt through Harry's heart like black ink welling from Tom Riddle’s diary.
‘Morsmordre,’ Voldemort whispered somewhere behind him, and then, with a deafening crack, he vanished.
Harry clawed himself together through the fear and tore his eyes away from Erik’s empty eyes, dragging them up the smooth, snow-veiled valley.
A flickering swirl of shadow coiled in the air just above the ridgetop, less than a wisp of fog or a shred of cloud, no more than a shimmer in the sky, but looming deeper and darker than the night or the thickest black gloom of the corners of the cupboard beneath the stairs. That thin twist of shadow danced before the silhouette of the setting sun, hovering at the heart of it like the slitted pupil of Voldemort’s red eyes.
And it smiled.
It smiled without lips, or teeth, or face, but Harry could feel it all the same: countless fangs curved up into a sharp grin and a piercing, lidless gaze full of insatiable hunger; it waited with endless patience, like the deep, dark waters of a cold lake veiled beneath clear ice.
And somewhere, somewhere Harry could not see or hear or touch or name, something cracked .
He jerked awake in the gloom of his room, but each thud of his hammering heart seemed to pound on that thin ice, and in all the corners of his room, dread brimmed, bubbling up through some slim, jagged crack from the deep cold darkness beneath.
‘What the fuck was that?’ Harry whispered. ‘What the fuck did Voldemort do?’ He took a deep shuddering breath. ‘Is Igor, Igor Karkaroff?’
Does it even matter? He flopped back on the bed, but didn’t dare close his eyes, dreading still, whatever might wait behind them. Even if that was real and not a dream, I’m stuck here. I can’t help anyone.