Chapter Text
The first thing Harry Potter notices is the silence. It’s not unusually quiet – the rustle of wind and the groans of the occasional car filter in from the street below with a familiarity Harry can’t place. But there’s a ringing to the quiet that suggests a sudden absence of noise, like the hollow fullness in your head after an explosion.
The second thing Harry notices is the ceiling: namely, that there is one. Instead of the canopy of branches he expected is a plain white expanse dimpled with replicas of constellations he never quite memorized the names of. Which is strange in and of itself, given that it was just past dawn when he’d walked out to his end in the Forbidden Forest, his back hitting the spring-damp rotting leaves as he went down. But it was clearly night now, the fake stars glimmering in the dark of the room.
The third thing he notices when he wakes from the empty white space of death is his legs. They’re impossibly short, little chubby things that have never flown a Quidditch match or run from Death Eaters. They can’t even support his weight if he lets go of the crib railing.
Which, in the end, is how he realizes where he is.
His head snaps to the side, eyes searching before his mind has even processed the thought. Then his brain catches up and he goes perfectly still, eyes fixed on the empty doorway across from him.
I don’t want to see this.
This isn’t a memory I want.
He already has his mother’s screams etched into his memory. He doesn’t need to know exactly what her body looks like sprawled across his nursery floor. Still, a lifetime of scrounging for every scape of his parents thrashes against this logic viciously, and only the fresh wound of seeing Remus and Tonks laid out on the Great Hall floor keeps him from craning to catch a glimpse of her.
He doesn’t know how long he stands there, at war with himself. It must be a while, because by the time he masters the urge and comes back to himself his little toddler legs are shaking from exertion. Which is when the reality of the situation sets in and said legs fold under the weight of it.
He is in his nursery, the night his parents died. He is in his NURSERY, and it’s bloody 1981. He is seventeen and was just killed by Voldemort in the Forbidden Forest, but he’s also one year old and Voldemort just went wraith-shaped in the face of his mother’s love. (The love he doesn’t get to actually experience in any life, apparently.)
A hysterical laugh spills out of his throat, and it’s one of the most disturbing sounds he’s every heard. High pitched and bubbly, clearly a child’s sound, but sour and broken in a way no child should be capable of. He slaps a chubby hand over his mouth to smother it and misses, finger jabbing into an eye instead.
“Ouch!” Well, it wasn’t the intended method, but the sharp pain sobers him instantly.
So. He’s in his room, in what appears to be Halloween of 1981. But is he really? Is this another aspect of whatever the fluffy white train station was? Some kind of trick of the afterlife, or his own mind?
Even as he thinks it, that idea doesn’t fit. Harry’s eye throbs, and his forehead prickles. He couldn’t feel pain in the bright white, he’s pretty sure. And the whole room just feels realer, somehow. Which means he’s alive. And back in time. Fucking hell.
When Dumbledore said he could go back, Harry thought he meant back to his life. Like, the present, where one usually assumes one would be. Not back back.
Harry’s nose tickles, and he rubs it. His hand comes away sticky and dark, and Harry is suddenly fully aware of a stinging pain on his forehead.
Right. Back. All the way back. To before the horcrux. To the last time he was really just Harry.
Fucking fuck.
That’s about when coherent thoughts leave him, and he’s falling down a rabbit hole of white noise and panic when a noise from downstairs wrest his attention away.
A door slam. Heavy footsteps, taking the stairs two and three at a time. Motion at the doorway.
And then Harry Potter is staring into a face he is completely unprepared to see.
The only thing Harry can think, as Severus Snape’s eyes sweep the room, is that this is the first time Harry has seen him not grieving Lilly. Then his eyes find what he’s looking for, his face crumples, and he becomes the man Harry’s known for seven years.
The man says something Harry can’t hear over the sudden roaring in his ears. Maybe a whisper, maybe a scream – it plays out like a silent movie. The lunge across the room, the fall to his knees. It’s a memory Harry’s already seen from a different angle, just scant hours before. He knows what Snape’s sobs sounded – sound – like, knows how Harry’s own hiccupping howls filled the background. But all Harry can hear is the scrape of scales across floorboards, the gurgling gasp of an open throat.
One thought floats up through the red that’s filling Harry’s brain: Snape is alive. Everyone who died last night is still alive.
“S-, Se-, Sew-us.” One part of his mind is horrified to be speaking with a baby lisp in front of his longtime nemesis and tormenter, but mostly he’s busy trying to catch up to this reality. Harry can almost feel Snape’s blood cooling where it splattered on his face, where it had still been as he hit the forest floor. He’s alive, he’s alive, he’s alive.
Severus goes completely still for a moment, then turns slowly to stare at the child, unsure if he’s heard correctly. There’s no reason for Lily’s child to know his name, much less recognize him on sight. It’s not like she would have spoken about him, right?
Harry is carefully keeping his eyes fixed on Snape and not the form in his arms. Dark eyes meet his, shock, grief, and confusion crashing in waves behind his eyes.
Harry is stuck in an unfamiliar body in an unfamiliar decade with no plan, no strategy, and no way home, even if he wanted to go there. He has no wand, no magic, and can barely string a word together.
It’s okay, Harry. Take it one step at a time. Just like always.
One step at a time. It was how he’d walked to his death, and now it’s how he’ll walk away from it.
He doesn’t know what he wants long term, but he knows what he wants now. To get the hell out of the room his mother just died in. And to do that he needs legs that work.
Harry stares back at Snape and sticks his arms out in the universal baby-sign for up. “Sewus,” he says again with more conviction.
Severus Snape is a cold-hearted son of a bitch. He is twenty-one and broken and holding the cooling body of the only person who ever made him feel cared for, and for a moment he considers turning his back on the little bugger and falling back into the ravaging monster of his grief.
But even as he thinks it he knows he won’t, because he can almost hear Lily telling him to pick up the damn baby, you dickhead. He’s my son and he’s asking for you and he knows that if he doesn’t go now he doesn’t deserve to keep holding her.
So he lays her body down as gently as he can, presses those brilliant, lively eyes – somehow still lively, even in death, the color too bright for anything else – closed. He walks to where the baby is watching him expectantly, this baby who shouldn’t know his name. Severus stares at him with something like wonder, picks him up with something like reverence.
“You’re Harry, aren’t you?” Snape says, voice coming out as a rasp that sends a shiver through Harry. He can’t help but wonder who told Snape his name, Dumbledore, or Voldemort? “Do you know who I am?”
Harry nods, then scowls in concentration, trying to force his mouth to form words without muscle memory. “You Sewus.” And then, because he wants the man to know he trusts him so he won’t leave him here out of some misguided sense of guilt or duty. “Mom’s fwiend.”
Snape goes rigid for a moment and Harry grabs at the hands holding him, worried Snape will drop him. But then his muscles go slack and he draws Harry into his chest, tucking him under his chin. “That’s right, Harry,” he breaths. “Mom’s friend. Let’s get you out of here.”
And that, combined with Snape’s steady heart beating inches away, is all Harry wants to hear. As Snape makes he way out of the room and back down the stairs, the rhythmic beating and warmth of the arms around him slowly lull Harry. When was the last time he slept? Did dying count as sleeping? If not it was before the Gringotts break-in, days ago. Or decades from now, Harry thinks with a sleepy giggle.
His war-weary tiredness combines with the exhaustion of a baby body that’s all cried out, and he’s asleep before they clear the apparition wards.
In another life, Harry’s first sight of Hogwarts was on a clear September night, the castle shining in all her glory with a candle in every window, laid out against a backdrop of stars mirrored in the shining depths of the Great Lake. It was, to this day, Harry’s most magical memory.
In this life, his first glimpse of Hogwarts was by the faint dawn light of a soupy November 1st. The castle was more shadow than substance, a bruise in the grey fog. Harry couldn’t help feeling things were off to a rather inauspicious start.
Severus had first apparated them to a house that smelled strongly of dust and mildew and that Harry was rather worried Severus lived in. There, Severus had given Harry milk and crackers after he woke up and then glared at him for a while. Harry, who was fluent in Snape-scowl, was pretty sure the glares were more thoughtful than angry. Finally, he’d transfigured a sweater and cloak down to toddler-sized and apparated them off to the Hogwarts gates at daybreak.
Which, come to think of it, seems pretty god damn crazy. A known Death Eater, turning up on Dumbledore’s doorstep with an infant strapped to his chest. Harry tries to chuckle, but it comes out a cooing sort of giggle instead.
“Hush,” Snape growls, bouncing slightly, before sending a shower of red sparks at the gates to trigger the wards. Harry watches with interest, having never approached Hogwarts on foot before. Who would come get them? Was there a doorbell? He’s suddenly swamped by longing for Hermione – Really, Harry, when are you going to read Hogwarts: A History?
A loud crack snaps Harry out of his musings, and he’s suddenly facing Albus Dumbledore himself through the wrought iron gates. It’s a face he’s somehow more prepared to see, the gentle pride of the Dumbledore in the train station soothing his grief. “
Severus?” the old man gasps out, and for the first time in Harry’s memory, Albus Dumbledore genuinely looks surprised.
“Hello, Albus,” Snape says, and his voice is suddenly ice cold, his body a frozen block against Harry’s back.
“Is that- is that the Potter boy?”
“And here I would have thought,” Snape says in a frigid drawl that only he could perfect, “you would know where he was, given you are in charge of their protection.” The last handful of words come out carefully enunciated, velvety and dark.
Dumbledore watches the pair of them for another moment, then slips a hand through the gate faster than Harry would have thought possible even at this point in Dumbledore’s life, grasps firmly on Snape’s arm, and turns on his heel.
Side-along, Harry decides, is much better when you’re hanging off someone else in a carrier. There’s no sickening wrenching feeling as someone drags you through nowhere by an appendage, and no stumbling landing to navigate. You’re just one place, and then another. Like magic.
The “another” in this case is the headmaster’s office. It looks almost exactly as Harry left it, with the pensieve on the desk and everything. Almost two decades, complete demolition at Harry’s hands, two battles in Hogwarts, and dozens of dead children couldn’t change a thing. How strange, that off all possible things, this office he’s been in perhaps a dozen times is the closest thing in Harry’s life to a constant.
“When Hagrid could not find Harry we feared the worst,” Dumbledore says, slipping into the highbacked chair behind his desk.
“Hagrid?” Snape remains standing, and Harry can feel the tension in his shoulders raising the carrier. “You heard the Dark Lord was at Godric’s Hollow and you sent Hagrid?”
“Of course,” Dumbledore says, seeming to completely miss the rage simmering in Snape’s voice. “Why did you take the boy?”
Harry tries to follow the conversation, he really does. Despite what Hermione might claim, he isn’t incapable of thinking things through. He knows what’s being said right now is vitally important, will determine the course of his life for the next several years until his body catches up with his mind a bit.
But that body is currently fifteen months old, and it’s simply not meant to process everything funneling into his ears. Even the nap he had at Snape’s house isn’t helping much. Trying to think critically about his situation is like trying to force mud through a fine sieve.
His brain is better at emotions and general impressions right now, which he supposes is how he’s been following along so far. The entire experience has been painful – he didn’t know heartbreak was such a physical thing, but everything seems to hurt more in this body that hasn’t felt grief or fear before – but Snape’s reactions and emotions have been simple. Rage, grief, blind fumbling forward through an impossible situation.
Now, baby Harry is lost in the blur of whatever play Dumbledore is making. He gets the general idea of sympathy, and more fear, and the bare fact that Snape, known Death Eater and twenty-one-year-old pauper, is in no position to take care of the “savior of the Wizarding world.” There is yelling and platitudes and lemon drops, and then Severus Snape of all people is kissing the top of Harry’s head before handing him over and sweeping from the room.
And then Harry is staring up into a pair of twinkling blue eyes, and he’s in a basket on a front stoop before he can even process what’s happening. He has to get away, or at least protest somehow because he will not, will not go quietly back to the Dursleys – not now, not ever, not in any lifetime. But all he can do is scream out his protest, which just makes Dumbledore wink before turning into the crack of apparition before Petunia Dursley opens the door to see what all the fuss is about and adds in a shriek of her own.
The first few years with the Dursleys are enough to make Harry wonder if he hadn’t just jumped to a different time, but all the way to an alternate reality. Because living with them is almost…nice.
The second bedroom is done up in green and white with a jungle theme, and even when Dudley throws a roaring tantrum over Harry’s stuffed giraffe Aunt Petunia doesn’t let him take it. (She buys him the biggest truck the toy store carries instead.) Every day Petunia dresses them in matching outfits and rolls them past the manicured lawns of Privet Drive, smiling when the neighbors coo about her precious boys and how brave she is to be taking on another child.
Not that it’s all sunshine and rainbows (though there are rainbow decals on the weather-themed sippy cups Harry and Dudley share). Vernon makes no secret that he thinks Harry is a waste of space – a sentiment Dudley picks on remarkably quickly given how early he starts shoving Harry around in their play pen – and Petunia has an unfortunate habit of forgetting him in his crib or highchair when they’re at home with the curtains drawn.
But there are picnics and birthdays and bedtime stories. Juice boxes and racecars and band aids with little cartoons on them. And, for the first time in Harry’s uncannily long memory, someone to come running and hold him when he wakes from a nightmare. (Petunia will take the truth to her grave, but she actually prefers comforting Harry at night. He quiets right down once he realizes the monsters are just in his head. Dudley screams and screams.) Sometimes he thinks about the things that gave him these nightmares, but it's hard to wrap his brain around the war or time travel or true grief right now, and much easier to just take another spoon full of pea mush or a nap.
And so, things roll along for the almost-family of four – the weeks slip into months, stretch into years, Harry slowly lulled into a sense of almost-comfort. He doesn’t love the Dursleys, could never unknown the truth of the horrible things they’d so easily do to a child forced to depend on them, but maybe this time he can avoid all the little landmines lurking around their sterile house. Maybe he can pick his way carefully to a quiet, easy childhood.
And then it’s Halloween again, and everything goes to shit.
Harry’s first Halloween on Privet Drive had been a bland affair, with Vernon grousing about government-approved hooliganism and Dudley eating himself sick on chocolate before the two boys were tucked away in their respective cribs early.
This year, however, Ms. Beetly of Number 12 Wisteria Lane was hosting a party for the neighborhood children, and if there was one thing the Dursleys hated more than a whiff of magic it was setting themselves apart. If the rest of Privet Drive’s young families were going to be there, then Petunia Dursley would be too, ghosts and ghouls be damned. Which is how a three-year-old Harry Potter found himself stuffed into a pumpkin suit and being wheeled up yet another identical Little Whinging walk.
“There now, Dudikins, just leave that hat on. Won’t you, for mummy?” Petunia croons, catching Dudley’s doughy fingers from where they were trying to release his perfectly bald head from under the felt pumpkin foliage adorning it. `
“Little tyke knows it’s rubbish,” Vernon mutters, somewhere between grumpy and proud.
“Hush,” Petunia hisses, just before the door to Number 12 swings open, swamping the front stoop in the sounds of clinking plates and chatter.
“Happy Halloween!” a boisterous voice roars from somewhere in the bright lights above Harry’s head, but all Harry can see is a sudden shower of green and red sparks.
Later, Harry will see that the sparks were from a sparkler Mr. Number 12 was brandishing about in welcome, smile broad and unthreatening. But in that moment Harry is a war-traumatized nineteen-year-old in a body that’s just starting to develop pathways for magical control, and his six years of magical education don’t stand a chance against that volatile combination.
For a moment nothing happens – literally nothing. Not a twitch of muscle, not a clink of cutlery. The house is stiller and more silent than death (and Harry would know). Then something in the outdoor air shivers, just beyond the edge of perception, and a wall of pure power slams through the open doorway.
The host stumbles back, away from Harry, his startled cry caught and carried back into the house by the wave of energy. The lights in the hall gutter, plunging them into darkness, startled cries and sounds of falling objects echo from deeper inside the house.
“Well,” Mr. Number 12 says long moments later, once the lights flick back on and he’s had a moment to right himself. “Sure is getting gusty out there! Come in, come in, before it picks up again!”
Vernon and Petunia Dursley make it through two drinks each, an hour of polite conversation about cars and children, respectively, an even more scrupulously polite round of goodbyes, and the entire walk home without acknowledging the strangeness of the “gust.”
Then the door clicks shut on Number 4 and all bets are off.
What follows is the worst fight Harry has heard on Privet Drive, including the time he blew up Aunt Marge and when he came home with a nearly-soulless Dudley. Vernon skips straight past pink and red and goes straight to purple in the face, laying into Petunia about her freakish family and her freakish genes and how he should have known better than to marry into this strangeness. There’s at least one crash and what sounds like the slap of skin against skin.
“And if you think you’ve trapped me into this freakshow with the baby, you’ve got another thing coming,” Vernon howls. Harry can’t see where they’re going at it in the living room, trapped as he is in his buggy in the hall, but he knows that tone of voice means spittle is flying. “No thing like that could ever be a son of mine. If you’ve mucked him up with your defects, all three of you will be out on the streets!”
It's the last thing he says before he storms out of the house. Petunia nearly flings herself across his car to keep him from driving away, but she remembers the neighbors at the last moment and just waves primly as he pulls out of the drive, pasting on her best smile.
Then she comes back in to find Dudley screaming in his playpen, the glass of last year’s Christmas photo shattered across the living room floor, and Harry sitting quietly in his buggy, still strapped in where he’d been forgotten by the door. She stands there for a moment, staring into his green, green eyes while Dudley screams and screams, a red welt forming across her cheek and an exhausted, cornered desperation in her eyes. For the first time in his lives, Harry might feel a little sorry for her.
Then she picks him up, shoves him in a coat cupboard, and pretends he doesn’t exist for two days. And Harry remembers why he cannot ever feel truly bad for a Dursley.
If asked, Petunia Dursley would tell you that she was a good person, thank you very much. Shoving a baby in a cupboard wasn’t who she was, it was something she’d done. Under stress. In an impossible situation. Really, her husband had just walked out on her and the boy had revealed he could do things, things that could hurt her son. That might take away Dudley’s father. She’d just needed the boy away for a bit. Anyone would have done the same.
And, well, after… the next morning, things are better. Not just better than the night before – better than they’d been in years. Vernon comes home in the night and she has breakfast on the table at precisely half seven and this, this was the family she’d pictured. No baby with her sister’s eyes hovering like a ghost. No sniping, resentful comments from her husband about the trouble she’d brought to their doorstep. Just her family, the way it was supposed to be. What could be wrong with pretending, just for a little while? Just one more hour becomes two, becomes the whole morning, becomes the day, and at some point a pinprick of anxiety started niggling at her brain. Shouldn’t the boy have made noise by now? Shouldn’t she have heard something?
But Vernon is pulling into the drive and she has to get dinner on the table, and at some point maybe she doesn’t want to open that cupboard. Because a baby had gone in but it had been days now and maybe she doesn’t want to know what’s in that cupboard that’s as silent as a graveyard.
She can’t sleep, the evening of the second day. There are no sounds from downstairs to keep her awake, no play of static between two baby monitors on her dresser. How it can be so silent with Vernon’s rumbling snores she’ll never know, but the quiet beyond their bed is deafening.
She’s in front of the cupboard before she fully realizes she means to get out of bed. The not knowing has grown worse than anything she’ll find inside. Because she won’t find anything bad inside. She is a good person, and good people don’t ki-
She opens the door before she can finish that thought, and for a moment her heart stops. Because there in the shadows by the baseboard, curled on a nest of cleaning rags and Halloween candy warpers, is her nephew, and he’s so small, and so, so still and –
And then his eyes open, nearly colorless in the dark, and all she feels is anger. How dare he frighten her like that. How dare he make her feel so wrong when he’s just fine.
That’s when Petunia learns she can do anything to Harry, without consequences. It’s a lesson she takes to heart.
Harry sees it. He’s startled awake by the rush of clean air through the open cupboard door, and for a moment he’s staring into a look he’s only seen on Petunia’s face once before, when he was fifteen and she’d heart Voldemort was back. For a moment she is looking at him – really looking at Harry and seeing him, her nephew, a child who is his own being but also a part of her.
But then something in the back of her eyes shutters closed, and Harry sees something else for the first time in this life: the look she gave him every day of his previous childhood. She grabs his arm and practically hurls him into the bathroom, snarling at him to clean himself up before shoving him back into the cupboard.
Harry learns something that night too: he can’t stay at Privet Drive. Any thought he had of the Dursley’s as an acceptable place to while away his toddlerhood died in that cupboard, and he would’ve died too without magic.
No matter the limitations of his toddler body, Harry is getting out.