Aunt Petunia would have had a fit.
Pothos vines, vibrant green and yellow had besieged the back wall of the house and the trellised fence that girded the otherwise unfettered miniature jungle. Zinnias mixed with calendulas, defying all laws of when each plant was supposed to bloom. The grass intermingled with weeds such as clover and sourgrass. Pink and white and yellow impatiens blossoms carpeted the shadowy corners. The herb garden overran what might have once been white markers in a rampant attack upon the wine-red leaves of the coleus plants.
The prospect of playing outside in this shadowy garden of colors and secrets--and more importantly, lots of creepy bugs--lit up Harry's young face. Especially since it seemed that the backyard already came with someone to play with.
Standing poised in the middle of the contesting swan-white snapdragons and narcissus, was a grubby waif no taller than Harry. The new boy himself seemed about as likely to make Aunt Petunia incensed as the was the garden itself, dressed in torn rags that had probably once been black, and covered in dirt. Aside from the smudges, however, the boy looked to be a ghost made of smoke and vapors, given human form on a whim.
The pale boy's thin white fingers held out three or four strawberries as the childish treble stumbled over complicated syllables. "You like strawberries? I found a patch hiding behind the mint."
Harry nodded. Then, because the other was obviously his age but not in his class at school-- "Where d'you go to school?"
"Targaryaen Elementary."
"Thanks." Harry took a strawberry and tasted it. It was sweet, but slightly bitter at the core. "I go to Stonewall Elementary, and I don't like it much, either. My cousin's in my class, and he's really mean. And fat, too," Harry added as an afterthought. The white-pale child was skinnier than even Harry.
"Oh. I don't have any cousins," the other boy confessed. "I had an uncle, except he's dead now." He chewed a strawberry thoughtfully, putting the leaves aside with care. "What's that on your forehead?" he finally asked, flitting from one topic to the next as children were wont to do, poking one sticky finger at Harry's scar curiously.
Later, Harry found a tennis ball so grimy one could barely tell it was green, and they played catch, crushing brightly-colored blossoms under Harry's shoes and the blond child's bare soles as they ran and jumped to make sure the ball didn't land on the ground, and the pale boy showed Harry a small broomstick, broken in half.
"I have an idea," Harry suggested as the white-skinned other stared forlornly at the fence. The tennis ball had vanished as it sailed over the white-painted and pothos-draped top, and the barrier itself looked to be without enough purchase to risk climbing over. "Let's play at wizards." Sometimes they did this at school, at recess, pretending to be characters in movies and Disney personalities, feigning possession of supernatural powers, and Harry had always enjoyed the game.
Silvery eyes blinked. "Play? I am a wizard," came the complacent declaration.
"There's no such thing as real wizards," Harry Potter scoffed. "My aunt told me so. People just play at--"
"There are so wizards!" The pale boy insisted fiercely. "My whole family are wizards."
Harry crossed his arms stubbornly. "Everyone knows wizards don't exist." Those were the exact same words Aunt Petunia had used, and though Aunt Petunia was mean, she'd never lied to Harry.
The silver-blond child held up one hand. "If I wasn't a wizard, could I do this?" he demanded in piping, childish tones that would have caused any adult to immediately become patronizing, and discredit whatever the boy said.
A flash of light sprang to life on the palm, then rounded itself out into a perfect, radiant globe.
"No," Harry acknowledged, the looked eagerly at the tiny sphere of light. It was brighter than a candle, and a whitish, ethereal glow rather than the saffron tinge Harry associated with indoor lighting. He poked at it with one finger, which went right through the light up to the very first knuckle. It felt cold, an icy, freezing cold that stopped blood. Abruptly, Harry pulled back his hand, suppressing a shudder. "But don't wizards have hats and wands and stuff?"
The towheaded child shook, no. "Adults have wands, but my father says I'm too young for one. My father doesn't like me doing magic," he divulged, and fell silent. Harry remarked that the father sounded mean. The towheaded boy didn't meet Harry's eyes as he admitted that was why he'd run away.
"Can you show me how you did that?" Harry asked quickly after. He envisioned himself going home and presenting a globe of light to Aunt Petunia and telling her that wizards really did exist.
The pale boy chewed his lower lip uncertainly.
"Please?"
"Well..." Again, the uncertainty showed. "You sort of think of the light, and then you think of it being in your hand and--" The boy shrugged. "That's how I do it, anyway."
Harry tilted his head, emerald eyes glowing in excitement. "Like--" he focused--
A tiny light sprang into being on the tip of Harry's index finger, barely the size of a pinhead. Like a spark falling from a blaze it made a feeble effort, but flickered out all the same.
"Now you do it again," the fair child instructed.
This time, the ball was a bit larger, emitting a dim yellow glow that stayed, steady with no hint of wavering. It felt warm against Harry's skin because he though of light as a warm thing.
The blond boy smiled at Harry. "And you keep practicing," he finished. "Until you can get it to be as bright as you want it."
Harry watched as the other recreated the miniature star. "I almost thought you were a Muggle, you know," the boy admitted. "I mean, you live with Muggles, don't you?"
"I don't know," replied Harry, perplexed. "What's a Muggle?"
"They're... not magic. Not like us, and they don't like us..."
"Like my family?" Harry asked.
The pale boy thought for a second. "Yeah."
The setting sun found them searching for four-leaf clovers. Harry didn't find any, but the blond child found two, and then turned to Harry. "Some clovers really are lucky. Four-leaf clovers are good bases for favourable fortune enchantments--my mum always--."
At that moment, a man, tall and pale, appeared behind Harry's elfin-faced acquaintance.
"Draco!" The man snapped. "What are you doing, covered in filth and associating with--" his gaze passed over Harry and his lip curled into a sneer, "--Muggle scum?"
The the pale child's chin titled proudly upwards. "He's not a Muggle, and he's not scum. He's smarter than the boys at Targaryean--"
The sound of the man's palm hitting the boy's cheek was an audible crack that shouldn't have echoed across the yard as well as it did. Under a spattering of loam, white skin swelled to red. "Father!"
"You're a disgrace," the man said quietly. "First you run off, and then you befriend a foul piece of Muggle—offal."
"But he's not a Muggle," the other boy protested, pressing one hand to his injured face. "I told you, he's not--he can do magic, Father, without a wand--"
For the first time, the pale child's father actually looked--and, even stranger, seemed to recognize him. This apparent recognition, however, only seemed to anger him further. "In light of your playmate's--" he spat the word out, as if it tasted bad, "--identity, I should almost prefer a Muggle."
"You will forget this," the man said slowly, eyes narrowed and voice forceful. One hand procured a long branch of cool, gray wood, which it pointed at Harry's scar. "You won't remember any of this--not my son, not me, not one part of it."
The pale boy stared at Harry, silvery eyes huge and horrified with unrealistic--but not completely unfounded--fear. "You can't kill him--"
It only took a raised hand, just the threat of violence, to quiet the objection. Already, Harry could feel memory growing hazy, clouding over the day with grasping fingers of fog that stole recollection away.
Within a minute, he couldn't recall tennis balls or strawberries or shimmering globes of light; he couldn't recall telling all that he could remember of his life to a blond child that was now suddenly a stranger to him, gazing at him apprehensively.
The back door opened, and Harry's eyes swiveled to see the wrinkled and drooping figure of Mrs. Figg, the owner of the garden. "Harry, you're family's back!" she called out into the yard.
Part of Harry's heart sank. As much as he detested Mrs. Figg's musty old house, it was better than the clean cruelty of the Dursley's. The other part of Harry's heart soared. Anything to leave the baleful glare of the bleached-looking man whose hand grabbed the odd, white-faced boy's shoulder.
"'Bye, then," he said to the pale boy and the pale man. It was only polite.
"Goodbye, little Harry Potter," the man answered, waving Harry away. "Remember--or, more fittingly, don't--that nothing ever happened."
Harry nodded, acquiescent, and turned back to the house. As he trudged up the steps, he heard another slap and hissing, degrading words, but he was forgetting them already.