The Dursley family hadn't ever considered themselves to be very religious folk, they only ever attended mass twice a year, once for Easter and once more for Yule, and that was mostly to maintain the façade of being a respectable sort of people. It wasn't for lack of trying, of course, in the early years of their marriage Petunia had strong-armed Vernon into donning his best suit to attend mass every Sunday, as that had been what her parents had done every week leading up to their deaths. But then Dudley had been born and made it quite clear that he didn't appreciate being dragged to the church every Sunday in the most vocal way possible. And so they fell out of the habit until the only time they stepped into church was when it became imperative to maintain appearances.
The Dursley family's lack of true faith, however, had never stopped them from attempting to use the religion as another tool to quell their nephew's more freakish tendencies. For as long as Harry Potter could remember, they'd told him that freaks like him burned in hell and that, if he wished to avoid eternal damnation, he might try and be more like them (i.e. normal).
It never really worked, young Harry wasn't a particularly god fearing child, but, what was more, he didn't know the cause behind the occurrences that had led his relatives to label him a freak, let alone how to control them. Weird things just happened around him.
And yet, despite his overall lack of belief in things such as heaven, hell, and an all powerful man in the sky, Harry did believe in angels, more specifically guardian angels. And he knew with all the certainty an eight year old could possess, that he had one looking out for him.
He'd been around as far back as Harry's memory recalled, always there, looking out for him, comforting him whenever Dudley was being particularly cruel or Vernon had tossed him out on his ear for one imagined slight or the other. He always wore a different face, spoke with a different voice, but Harry never failed to recognize him, something about him was unmistakable. There was an aura of otherworldliness about him, one might even call it magical.
Harry never called him out on it though, he feared that the moment he revealed that he knew that the strangers always willing to provide kind words and quiet comfort were all the same person, they'd disappear and never return. So he kept quiet and continued to play along with his angel's game, and for years it worked; they met in some form at least once every week, some visits were planned and some occurred merely by chance (or at least by chance on Harry's part). With every encounter between him and his guardian angel, he found it easier and easier to ignore the vitriolic hatred his relatives sent his way in an almost endless barrage, until he found himself entirely unaffected by their mistreatment.
But then he stopped coming.
Harry and his angel had parted ways one evening with no promises of seeing each other again but with both knowing that they would anyway, but then a week passed and Harry's angel didn't make an appearance, then another, and another until two months had come and gone and Harry hadn't seen anything of his angel. The boy couldn't help but worry, the longest he'd ever gone without seeing his angel was two weeks, had he done something to drive him away? Had he done something wrong?
Without the quiet support of his guardian angel, it became increasingly more difficult not to wilt in the face of his family's scorn. And they seemed to realize that something had changed with him as the frequency and the ferocity of every altercation between Harry and the Dursleys increased nearly tenfold.
"What are you stupid, boy?" Petunia snapped one evening, swooping into the kitchen just as Harry upended a package of minced beef into a sizzling frying pan. "That fire is entirely too high. Are you trying to burn the beef?"
"No, Aunt Petunia," Harry said, dutifully turning the gas stove down.
"I won't have you ruin dinner for Dudley, he's had a hard day at school today."
Harry surreptitiously rolled his eyes as he worked on browning the meat. He knew it would be pointless to remind Petunia that he had also attended school that day, and, considering he'd spent much of it avoiding Dudley and his gang in one way or the other, it was likely his had been far more stressful than the baby Dursley's.
"Not to mention your uncle's had a long day at work and he'll be expecting a warm meal when he returns home."
"Yes, ma'am," Harry said monotonously. He barely even flinched when a bony hand whacked him upside his head.
"Don't take that tone with me," Petunia chastised, "or you'll find yourself going to bed without dinner."
Seeing as his usual dinner was a cheese sandwich and a glass of tap water, he didn't feel as if he was really missing out. Of course, if his guardian angel were around the lackluster dinners wouldn't be a problem as he always seemed to have something for him to snack on.
Harry suppressed a melancholy sigh at the reminder of his missing angel. Maybe if he ever came back he'd finally confront him about the fact that he knew who really was, seeing as keeping that a secret obviously hadn't kept him from leaving.
"Get the noodles! They'll be overcooked if you keep them on for much longer."
Harry scrambled to do as his aunt said, knowing that if even one thing wound up burnt or overcooked the consequences would be incongruously severe.
In the end, the meal turned out as near perfect as the eight year old could make it, and yet he still received only a dinner roll and half of a banana for his troubles before being unceremoniously shoved outside. Apparently Vernon had invited his coworker and his wife over for dinner at the very last minute, and, of course, they wanted to keep Harry completely out of sight.
He didn't mind being kicked out at least, for him it meant less time he had to spend locked in his cupboard. It was mid-spring, so it was still pleasantly cool despite the steadily setting sun, he might as well make the short trek over to the park and enjoy his dinner there. And so he did exactly that, working his way through the crumbling piece of bread and browning fruit while pushing himself back and forth on the swing. As far as things went, there were worse ways to be spending the night.
"I'll say, what are you doing out here all alone, young man? It's nearing dark, it's not safe for you to be here without your parents."
Harry startled and nearly toppled off of the swing set with how fast he twisted his body to face the street and the source of the unexpected voice. A man who looked to be in his late sixties with neatly combed, silver hair, impossibly long legs, and a surprisingly straight back for a man his age was watching him from just outside the park, waiting patiently for an answer to his questions.
Harry blinked several times, forcing himself to look past the man's outward appearance, searching for something deeper; it was all too easy to fool a man's eyes through careful trickery and disguise, what he was looking for was not so easily hidden. Harry had no word for it, though there were certainly many in existence, all that he knew was that, when he finally found the soft pulse that thrummed with an electric kind of energy and yet crackled with an ice cold calm, his heart sang. The energy belonged only to one being, his angel was back.
"It's you," he gasped, scrambling from the swing and hurrying to the silver haired man's side. "You're back."
For a moment, the man looked caught off guard. "Pardon? Have we met before?"
Harry nodded fervently, not allowing the innocent question to throw him off. His angel was only pretending not to know him after all. "Yes, we have. You take care of me and watch over me whenever Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon are mean to me. I know I'm not supposed to know who you are, but you've been gone for so long and I was worried."
"Know who I am…?" the man blinked rapidly. "Whatever do you mean?"
"Can we please just not pretend?" Harry begged. "Not today? Not after you've been gone so long. I swear I'll go back to pretending to not know who you are tomorrow, but can we just be ourselves tonight?"
The man's brow furrowed. "Who is that you think I am?"
Harry hesitated, suddenly reluctant to speak the truth aloud. But when the man gave him a curious look, clearly expecting some sort of answer from him, he gathered his resolve and spoke what he'd been dying to say for years. "My guardian angel."
"Is that so?" a contemplative frown furrowed his angel's brow as he moved to seat himself on one of the rusting swings. "I'm neither confirming nor denying your assumption, but how long have you been aware of my presence?"
Harry hurried to seat himself on the swing beside the angel. "For a few years now," he explained. "I think I've always been able to recognize you, but it wasn't until I was older that I really understand what it meant, or who you were."
"That being a guardian angel?"
Harry nodded.
"What led you to believe in such a thing? You don't strike me as the sort to believe in that kind of thing."
"I never really believed in the church stuff my aunt wanted me to, you know God and Satan and the like, but a guardian angel doesn't have to come specifically from heaven. You could be a regular human, born to earth and not heaven or whatever someone wants to believe in, but you're nice to me, you give me food when I'm hungry and gifts when I'm sad, that can count as a guardian angel if I want it to."
"That is….You are astoundingly astute for one so young."
"I'm not that young," Harry frowned. "I'll be nine in a few months, I'm almost a teenager."
Harry's angel looked vaguely unsettled by this for some reason. "Yes, I suppose you are," he murmured.
Harry idly pushed himself on his swing for a few minutes, slowly working up the courage to ask the question that had been nagging him since the very start of this encounter. "So are you?" he finally asked. "My guardian angel that is?"
"From what you said earlier, I think you've already got that decided."
"That's a yes then?"
The man hummed noncommittally.
Harry huffed in frustration, but let it go for the time being. "Why me?" he asked instead. "Why spend years looking out for a stranger without ever revealing who you were?"
"You are no stranger," the man said. "I've known you since you were a babe, I was…familiar with your parents, your mother specifically. When they passed, I wanted to keep a close eye on you."
"But why keep it a secret? Why go through the trouble of disguising yourself? And how were you able to disguise yourself so well for that matter?"
"Where I live, there is conflict between my family and myself. I did not wish to endanger you by coming to you while wearing my true face. As for how I was able to disguise myself," the man smiled mischievously, "magic."
Harry scoffed disbelievingly. "Magic doesn't exist."
"I'll have you known that it does indeed exist. Tell me, young Harry, how were you able to recognize me? It's been proven on many occasion that my disguises are near infallible."
"I don't know, it's a feeling I suppose." Harry shrugged. "Something about how you feel is different. I'm not explaining it very well."
"Quite the contrary, as a matter of fact. You're explaining it very well. And what of the things that so often get you in trouble with your relatives, the 'freakish' occurrences you're frequently punished for?"
Harry's eyes widened. "You know about that?"
"The entire neighborhood knows about it," the man said, face dark, "your relatives have so kindly seen to that. I am the only one who knows it for what it truly is."
"Magic," Harry repeated incredulously.
"Indeed. You didn't truly believe that being able to make things disappear when you no longer wished to see them or quite literally freeze when you so wished it to was normal."
"Well, I knew it wasn't normal, but I didn't ever consider the fact that it was magic," Harry said. "If that was true I would have turned my relatives into frogs a long time ago."
A small smile quirked his guardian angel's lips. "You didn't believe it to be magic because your aunt and uncle have spent nearly your entire life drilling it into your head that such a thing doesn't exist."
"But why?"
"Because they're afraid of it? Perhaps even a bit jealous. Those who are so extraordinarily ordinary most often are."
Harry frowned, seriously contemplating what this strange man was telling him. Films and television shows involving anything of the supernatural variety had been banned from the Dursleys household a long time ago (much to Dudley's chagrin), but Vernon and Petunia couldn't control what Harry read whilst at school and so he had a fairly good idea of what magic was supposed to look like. He had to admit that some of the things he'd done by accident when scared or angry fit well with the powers he'd seen some of the heroes in comic books utilizing.
"I'd like a bit of proof, if it's not too much trouble," he told the older man. "A demonstration, maybe."
Much to Harry's relief, his angel didn't seem upset by his demand, only amused. "What would you like to see?" he asked.
"What can you do?"
"A bit of everything, I'd like to think. Though illusions are my specialty."
Between one blink and another, Harry found himself surrounded by exact replicas of himself. Seven copies of himself stood in a loose circle around him and his companion.
"They're insubstantial," the man explained as Harry reached out to touch one only for his hand to pass through it as if it weren't even there. "Tricks of the light."
"What else can you do?" Harry asked, slightly awestruck.
"My disguises. As I told you earlier they are a result of magic, more specifically shapeshifting." There was a barely distinguishable shimmer of bright green before an entirely different man stood before him. He was just tall and put together as the older man, but his hair was inky black and pulled back into a neat tail at the back of his head. Everything about him reeked of old money, from the expensive looking coat arranged over his immaculate, black suit, to the confident tilt of his chin to the straight line of his back.
Harry took an involuntary step back, drinking in the man's appearance with silent confusion. "Is this what you really look like?"
"Yes," the man nodded, "this is my true face."
"You look…you look like me." And he did, the bright green of his eyes, the inky sheen of his hair, even the faint angles to his face were all entirely too much like Harry's. They weren't identical, but the similarities were there and they were unmistakable.
"We do share a striking resemblance, don't we?"
"We do," Harry agreed. "How did you say you knew my parents again? You said you were familiar with my mother. How familiar?"
The man shifted in a way that could be considered uneasily. "We were old friends."
"You're lying," Harry refuted almost immediately.
"Am I? How can you be so sure?"
The boy shrugged evasively. "I've always been good at spotting lies. How did you know my mother?"
Harry's companion laughed quietly, he shook his head in silent wonderment. "I've said it once but I'll say it again, you are astoundingly astute for one so young. I suppose I only have myself to blame for that, though.
"I met your mother purely by chance. I'm not sure if you can tell, but I'm not from around here, I was only visiting the…area because I was in search of something, someone. For a short period of time, I was quite taken with her; she managed to persuade me to remain for a while longer without ever really having to ask."
"I don't understand," Harry frowned.
"We were together. Intimate. Though it was never anything romantic, it was all purely physical."
"What are you trying to say?"
"I'm not trying to say anything," the man said. "I did not come here with the intention of revealing myself to you."
"But you have. You are. What are you trying to say?"
The man gave him a look, it wasn't angry, but it wasn't particularly happy either. If anything, it was contemplative. He was assessing him, silently sizing him up to see if he deserved any kind of answer. Something in the firm set of Harry's jaw and the hard light in his eye must have convinced him as a small, somewhat challenging, smile stretched across his face. "What I'm trying to say is that you've been lied to nearly your entire life, not on purpose perhaps, I don't believe your relatives knew anything other than what they'd been told, but that does not change the fact that you've been left blind to your true heritage.
"James Potter wasn't your father. I am."
Harry didn't even hesitate before saying. "I don't believe you."
A surprised chuckle burst from the man's mouth, it was obvious that, of all the responses he'd been expecting, that was not among them. "Is that so? Do you require some sort of proof?"
Harry nodded sharply. "That would be a good place to start."
"I'm sorry to say that I have none, other than what you've been presented with thus far. Your good looks, your abilities, your magic are all traits passed down from me. It doesn't take much intelligence to note these similarities and what they could mean."
"We look alike, we've already come to an agreement on that," Harry conceded. "But I'm still not entirely sold on this magic, it could be a trick or something."
"A trick you've been playing on yourself your entire life?" the man challenged. "You and I both know that the freezing and the vanishing weren't isolated incidents. You're able to do so much more and you have, only you were much more successful at keeping those occurrences secret."
Harry looked slightly taken aback. "How do you know that?"
"Because I know you and I know what you are, Harry. You are magical, in every sense of the word; not just because of the power passed onto you, but because you are my son."
"If I really am your son…if you are my father, why am I not with you? Why am I living with the Dursley's when you're alive and well?"
"It is as I said before," the man said. "I didn't wish to endanger you. I have enemies on many different fronts, some are strangers who would do me harm both because of the family in which I hail and because of my own actions, but others are of my own blood. My father specifically, doesn't wish for me to procreate for various asinine reasons. If he were to know that I had a son he would be…displeased."
"But you could have told me at the very least. I understand the need to remain in disguise but why keep who you were a secret from me?"
"Fear, I suppose. Until this day, only three people knew of your true parentage, two of which are dead and the third is standing right in front of you. I thought it best to keep it that way. I thought that if not even you knew who I truly was to you, the chances of being found out would be slim to none. But then I was confronted with a very ugly truth."
Harry shook his head in confusion, prompting his companion to elaborate.
"These past few years I've done everything to keep your existence a secret, I've used the best disguises, the most powerful cloaking spells in my arsenal and it still wasn't enough. Somehow, my father began to notice that I was disappearing more often than usual, so he had me watched and very nearly discovered where it was I was going. I was forced to stay away until he lost interest and was no longer keeping track of my comings and goings.
"In the two months I was away, I considered what it was I'd done wrong, none of my spells or disguises had faltered and I'd been very careful in spacing our visits out, and yet we'd still nearly been found out. It was only then that I realized that none of it mattered, no matter how careful I am, no matter how many disguises I don or secrets I keep from you, there is always a chance that we'll be discovered. With that realization came the resolution that, when I returned to you, I would stop hiding and tell you of our relation." A rueful smile took over the man's face. "But, of course, you beat me to it."
A slightly suspicious look twisted Harry's features. "So, if I hadn't said anything about being able to see past your disguises, you would have told me anyway?"
"I would have," his maybe-father confirmed. "Though perhaps not all at once, I would have started with revealing that I'd been…watching over you, so to speak, these past few years, then I would have told you about the magic both you and I possessed, and then I'd tell you of who I was to you. I intended to spread it over the course of several visits, break it to you gently, but you obviously had other plans."
Harry hummed softly and idly kicked himself back and forth on the swing as he thought over all that he'd just been told. He had magic, which, all right, wasn't all that hard to believe considering all of the strange things he'd been able to do. What was truly unbelievable was that he had a father, who was alive and well and obviously cared for him quite a bit seeing as he'd risked the wrath of his own terrible sounding father to visit him. He found himself struggling to wrap his head around the far-fetched idea.
"I think I need some time," he told the man. "To think."
"Take as much time as you need, little one, I'll be here when you're ready."
Harry nodded and slowly slid from his perch on the swing. He slowly made his way out toward the street, but stopped just before he stepped onto the sidewalk. "What's your name? What should I call you?"
"I am known as Loki. But what you should call me is entirely up to you."
"All right, well I suppose I'll be seeing you."
The man, Loki, granted him a small smile and a dip of his head. "I certainly hope so."