Take Care Of Yourself
Chapter two: Home-making
[Characters and setting belong to J K Rowling. Everything else is my own.]
Harry finished bespelling the wallpaper of the ground-floor hallway, making it a hypnotising pattern of frolicking scarlet lions on yellow fields. He'd already traversed the carpet with his wand out, leaving a pleasant motif of pink pastel socks in his wake.
The young wizard looked about in satisfaction. He'd decided to clean Number 12, Grimmauld Place by working methodically from room to room, creating safe areas. This should nicely complement Kreacher's entirely random cleansing ministrations. He'd watched, at one point, as the elf whipped himself into a frenzy of erratic dustpan action, then stopped to run in and out of rooms with a ladder and a bucket of wallpaper paste, only to return to sweeping two minutes later.
In the half an hour since he'd started cleaning, Harry had used six different curse-detection charms. And he wasn't even out of the entrance hall yet.
A swish of his wand, and the tally reached seven. He hummed, considering the troll foot umbrella stand in front of him. On the one hand, it was unrepentantly hideous. On the other hand, it was a conversation piece, and it had no dark magic on it. Judging by the silver-banded pearwood inlay, it was probably quite valuable, too.
A flick of his wand and the huge hoary toenails on the thing became a deep rose-pink. It would do for now. When he could show his face in the wizarding world, he'd hock it.
Then he looked up, and narrowed his eyes. Something had to be done about that.
Harry rudely jerked back the portrait's curtains, causing the narrow-faced lady's eyes to bulge out. "Who are you? This man I've heard about from the elf? You claim you will bring a Lord Black back into this household? Speak up, boy!"
Harry sneered slightly at her. "Who am I? Madam, I am both a half-blood and a blood-traitor."
The portrait's eyes bulged even further, and colour splotched across her pale cheeks. "What? What? Are you taunting me, you loathsome worm? How dare you set foot in this house! You disgusting, worthless, know-nothing SCUM!" The voice began to shake the eaves, and Young Harry broke into matching wails behind him.
Harry just smiled. "Know-nothing? I beg to differ, madam. I know several things. For instance, I know the difference between a Permanent Sticking Charm and a Permanent Impervious Charm."
Bing.
Harry was on a roll. Bing.
He took careful aim again, and transfigured the last iron gas lamp into a crystal vessel in the shape of a lion's head. Bing. Young Harry gurgled a laugh and clapped his hands together at the sight.
Later Harry would see about getting some will'o'wisps to put in the heads, making permanent lights for the hall. He left the large crystal chandelier as it was, but added a warm pink tinge to the quartz crystals so it didn't clash with the new décor.
He had decided to go for 'garish Gryffindor', thinking it would make a nice change from the current decorations in 'subdued Slytherin', all dark snakes and silver fittings. Sirius could change it to whatever he thought was appropriate, once he was in his right mind.
Harry paused to paint golden zigzags on the skirting board with a flick of his wand. He liked to think he was opening up whole new realms of tastelessness, ripe for architectural exploration.
The ground floor hallway opened into a small vestibule, to either side of which lay the dining room and the library. On the back wall stairs went up to the higher floors, and a slightly more rickety flight coiled around down to the cellar and kitchen.
Harry stepped into the dining room, which Kreacher had actually kept in fairly good condition, compared to the rest of the house. The Black family silverware had been polished so much that it shone.
Harry put down the makeshift playpen he was carrying, and stared absently at the open fireplace. "Have to see about getting the Floo reconnected," he said aloud.
"I'll add it to the list," Hermione's voice said from his open collar.
Still, despite the house elf's efforts – Harry pointed his wand carefully – that table was too dark, that wall was covered in mildew – oops, a little too much power there, but now at least he had an excuse to conjure some nice wood panelling... and then there was the dresser, of course.
Fortunately, he had been through all of this once before. Without the benefit of magic the first time, it had taken weeks of (admittedly lacklustre) effort. He approached the wooden drawers of the dresser carefully, wary of the hordes of spiders that had infested it in the future.
Of course, the current present – the present present, perhaps – was a decade and a half earlier on the timeline. Regulus, the last Black to live here, couldn't have been gone much more than three years. In fact – Harry frowned – it was actually surprising how filthy the house was already.
After all, an old pureblood family like the Blacks wouldn't have lived in squalor. Nor would they, no matter how dark, no matter how wizardishly lacking in common sense, have lived amongst objects this dangerous. Only a family of Aurors could have lived here without serious accidents.
So... presumably Kreacher was bringing things in over time to make the house worse.
Well, that certainly explained the beartraps. Harry's initial exploration had turned up quite a few of them, steel jaws set, under beds or on chairs. He'd questioned Kreacher about them, but got nothing more than incoherent mumbling about family tradition and filthy muggles. In the end the elf had loped off to spring the vicious serrated traps and bundle them away somewhere.
Since then, Harry had been keeping his younger self particularly close.
Harry investigated the dresser carefully, finding only one nest of spiders, in the bottom of a drawer – perhaps some sort of seed population being bred by Kreacher. Harry flicked his wand to Vanish them, then transfigured the dresser into a simple set of open brass shelves. Against his better judgement, he left the family china and silverware with the horrible Black crest where it was. Sirius would have a good time throwing it at things.
Finally, he concentrated hard, and transfigured the chairs. They had been dark wooden things with clawed feet and grotesque eagle-snake-things carved elaborately into their headpieces. He spent ten minutes on each, permanently changing them into something a bit more utilitarian, but comfortable.
Well, now he had two finished rooms. Just a dozen more to go.
"Trash. Trash. Tra- wait, hold it up again. Um, put it in the 'maybe' pile. Trash. Trash. Maybe. Trash. Ooh! That's Postwaggle's Principles of Unnatural Deduction!"
"Treasure?" Harry asked.
"Definitely. Without that, we couldn't have sent you back more than two months in time without your body unravelling."
"Nice to know."
Harry put the tome on the stack of books that represented everything from the Black library actually worth keeping. The 'trash' pile was a dozen times larger. It was made up of books of dubiously appropriate magic, cursed books, and pureblood screeds, in approximately equal proportions.
He held up the next one, and Hermione's portrait peered from the Slytherin locket to scan the title. "Trash."
He picked up the next from the half-empty shelf. "Um..." Hermione hesitated, looking torn.
Harry squinted at the spine. "It's 'Magically Inflicted Diseases of the Bladder', Hermione. Dark magic and pointless and disgusting? Why would we want that?"
"It could have useful counter-curses in it," she said defensively.
"Fine. I'll put it in the 'maybe' pile, but only so I can get rid of it later when you're not looking."
The 'library' had been really quite small, and by the time they were done, it could be more accurately described as a 'bookshelf'.
"Incendio." Harry put plenty of juice into the spell, listening with amusement to the various squawks and snarls coming from Hermione's picture.
"You said they were trash, 'Mione."
She sniffed at him, then stomped out of the frame to visit her other painting.
Harry finished up, scourgifying the library floor and replacing the two gothic lecterns with nice reading desks. The room was still a bit gloomy, so he conjured hundreds of red glass jewels and floated them up to the ceiling, cementing them in place with a Permanent Sticking Charm. The light from the safety lamps glittered off them pleasantly.
"Right. Downstairs." He picked up the light blanket-lined clothing basket he was carrying Young Harry around in, and headed to the staircase.
The huge below-ground kitchen was filthy. After his cleaning charms, Harry burned out a mass of cobwebs overhead, zapped the dark fireplace into pale pink marble, and put a polishing charm on the long central table.
He stayed well away from Kreacher's cupboard, but glanced into the pantry. One look was enough for him to banish the entire current contents – honestly, who kept human fingernails in pickle jars? – before going upstairs to retrieve the purloined baby food. He'd gone out this morning to supplement the cans of mush with stolen bread, crackers and tins of beans.
"Going to have to do something about money, too," Harry said aloud. "In both worlds."
"We could have sold those books for a few Galleons in the hand," Hermione's portrait said reproachfully. "If you hadn't burned them."
"Better to go hungry then let some dark wizard – or worse, potential dark wizard – get their hands on them," Harry said shortly. "Anyway, there's plenty to sell here. The real problem is that I don't want to leave kiddy-me alone, but I don't want to take him out to Diagon Alley even under a glamour. The news about his disappearance must have broken by now. Anyway, add 'steal more food' to the list."
Hermione gave a long-suffering sigh, which Harry ignored. He certainly wasn't going to let the elf cook for them. Come to think of it, what had Kreacher himself eaten all these years?
His eye was horribly drawn to the enchanted stone box which kept cuts of meat chilled.
When he levered off the lid, he found that the coldbox was, mercifully, empty. There was something rattling about under the sink, though.
Harry paused, considering. It was probably a boggart, and he hadn't faced one of those in years, so he wasn't sure what form it would take. He glanced back at the clothes basket, from which a young voice chortled, happy about the existence of coloured balls. It'll probably be Young Me, dead, he thought. And then... real me, fading away.
He shook himself distractedly, knowing it didn't work like that. Coming back in time had completely annihilated the future. Losing Young Harry, institutionalising Dumbledore, blowing up the planet – nothing would have any impact on his current existence.
He opened the doors.
"What."
The thing that emerged was...
"Maths? I'm not afraid of maths. Who said I was afraid of maths? Maybe... maybe I don't have anything left to fear, and the boggart just reverted to some sort of weird default setting?"
Harry ran his fingers through his hair, staring at the glistening strings of complex equations that floated in the air towards him. Some were familiar rune-tuples, and he recognised a destabilising lemma from arithmancy.
"It's a magical hypothesis," Hermione said, peeping out of his shirt. "I think it's implying the immutability of timelines. The inference is that nothing you do will have any effect on events in the long term."
Harry thought deeply on this, as the glowing symbols drifted closer.
"Bullshit," he pronounced. "Riddikulus."
He laughed, watching the numbers and proofs shriek and burn, withering away before him. Five years of life following the practical extinction of Britain had ...changed his sense of humour somewhat.
Especially after he had gone back there.
Harry pocketed the boggart, now transfigured into a fly and trapped inside a piece of resin, and moved through a small door at the end of the kitchen. There, three stone steps led down a short way, into the wine cellar.
Harry lit his wand and looked around. The place was damp and fungal. Several oak firkins had been reduced to rotten splinters littering the floor. Rats skittered away from the light.
One shelf held tiny bottles of spirits, while on the opposite wall, there were shelves of... well, bottled spirits, amongst other things. Malevolent eyes stared out of the glassware, and smoky vapours coiled slowly in jars. There was also a row of larger, ornate crystal bottles, each with precious gems set in their lead stoppers. Most of these were filled with blood.
Old wine bottles lay on racks, obscured by dust. Harry's gaze passed over them, and then his eyes watered painfully when he glanced at one dark corner. He automatically took a step back, moving into a crouch that minimised his frontage to attack.
"Homenum Revelio!"
Nothing changed, but Harry found his eyes still refusing to focus on whatever was in the corner.
"Specialis Revelio! Cistem Aperio!"
The air in the gloomy room shimmered, and there was a tinny noise. Harry hesitantly identified it as a notice-me-not charm breaking, which Hermione confirmed aloud a moment later.
He moved cautiously over to the corner, and found an old, dusty wooden crate in a heap of empties.
Harry set the crate down on the newly-polished kitchen table with a thump, then as a precaution, moved Young Harry's makeshift playpen into the hallway.
"What is it? Some sort of secret treasure, do you think?" Hermione asked. "Or something Sirius' brother didn't want the Death Eaters to find out about? You don't think it has to do with..."
Harry sighed, tapping his wand against each side of the box. "No. I'm sure it would be under a better protection if it was." He frowned, not detecting any traps. He flicked his wand, opening the top.
A strange sight met his eyes. He approached the box, hesitantly.
"That's an... unusual figurine. What are all these big coloured feathers? And this leather thing?"
Harry was confused. He examined a handful of whips and chains. However thematic that sounded, they somehow didn't look quite as dark as the rest of the house. "These handcuffs are all fuzzy."
Hermione, on the other hand, had a bit more of a clue. After all, girls talk girls' talk. "Harry, do you really not know what all of this is?"
Harry glanced down at her picture. Her cheeks, formerly Flesh Tone #17, had become distinctly Pink Ochre, and the blush was rapidly reaching Scarlet Sienna Bloom.
"That figurine is a ...personal massager, Harry. And the mask is for- well. They're toys. Adult toys."
"Oh? Oh... Oh! Oh." Now Harry was blushing, too. He dropped the handcuffs. "Oh god. Um. I have to admit I never really... after Ginny died, when they went to try to... and then we had to flee, and I didn't know anyone in France... and before I'd even regained consciousness, you'd worked out we could send one of us back to fix things, so we had too much to do, I couldn't justify..."
"Perfectly understandable," the portrait said, not looking him in the eye. "I mean, it's not like – what are you doing, Harry?"
"Checking," he said absently, ratting through the crate with his wand levelled over it. "Looks like there's no actual dark magic on any of them. A few... vibrating charms, enchantments for warmth and... stuff, but they wouldn't show up if you checked for curses."
He closed the box again and thought deeply. "Hermione, you know how you researched linking ingrained charms to passive triggers? Do you think we could do that on a depulso?"
The portrait of Albus Dumbledore waited in silence for five minutes after Harry left. He probably didn't have much more than another five; the young man was leery of leaving Young Harry alone with only the Headmaster's portrait watching over him.
Dumbledore nodded to himself. Hermione had not returned from the Slytherin locket portrait, even to 'check up' on them. He called loudly, "Kreacher!"
The house-elf appeared with a pop, and looked about the empty room in confusion.
"Ah, Kreacher," Dumbledore said, drawing his attention. "You've made a commendable effort cleaning the house. You know, I remember young Regulus Black fondly. A most capable student."
"Master Regulus was a great wizard," Kreacher hissed, scuttling around the anti-elf ward that lay over the crib, and towards the painting. "Master Regulus was fit to use the Black name. Blood traitors should bite their tongues instead of speaking of him!"
"Quite so," said Dumbledore pleasantly. "However, I have a secret task that I think Master Regulus would think quite important, given that his aim was to bring about the fall of the Dark Lord. Here is what must be done..."
Remus Lupin sat in an uncomfortable chair by the hospital bed, feeling angry and guilty in equal measures. In front of him, Sirius' face was hollow, his eyes underscored by dark crows' feet. Even under heavy sedation, the man's expression frequently flickered into horror, rage or disgust.
The Ministry had released Sirius to St Mungo's on the proviso that he stayed there, for now. They had no real grounds to hold him, since one murder victim had suddenly turned up and confessed killing the other twelve victims. In a lucid moment Sirius had offered to give his account under veritaserum, and Amelia Bones had let him, off the record, asking just enough that she was sure of his innocence.
Still, in a balls-up like this, the Ministry would like nothing better than to sweep it all under the rug. And the best way to achieve that was for the victim of the miscarriage of justice to undergo a nice, long convalescence, until the furore in the press died down.
There were two Aurors on guard outside the door, and one of them checked inside every ten minutes. Everyone entering, even the healers, got vetted carefully. Lupin had waited for hours outside the room yesterday before Amelia appeared. Fortunately, she knew him, and had given him dispensation to visit when he wanted.
There were Dark Detectors on the door, and a wide-area anti-apparition jinx over the entire ward. The Ministry was now very keen to see justice done, which meant extra security measures. The consequences would be dire if anybody got to Sirius Black – to attack him, for instance, or worse, get an interview.
Given all the protections, Remus was quite startled when a shadow fell across him.
His head jerked up from contemplation. He didn't recognise the muscular blonde man in front of him. "Hey! How did you get in? There are guards right outside the door!"
"Window." The stranger jerked a thumb, his eyes glued to Sirius' face. "I had to find an owl anyway, so it was convenient. And Aurors tend not to think outside the box."
Lupin's attention was drawn to the bouquet of plastic backscratchers and half-bag of lemon candy in the man's hand.
The stranger looked up at him at last, then followed his gaze. "Oh, yes. I brought these."
Harry suppressed the urge to giggle as Remus frowned bemusedly at him.
"He's not allowed anything with sugar until he's off the potions," the werewolf eventually said.
"What are you, his mother, Moony?"
Remus was standing, wand in hand, in a flash. "How do you know that name?"
Harry blinked. "Oh right, sorry. It's me, Harry. Remember? I turned up on your doorstep a couple of days ago with my child self and some good news. I'm under polyjuice."
He turned away, found a vase on a side table, and arranged the brightly coloured backscratchers he'd grabbed from a muggle junk shop. Turning back, Harry sighed at Moony's pointing wand.
"Explain," the man said tightly. "You had Harry. You claim you are Harry. Now Dumbledore's told the Ministry that James' son has gone missing and he can't find him. You dumped some incriminating evidence on me and ushered me off to Azkaban, and the Ministry was in turmoil by the time I got back, since you'd dropped the little traitor off in their midst. You look like a weedy version of James but you don't smell exactly like him, you obviously know Sirius, and you have a lot of explaining to do."
Damn it. Harry brushed his fringe back, showing a pale jagged scar. "I really am Harry. I really did come back in time." He shrugged. "I'm not sure if I can convince you, but I can tell you a few things only you or Sirius should know..."
He took a deep breath. "Your boggart is the full moon. Your patronus is a gibbon. Sirius once tried to murder Snape by telling him about the passage from the Whomping Willow to the Shrieking Shack one night when you were there. James saved him and Dumbledore covered it up. He made you a prefect to try to get the other three under control but it didn't work. They were animagi by fifth year, and kept you company on the full moon – Padfoot's a dog, Wormtail's a rat. Prongs was a stag, and had an invisibility cloak of such fine quality that only Dumbledore could ever see through it. All of sixth year, James and Sirius competed to be the first to steal Siobhan Davidson's panties. James had a purple birthmark shaped like a panda, on his right hip. He tried to burn it off with salamander venom, but only made it look like a scowling clown face. Uh, what else... The Order of the Phoenix, Fenrir Greyback, 'I solemnly swear I am up to no good', and Sirius' drunken confession about the hedgehog."
Lupin's face had become paler and paler, and his wand drooped lower and lower, and finally he sat heavily back on the chair. "Nobody else knows about the hedgehog. As far as I know, he didn't even tell James."
"Anyway," Harry wound up, glad that Remus was accepting his tale, "How's Padfoot? Sleeping it off?"
"I don't think one typically 'sleeps off' a year in Azkaban. He looked so ill..." Moony's voice dropped to a murmur, and he looked lost.
"They're keeping him under until the first course of potions for his mind are done. They're saying he could damage himself otherwise. He'll be on a special treatment plan for months. Harry, Harry James Potter... it's really you? You travelled from the future, this isn't some joke?"
Harry flopped down on the St Mungo's bed opposite. "Yep. It's really good to see you too, Moony."
And with that, as he looked across at the two friends who had been like parents to him, who had died for him; as he looked at the first friends he'd seen in the past, the emotion hit him.
His mental dykes had been holding back too large a flood of feelings, too long, and now his eyes flooded with tears. Harry knew, deep in his mind, that if he'd woken up after the war and that was it, two-thirds of the people he'd ever known were gone forever, every muggle, animal and bird in the UK dead or worse, then he'd have broken. He'd have snapped, and wouldn't have been willing to live any longer himself.
As it was, though, when he had come round, Hermione and the Headmaster's portrait were already certain their idea was viable. When he'd found that out, at the same time as the devastating news, he'd pushed off a lot of thought, a lot of emotion. He'd thrown himself into the work with a focus he could barely believe, now.
Well, with a bit of luck, he could get things rolling here and then have the breakdown that was long overdue. It would probably last for years.
Harry struggled to get his breathing under control, and resolved to share everything that had happened with Sirius and Remus. The plan had been to work up to it, keeping back the sensitive information until they'd learned basic occlumency. Just in case there were any stray Death Eater legilimens wandering around, aside from the obvious one.
But now he needed to ground himself. He needed human contact. He needed, in short, to get amazingly drunk with someone, in the way he and Ron sometimes did before ...the end; the way he and Hermione occasionally did after it. A house elf, two portraits and a two-year-old just wouldn't have been good choices.
He opened his mouth, bit down before the words "I won't let you die this time" could escape, and cleared his throat, aware that Moony was watching him in confusion. "Listen, I can't stay long, I've got Albus at home watching young Harry surrounded by a buffering ward, and I'm not happy leaving him for long. I'll meet you in the foyer here tomorrow morning-"
"Can't be the morning," Hermione's voice interrupted from his collar, startling Remus.
"Argh, yeah. Scratch that, it'll have to be late afternoon or evening, my schedule's just crazy. I'll tell you a story so ludicrously frightening your mind will refuse to believe it even after you've seen the Pensieve memories. Bring the newspaper if you can. I've got alcohol."
Harry spoke faster and faster, eyeing the door nervously. The proximity charm on his earlobe said that the patrolling guard had stopped, and now the other one was unlocking the door. He stood, patted his slumbering godfather gently on the cheek with a trembling hand, and gave Moony an apologetic look. "I'll be back. See you tomorrow evening!"
He sprinted for the open window and dived through it as the door opened.
"What- hey!" Footsteps clattered across the floor behind him, but he swung up onto his disillusioned broom and swept his invisibility cloak around himself.
An angry face peered out below, then turned back. "Damn it! Who was that?"
After a long pause, Lupin's bewildered voice carried to him. "I- I really, really don't know."
Harry apparated into the kitchen, thinking deeply. Quite apart from all the bad memories he'd just conjured up, it was a real shock to see Remus young and uncertain. Moony had always been the one in control of the situation. Now, the three of them were all basically the same age, and Harry had the advantage of magical foreknowledge.
In fact, Harry was probably technically slightly older than Lupin now – he'd used the time turner quite a lot in preparation for coming back to the distant past – but he had no intention of acting maturely. He swore to himself that he'd give Sirius a run for his money, even if time in Azkaban had reverted the man to a child's mental state. Let Lupin, younger than Sirius by half a year, be the responsible one again.
Harry spent a moment leaning on the coolbox, making sure he had a grip on himself. Then he sighed, and looked around the kitchen for foodstuffs. He had a few extremely onerous tasks and then could lead a relatively carefree life. All he needed was Sirius alive, awake and home. It would get him grounded in this reality.
He found the pumpkin he had stolen earlier, and grabbed the custard power, the noodles and the last quarter-tin of baby food.
Harry didn't know how to cook per se, and he didn't know what was meant to go into a two-year-old's diet. But he probably couldn't go far wrong as long as he ate everything that Young Harry did.
Harry fed his two-year-old doppelgänger and rocked him patiently to sleep, with Hermione and Albus harmonising in an improvised lullaby. Then he fell back on his bed with a muted groan.
The painted Dumbledore, who was now engaged in knitting a pair of pink socks that matched the carpet, looked up. "You've made excellent progress on the house, my boy. I was particularly enamoured with your choice of colour scheme."
"Well, yes," Harry said, eyelids already drifting down. "Do I not have mastery over the indomitable elder wand, unbeatable in a fair match, be it a contest of interior decoration or otherwise?"
The painted wizard could do nothing but incline his head in acknowledgement of that fact.
Author's notes:
→ Thanks for the big response. Like it, leave a review! Hate it, leave a review! Want to express your ambivalence towards it, leave a review! Spelling mistakes or glaring plot holes, leave a review!
→ Note that I've rewritten most of this chapter. Don't worry, the much-anticipated backstory will turn up in a few chapters. But since my knowledge of young children could be written on half a postage stamp, then if you're hoping that the story will focus on Young Harry, you're out of luck.