AN: More silliness, I couldn't resist.

-Aww, thanks for the faves! I really appreciate it.


"Bloody hell."

That summed the situation up just fine, thought Harry, who had elected to cuddle up with the late Lord Voldemort's wand and cloak atop the barely breathing bodies of his parents. They were his trophies, damn it, and he'd cuddle with them all he pleased until somebody took them away.

The fellow who'd breathed the intelligent comment appeared to be a nobody of consequence who'd thought to come see exactly what the Potter's had gotten up to that morning.

Harry squinted at him, then at the men behind him. Scratch that. This was an Auror. Fine and dandy, about time they dragged their carcasses over to check.

"Gaa, gaa." Harry greeted him and chewed on his wand absently. It fizzled red sparks, lighting up the frozen stag and lions surrounding him.

"Bloody hell, bloody hell, bloody hell. Over here! I found the Potters!" the man bellowed, and a cacophony of voices joined his as the troop of Aurors navigated the remains of the flattened house to reach them.

Harry just smiled when a kindly looking woman picked him up and muttered a warming charm, taking him away while a team of Mediwizards looked over his parents. He did frown when she plucked the wand from his grasp, but at his look of discontent she offered him a conjured toy wand in its place. Harry chewed on it delightedly.

It tasted like mint.


Harry spent an inordinate amount of time in a white room. It was not a particularly bad room, as far as rooms go, but he felt that measures could have been taken to make it at least a little, teensy, tiny bit less dreary

Its only saving grace was that nurses constantly filtered through, always taking a moment to check on him and receive their token smile from baby Harry.

"Goo," he said, in greeting as one passed, then clambered to his feet and leaned against the bars of his crib.

He glared at the empty air over his head. This was positively criminal. Didn't the staff at St. Mungoes know that babies were to be provided with diverting overhead toys? All he had was this wand of his that lit up orange when he chewed on it a certain way.

Smiling, he dropped to his knees and crawled to retrieve his wand, then chewed on it just so, delighting in the orange glow.

Wait, he was getting side tracked.

Where was his righteous indignation?

Hee. Orange wand. Num num num.

"Harry, dear," said a nurse, stalking toward his crib. He eyed her warily. She looked like she was going to pick him up.

Num num. Orange.

Pick him up she did, and then she said something that pleased him very much.

"We're going to see your mummy now, Harry."

"Mama!"

He gripped the slightly soggy wand tightly in his little fist and pointed imperiously in what he knew was Lilly's general direction. It flashed orange and stayed lit.

"Goodness," the nurse murmured to herself.


If Harry were to be entirely honest with himself, he might admit that he was entertaining the possibility that he hadn't done his parents a favor by resurrecting them.

Certainly his mother had been distraught to wake up in a hospital bed only to be told her home had been attacked, her child had survived a lethal curse and that her husband was recovering from a coma.

. . . And that she and he had both been the victim of some unknown ritual and they now had black eyes.

. . . And nobody could tell what was wrong, if anything.

. . . But that it was all okay because Voldemort was dead now. Hurrah!

Still, she was more than mollified by the fact that her family was alive, and had corrected the suspicion that Black had betrayed them, making it clear that Pettigrew had been their secret keeper.

Harry adored the time he spent in her company, playing stupid games and gurgling like the baby he was.

Harry did not, however, enjoy looking her in the eyes, now that he thought he understood exactly what he was seeing. The eyes were windows to the soul, and if his mother had one, it wasn't in the usual place anymore.

Instead, they opened into the inky depths of somewhere else, and from time to time, something looked out. He'd waved at one, and it had quivered at him before flitting away. He suspected that the terms of the ritual decreed that these curious things might one day do a little more than look.

He decided to be optimistic about it. For all he knew it could be to his benefit to have soulless monsters for parents with further monsters living a hairs breadth beneath their eyelids, particularly if he needed to go through the whole bloody prophecy thing again.

Baby Harry gurgled happily and hugged his mother as best he could. Things were looking up.

It occurred to him during his dinner that if all went to hell for his efforts, at least the pair could have a few more good shags. Lilly had fabulous tits, and it would be a shame to bury them so young.

Good god, he was a dirty old man at the tender age of one.


It was a solid week before James awoke, and as the man hadn't yet torn into his wife's room, plucked Harry out of her grasp and dashed him against the tiled floor, Harry was inclined to be pleased when Lilly received permission to visit with him in hand.

He practiced his cheerful burbling as they were escorted to the recovery ward by a kindly nurse.

Occasionally, when he was completely at a loss as to how to respond to an adult's fit of baby talk, he actually vocalized the word, "burble," which earned him some odd looks from time to time. He'd done it so often now that a nurse had already aired the hypothesis that he said it when people didn't make any sense.

Perhaps he'd substitute with animal noises, like "moo" or "woof." Surely those would be considered moderately endearing responses and not a sign of a malignant intelligence waiting to plunge their world into chaos and misery through the darkest of black magics?

Bah, first he'd need to convince someone to show him an animal picture book, if he were to maintain his cover. He didn't think anyone had sat down and gone through the cow goes moo with him yet.

Did magical children even get the whole farm animal book thing? He really didn't know.


"Your son is remarkably well behaved, Misses Potter!"

"Thank you. He's such a dear."

"Lilly . . ."

"Yes, James?"

"This may sound incredibly selfish, but, uh. Would you mind if I spent some time alone with Harry? I need to . . . I mean, I just want to confirm. Well."

"Oh, James. I love you. I understand. I'll be back in a while. Ring if he needs his nappies changed, though!"

Harry watched this exchange with interest. This was a family dynamic he hadn't known existed.

Mother and nurse left, and Harry looked up at his father.

"I wonder which one you are. I really wonder," James murmured, holding Harry in the crook of his arm and walking toward a little table in the corner of his room. "To that end, I've devised a test."

Pea mash.

That was pea mash Harry saw on the table. This was not a good sign.

Harry eyed the jar warily.

"Yes you see this, don't you?" James smiled. "This is your very favorite green pea mash that you like so much, Harry. Now open wide, and lets see if you spit it in my eye."

Harry opened his mouth as per spec, gobbled the mouthful of mash, "Huh. Good bo-" and spat it in James's mouth.

"Oh ye gods this tastes terrible!" James exclaimed, sputtering.

"Burble," said Harry.

"Yuck," James said with feeling, after having washed it down with the glass of water at his bedside.

"Well played, Harry. Very well played."

Harry giggled at him.

James held him gently, but his face hardened.

"You're still in there, aren't you?"

Harry didn't feel up to pretending to be a squalling brat just to temporarily deceive a man he'd come to respect. He nodded and waited to see what he would do.

Rather than looking angry, James just seemed resigned. "Can you talk anymore?" he asked.

"Dada," Harry said simply, shaking his head apologetically.

"I see."

James looked very sad, and Harry reached a chubby hand out to his face.

"Dada."

"My son is in there too?"

"Dada," Harry said again, with feeling.

James lowered his forehead and rubbed noses with him.

"You didn't get what you wanted, did you?" he whispered.

Harry looked at him somberly and shook a fist in mock fury. "Dada," he said in as close to an annoyed tone as he could muster.

"Why are we alive, Harry?"

"Dada," Harry answered, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. Looking into his father's coal black eyes, he mused that this was possibly the most versatile word he'd ever come across, as it captured his feelings on the subject perfectly.

James seemed to understand.


Their family home, in old Godric's Hollow, was a write off. But the method in which it had been destroyed, namely being sent into low orbit in many pieces, presented them with an opportunity to raise something better in its place.

A modern home for the modern wizarding family! A paranoid, jumpy family. One with a large number of enemies.

It was good, then, that the house elves had survived the conflagration.

The lead house elf was named Brick. Brick was not a stupid elf.

Brick had, in fact, taken one look at Harry's glowing eyes when he crawled around a corner and shrieked like a little girl elf before running to hide in the chimney. As the only elf on duty at the time, he'd been at something of a loss when Harry murdered his mum in cold blood, but there were precedents for this sort of thing. He shouted very softly as only an elf can and woke up the other elves, who also made for the chimney.

"Three to one odds on the little master."

"Tizzy will take that bet!"

When the chimney exploded, they relocated to their warren beneath the cellar, which was considerably safer. Here they concluded that master Harry was a very scary master indeed.

When James returned after his convalescence, he put them to work. And work they did.

House elves, it turns out, are very good at building houses.


The family stood in the hospital's designated apparition point, happy to get away. James had already been free for some time, but Lilly had been allowed to remain with Harry until he was healed of all scrapes and bruises, to say nothing of the lightning bolt scar on his head.

"On three," said James, preparing to apparate with Lilly and Harry to their freshly restored home.

"I know how this works, James," said Lilly.

"Right."

"Three!" they both shouted, and Harry felt the sensation of crawling up his own nostril and coming out the other side.

Then he noticed that he was falling.

Lilly, bless her heart, had gone and lost him along the way.

"Gurble flub flllbpt," said Harry, as he tumbled head over heels in the sky over London.

Sky.

London.

Sky.

More London.

Etc.

If only, he thought between revolutions, he had his Firebolt.

Sky.

He'd really be able to do something about this, then.

A faint prickle built up in his sinuses, and he sneezed.

He dropped into Lilly's arms a moment later.

"Oh. There he is," James murmured weakly.

"Harry!" Lilly squeezed him tightly to her breasts. "Oh you silly boy. Don't scare mummy like that!"

"Mmph."

"You're smothering him, dear."

"What? I'm his mum, I'm allowed to mother him"

"I said you're smothering him."

"Oh. Oh! Harry!"

"Burble," said Harry, scrunching his nose at her.

James squeezed the bridge of his nose and looked at Harry sideways. "That's uncanny, that is."

"He learned it from the nurses, I think."

When Lilly carried Harry up the steps to the front door, he saw something that nearly caused him to choke on his own tongue out of his effort not to laugh.

One unfortunate lion had been shrunk to the size of a mouse and was attached to the front door by its tail as a knocker. It scrabbled against a steel plate and yawned as they approached.

"James?" Lilly said sweetly.

"Yes, dear?" James had a slightly wary tone to his voice, and looked at her inquisitively.

"Did you put a lion on the door?"

"Oh. Oh! Yes, I did!" he said proudly. "Er, do you like it?"

Lilly pouted and examined the lion closer, reaching out a hand but stopping half way. "I'm not sure. Will it eat my hand?"

"Right now? Only if you're a death eater."

This comment did not seem to reassure her. "Is that really safe?"

"I figured, see, that you could put a detection charm on the lion, so it could tell if someone nasty got close. Then it'd do its thing."

"But its tiny," she said flatly.

"Well, sure, but the lion on the roof isn't." James pointed overhead.

Lilly looked up and stared at the fully grown brass lion that was lounging in the shadow of the massive mantle above the door. Its tail hung down and twitched mildly.

She opened her mouth to say something, then stopped and plainly considered the notion of an erstwhile eater of death knocking on her door, only to be crushed to death while wrestling its hand out of the jaws of a brass kitten.

"I like it," she said firmly, giving Harry a squeeze. For his part, Harry burbled appreciatively and eyed the lion with a look of malicious glee. It glowered back at him and mewled.

"That is adorable!" Lilly squealed, immediately sold on the idea.

The lion glared at her, too.

James grinned and led his family inside, sparing a sympathetic glance for his creation.