I apologize for the delay in updating. I got caught up in reading a series of rather long fics by RoseDragonWitch. I realized I'd neglected my writing and decided to take a break from reading in order to do this chapter. I'm sorry for the delay! It was an accident!

Thanks for the reviews!

All rights belong to JK Rowling and Warner Bros. I'm only borrowing Harry Potter for fun. I never have and never will make profit from this.

"Harry!" Sirius yelled. He was across the room in no time at all, carefully reaching out to his terrified godson in an attempt to shake him awake. Even in sleep, Harry flinched away from the touch. "Harry, wake up!"

And wake up he did.

With a yell, Harry sat up in bed so fast that his head almost collided with Sirius's. Before either Sirius or Remus could stop him, he had thrown himself off the bed and into the far corner of the room, wand out, ready to hex anyone who came anywhere near him. The two Marauders could only watch as Harry, breathing fast, slowly began to take in his surroundings. The teen's eyes fell upon Remus, frozen near the door, and Sirius, who was sitting on the bed with a hand reaching out towards the raven-haired boy. After a long, tense moment, Harry exhaled forcefully and lowered his wand arm. Remus relaxed his tense posture, moving to sit at the desk that was in the room. Harry sank down against the wall until he was seated on the floor.

"Sorry," they both heard him mutter. Sirius frowned.

"Harry, you've got nothing to be sorry for," he said softly. His words were meant to be comforting, but they seemed to have the opposite effect. Harry looked up at him with an incredulous expression and lifted his wand, holding it loosely between two fingers as he showed it to his godfather.

"I almost just used every single defensive curse I know in order to kill you both, and you're telling me I've got nothing to be sorry for?"

"I doubt you would've killed us," Remus reasoned. "You're far too kind for that." Harry merely gave the ex-professor a withering look before closing his eyes.

"It doesn't matter," the boy sighed self-loathingly. "I expect you probably would've stunned me before I did any real damage. Who am I but a pathetic, useless, defenseless teenage idiot…?"

He spoke so softly that Sirius had to strain to hear the words. One glance at Remus, on the other hand, told Sirius that the werewolf had heard every word quite clearly. Remus looked shocked and angry.

"Harry James Potter," Remus whispered, but Sirius was sure that Harry wasn't meant to hear the exhausted, concerned, confused words. If he did hear, he certainly didn't react. Remus and Sirius exchanged a look, wondering how best to go about fixing this situation. Sirius felt it wise to keep silent; Remus was always better with words, and anything Sirius said would more than likely make things worse.

"Harry," Remus said quietly, but the teen's head snapped up and his eyes focused on Remus. "Harry, listen to me, and listen very carefully. I don't know where you got the idea that you're pathetic, but I can tell you for certain that it's not true."

Sirius felt fairly sure that he knew where Harry had gotten that idea, and he vowed to himself that as soon as Harry was in a better state of mind he was going to return to Privet Drive and give the Dursleys a piece of his mind.

Harry, for his part, appeared to be trying very hard not to roll his eyes. It was obvious that he didn't believe Remus for an instant. Seeing this, Sirius scrubbed a hand over his face. It killed him to see that his godson was hurting like this. Sirius might be reckless, but he loved Harry more than anything in the world and he couldn't stand the thought that the teen hated himself so much.

"Isn't it?" Harry laughed mockingly. "I'm Harry Potter, the Boy Who Lived, the baby who defeated Voldemort and saved the Wizarding world. I'm Harry Potter, youngest Seeker in a century, winner of the Triwizard Tournament, able to cast a patronus at age 13 and fight off the Imperius curse only a year later. I'm Harry flipping Potter, and I can't even hold off a bunch of Muggles."

Dead silence met these words. Harry dropped his head onto his knees, which he was hugging tightly against chest. Remus and Sirius exchanged dark looks.

"Harry," Sirius couldn't stand the silence after a few moments. "You're not allowed to use magic outside of Hogwarts."

"That's true," Remus spoke to the top of Harry's head. "You couldn't have defended yourself even if you'd wanted to. You would only have gotten in more trouble. It's not fair, I know, but there you go."

"Oh, come on," Harry spoke bitterly, the words muffled by his legs. "Which is really more important? Going to Hogwarts, or getting expelled on account of stopping someone from trying to beat you to death?"

"Hogwarts is more important," Sirius spoke up. He wasn't sure what was making him talk, but the words wouldn't stop coming and he felt the need to speak them. "I know, because I've been in your situation." He had Harry's full attention now. "Remind me to show you some of the true horrors of this house sometime. You don't know this, Harry, but my parents hated me. They loved pureblood wizards and in their opinion anyone who associated with a wizard who wasn't a pureblood was evil. I was friends with Remus, a werewolf, Lily, a Muggle born, and James, who was a blood traitor. You can imagine that my parents were not pleased. And when I got sorted into Gryffindor, well. Not one member of my family had been in a house other than Slytherin for centuries. Let's just say that my summer holidays were hell."

Harry didn't seem to know what to say to that, Sirius noticed. He frowned, the scar on his forehead wrinkling as his eyebrows pushed together. Sirius watched, waiting for a verdict. Across the room, Remus was looking just as anxious.

"Well, I'm still pathetic and useless. Cedric died because of me."

The words were like a slap in the face. Sirius sucked in a breath and Remus flinched. They both knew that Harry's words were not true, but they also knew that convincing Harry of that fact would be next to impossible.

"You're fourteen, Harry," Sirius, frustrated, spoke without thinking about it. "No fourteen-year-old can defeat Voldemort when he's just come back to full power."

"I guess." But it was obvious from the tone that Harry didn't believe the words. Sirius desperately wanted to say something, but he had no idea what to say that wouldn't make the situation worse. He didn't know what Harry was thinking. The silence stretched on. In the end, it was Remus who saved the day.

"We love you, Harry. We all do. Sirius, me, Hermione, the Weasleys, even Dumbledore. We all love you so much. You have no idea what you mean to us. We're sorry we didn't notice that anything was going on sooner, and there's no way to make up for it, but we're going to try. What the Dursleys did to you was cruel and inhuman. Please, please try to see that they don't mean anything! They're no better than Lord Voldemort himself. Your family is here, Harry, not there. We're your family. Us. Not them. They don't matter."

Harry was looking at Remus with a shocked expression. Sirius watched his godson carefully, noticing the way that he locked gazes with Remus as if trying to read into his soul to find the truth of his words. Remus didn't break eye contact. Finally, after a long moment, Harry smiled, turning from Remus to Sirius and then staring at the floor. His smile was cautious and small, but it never faltered. Remus caught Sirius's eye and the relief that penetrated the room was palpable.

*****HP*****

Harry listened to Remus speak in stunned silence. Three words kept repeating themselves in his head. We love you. We love you. It was the first time anyone had said that to him. It was the first time in Harry's life that anyone had voiced their love for him. For a moment, it was almost too much. Harry almost started crying. The look in Remus's eye was impossible to doubt. Harry stared, trying to find some indication that Remus wasn't speaking the truth, but there was no lie in the words. There was no trace of dishonesty.

It wasn't enough to get rid of the self-doubt. It wasn't enough to make him feel less pathetic, or more powerful. It wasn't quite enough to convince him that everything would be okay. But it was enough, for now, to let Harry know that he was wanted. There were people that cared about him. No, it wasn't the Dursleys, which sort of hurt a bit; it would have been nice if he'd been loved in the only home he'd known before Hogwarts. Still, to know that he was wanted, after all, was a huge relief. It did something funny to his emotions. A smile grew on his face, and he couldn't even begin to try to force it back down.

"Okay," Harry said. That one word was filled with so much emotion; love, hate, fear, acceptance, happiness, sadness, realization, hope. It was filled with the unspoken knowledge that in the long term this conversation would not be enough, but that in the short term it was just exactly enough. It was filled with questions and answers. Harry never knew that one word could contain so much, but a look at Sirius told him that his godfather understood all of it.

"Do you want to try to go back to sleep, Prongslet?" he asked. Harry thought about it. In truth, he was exhausted. However, he remembered what had caused him to have the nightmare in the first place – Cedric being murdered in the graveyard by Voldemort, while the Dursleys stood there in Death Eater robes, laughing, helping Voldemort torture Harry.

"Yes… but I'm scared of what I'll dream," Harry answered honestly. He looked up at Sirius in time to see his godfather look over at Remus.

"Harry, we can give you some dreamless sleep potion," Remus suggested. Harry thought about it. The idea was tempting, but he really hated using that potion. Avoiding the dreams made it that much harder to deal with the emotions when the drinker woke up the next morning.

"No, thanks," Harry sighed. "Actually…" He hesitated, embarrassed, not wanting to admit weakness to either of his father's best friends.

"What?" Sirius prodded gently. Harry closed his eyes, not wanting to see their faces when they laughed at him.

"Will you both sit with me?" This was spoken so quietly that Harry was sure neither man would hear it. Remus clearly did, however, because Harry heard footsteps approaching. A hand gently pulled Harry to his feet.

"Of course," the ex-professor answered softly, and Harry opened his eyes. Remus wasn't laughing; in fact, there was empathy in his eyes. "We'll stay with you all night if you want us to." Harry fell onto the bed, already almost asleep. He felt someone pull the covers up over him. He tried to thank them, but he wasn't sure if the words actually came out.

"Someone better hide my wand. You know, just in case," he managed to mutter after a moment, and the resulting snorts of laughter from both Remus and Sirius caused the last of the tension to drain from his body. He was asleep before he heard a reply.

*****HP******

Remus watched Harry sleep. He looked so young, so peaceful in this state. It was like seeing a carbon-copy of James. The worried set of Harry's eyebrows was relaxed, and the hyper-vigilant eyes were resting behind closed lids.

"Do you think he'll be alright?" Sirius asked after a few moments. Remus glanced over at his friend.

"It may take a while, but he'll be fine."

"I can't believe we didn't notice, Moony," Sirius pinched the bridge of his nose. "How did we not notice?"

"I don't know." Remus was wondering the same thing. How had the entire Order of the Phoenix neglected to notice that Harry was being abused in his own house? Each member of the Order had stood guard outside of Privet Drive at least once over the summer, and Sirius and Remus knew Harry well enough that they should have noticed immediately. How had they been so blind to what was really going on?

"I suppose we see what we want to see," Sirius mused, as if he'd read Remus's mind.

"What do you mean?" Remus asked, turning his attention back to Harry but listening to his best friend.

"Well, what is sight, really? It's a picture of what's going on around you, right? But if I close my eyes, I can still visualize exactly what I want to visualize. Even if I know the sky is blue, I can still shut my eyes and pretend that it's red instead." Sirius paused for a moment as Remus pondered this. "What if we did notice what was going on with Harry, on some level at least, but we didn't want to see it? What if we made the sky red when it's really been blue all along?"

"Even when the facts are right in front of us, we ignored the story they were telling," Remus translated. "We saw what we wanted to see because dealing with the truth was too painful."

Sirius didn't answer, and Remus took his silence as an affirmative. The thought wasn't a comforting one. Remus let his mind wander back to the first time he'd seen Harry in twelve years; he'd awoken on the Hogwarts Express to find that he was sharing a compartment with Harry Potter and his two best friends. Now that he truly thought about it, there had been signs, even then, that Harry wasn't being raised in ideal conditions. He'd noticed how skinny the boy was, but he'd ignored it. It was certainly suspicious that Harry was the only third year who wasn't going into Hogsmeade. Remus felt like kicking himself; why had he not noticed it before?

"We've got to find a way to fix this," Sirius muttered. Remus looked over at him.

"We will, Sirius."

"How, Remus? How do we fix this?"

Remus sighed. "With patience, time, and a lot of love."

The two fell silent again, both watching Harry's face as he slept.

To be continued.

Again, I'm really sorry for waiting almost a week. Oops. School is starting again in a few days, so I'll try to get the next chapter up before classes start.

Thanks for all of the reviews, favs, follows, and etc. It really means a lot. Please feel free to leave a review, and thanks again!

Oh… if you don't like this story, that's perfectly fine; I respect that. But… it isn't necessary to be disrespectful about it. It's not really fair to leave a review that you yourself wouldn't appreciate seeing on one of your own stories. If you have constructive criticism, that's fine. I like that. I encourage that. It helps me improve. On the other hand, leaving a nasty review just for the sake of leaving a nasty review is unnecessary.