The next morning...

"What happened to my parents?"

"They were killed."

"Wh-what? Why? What?"

"They were killed by a man named Tom Riddle. You were a year old when… he tried to kill you too, but he couldn't. You got your scar on your forehead that night."

"He… he killed them?"

"I'm sorry, Harry…"

He needed a moment to calm down his suddenly pattering heart. He felt panicked for some reason. He took a few deep breaths. "And then?" he asked quietly

"You lived with your mother's sister."

He appeared troubled. "Where is she?" he asked.

"Well, you never had a good relationship with her and her family," Hermione admitted. "But she was your only family and you had to be sent to live with her. Once you became an adult, you severed your ties with them. It was mutual."

Harry couldn't imagine himself doing anything like that. He looked up when Carlisle entered the room. He couldn't imagine abandoning family like that just because of troubled water under the bridge. He responded to Carlisle's comforting smile with a vague smile of his own. Then he held up his right hand in front of him. "Do you know what this is?" he asked his friends while pointing at his one peculiar scar.

Ron winced at the pale words etched into skin while Hermione's complexion started to ashen. Carlisle read both expressions closely, realizing that the cause for that scar was more complicated than he had initially assumed. He hadn't even assumed magic, of course.

"Does it bother you, Harry?" Hermione asked. She rested her fingers atop the scar to hide it. "Does it hurt?"

"No," Harry murmured. He just wanted to know why he had done it to himself. He just wanted to know so much. "Why would I do that? That's my writing."

Ron absently ruffled Harry's hair to pull him out of his worried reverie. "It's alright, mate. We'll explain that and other scars," he promised Harry. "I just want you to know that you didn't have a choice with any of those. It wasn't your choice."

Harry believed Ron's words out of necessity. He nodded and swallowed hard. It wasn't his fault.

Hermione cleared her throat and started where she had left off. "When you turned eleven, you were accepted to a boarding school. And that's where we met, on the first day in the train," she recalled. "You two didn't like me at first."

"I'm sure I liked you right away, Hermione," Harry argued. "I don't see any reason not to like you."

"Oh, you don't remember those first few months," Ron smirked. "She was pain, I tell you. She'd read all her textbooks days before school started and, even worse, she remembered everything she read. She's too smart for her own good, believe me."

"Being smart is no reason not to like a person," Harry declared with a wise nod. "Edward is really smart, but I still like him."

"Moving on," Hermione interjected after throwing a dirty look Ron's way. "While you two got into trouble, I was the one with my head screwed on right, trying to get you out of messes."

"Can't deny that," Ron added.

"And when did I disappear?"

Hermione glanced at Ron as she fidgeted in her seat. "You had been in an accident. You were very badly hurt and had to be in the hospital for months. That was two years ago. One morning you were gone," she answered. "And we searched for so long. We knew you hadn't run away. You would never do something like that."

Harry mulled it over. "How did I get hurt? What accident?"

"You didn't wake up, Harry," Ron explained. "Not for many months. You had hit your head and you wouldn't wake up for so long. The doctors tried everything. They even told us that we had to expect some brain damage in you when you woke up. But before you could, you were gone. And found here, I guess."

"Yeah…" Harry mumbled. "In the park. Mr. Plum found me. He drove me to the hospital."

"Were you hurt? Do you remember being hurt?"

"I wasn't. I was just… well, I couldn't remember anything, I guess. But I wasn't hurt. Not like you said. Dr. Cullen said I slept for five weeks and then I was suddenly awake. But I couldn't remember anything."

Hermione nodded pensively. "I'm glad you got better," she said. "We aren't sure what happened. And since you can't remember anything, I suppose you won't be able to tell us either."

"I hate this," Harry grumbled.

Hermione shook her head and sat up straighter. This wasn't the time to be sad. This was the time to fill the holes in Harry's memory. "Now… Do you want to tell me about the Cullens?"

Harry beamed in response. "Yeah!" He set off to explain everything he could as fast as he could. He wanted his friends to know that the Cullens were great and who everyone was. He recounted the first day he came to the house and how terrified he was. He told them about his first day at school and how terrified he was then. He assured them of his progress. His grades were better and he was able to understand concepts in school that had boggled him a year ago. "Gosh, wait until my friends hear how old I really am," he chuckled. "They'll make fun of me for days." He trailed off and looked down at his fingers that were tangled together from residual tension. "Why can't I tell them?"

Ron smiled wryly when he heard the quiet question. "What are you going to tell them?" he wanted to know.

"About you two. About how you found me. They'd want to know."

Hermione rested a hand on Harry's shoulder and gave him a quick squeeze. "Could you wait just a week?" she asked. "We have so much more to tell you. Don't you want to tell them the whole story instead of just a bit of it?" She was talking to him like she would speak with a child. He didn't particularly mind. Most people talked to him that way. At least that was better than not understanding what they were talking about in the first place. He simply nodded and let the subject die. He could wait a week. If there was anything he had learnt from his experiences, it was patience.

After lunch, Ron and Hermione talked with Carlisle and Esme about matters regarding their friend's health, both physical and mental. Harry didn't feel like listening to them speak about him that way, so he wandered upstairs and into Edward's room. He hadn't met with Edward in a day. That had never happened before. He sat down on the soft rug with his back to the couch and cracked open his book while soft music filtered through the hidden speakers. He had to get things straight in his head and he knew Edward would help him out. He just needed to wait until the younger Cullens came back home from wherever they were.

He must have dozed off because when he woke up, the door was partly open. He picked himself up and wiped the side of his mouth as he swept his eyes across the room. He paused when he found Edward standing by the window, looking out. "Hey," he mumbled sleepily.

Edward glanced back at him. "Alright?" he asked.

"Mhm. Fell asleep."

"I see that."

Harry rubbed his heavy eyes and yawned. "I could hardly sleep a wink last night. I was so excited." He frowned when he realized that he had lost his spot in his book because he had dropped it on its side when he took that little nap. "Where did you guys go? You were probably bored without me, right?"

Edward smiled. "Mhm."

"I thought so." Harry finally figured that he was a lot more comfortable lying down again, so he did just that and stared up at the ceiling. "What do you think of them, Edward? They're nice, aren't they?"

"Genuinely," Edward said with a sincere nod. "Some of the most genuine people I have met, in fact. They care about you."

"I know. I can tell." Harry closed his eyes. "But there's so much that they aren't telling me. Very important things."

"How do you figure?"

"They take too long to answer my questions. Like they're choosing their words carefully."

"Is that a bad thing?"

Harry looked up at Edward in confusion.

"Is it a bad thing to tell you slowly instead of revealing everything at once?" Edward elaborated. "It's easier to digest, isn't it?"

"I suppose."

Edward walked over to Harry and sat on the couch. How could he ever have thought of Harry as being fragile? This man was the most powerful wizard alive. He wore battle scars to prove it, even if he didn't know it. He had seen so much suffering and death. That wasn't a fragile man. He's an indestructible man. The strongest. Kindest… "I think you should go back."

Harry didn't move.

Edward reached down to ruffle his hair. "Alright?"

"No."

"I know they haven't told you this, but… there are a lot of people waiting for you in England. People who have known you all your life. People who have cried because they couldn't find you. You need to go back for them, right?"

Harry squeezed his eyes shut.

"Imagine if I disappeared for years and you couldn't find me," Edward murmured. "Imagine how you'd feel."

"Where are you going?"

"Nowhere."

"Then I'm going nowhere too."

Edward slipped out of the sofa and sat down to the floor beside Harry. "You've known us for two years," he said. "And these people have known you for twenty."

"I've known you all my life." Harry turned onto his side to look at Edward. "I'll be sad to leave you. You'll be sad if I go. So I'll stay."

"That's not how it works."

"It is. It's how it works for me."

"Go home."

"This is my home."

That night, the younger Cullens were out hunting. Winter was the worst when it came to food because their prey most often hibernated, which left them to sniff out well-hidden dens and burrows. They traveled out of Forks and deeper into the forest for their food so as not to draw suspicion by leaving dead animals behind.

Emmett decided to have an impromptu competition with Jasper. Alice was already in her own world and she had wandered off a long while ago. That left Edward to look at Rosalie warily. "Don't start," he mumbled.

"Why not?" she asked. Her brow arched up in derision. "I've got every right to start with you. You're practically running him out of here. Why?"

"He needs to go back, Rose. He doesn't belong here."

"But he does," Rosalie said adamantly. "He belongs right here with us. I know there's something you aren't telling me and I know it's something bad. So I want him to stay here if something bad is waiting for him back there."

"I thought you would be more than happy to get rid of him," Edward muttered under his breath.

She flinched. "Don't you dare-"

"His life is in London," Edward interjected. "He has family and friends. He's not ours, Rose. Why don't you just-Why can't you understand that? He's not… He was never ours, okay?"

Rosalie was troubled by his outburst. She reached out to clutch his hand. "Edward, I-"

"Sorry," he mumbled, slipping away from her grip. "I'm going this way." He blurred before she could speak, disappearing into the dark woods silently.

The days had flown by with Ron and Hermione sidestepping a lot of Harry's questions, steering the conversation in innocent directions, and glossing over a whole lot of important details. But Harry wasn't about to miss this particular tidbit of information. His parents had been killed by a man named Tom Riddle. Tom Riddle was a very bad man. He started a war in Europe, which confused Harry because he hadn't even heard about this from anyone, and then, when the man died, the war was over. Many of Harry's friends from boarding school fought in the war and most of his scars were from those years. It sounded very odd to him.

Especially since there was no mention of any of this on any search engines on the internet.

"See?" he said as he pointed to his laptop screen. "Nothing spectacular happened at all. I can't find any news on war."

Ron was trying very hard not to ogle the machine sitting on the tabletop while Hermione was trying her darnedest to come up with a suitable excuse.

"But do you see these?" she asked while pointing to the 'significant events' section. "Bridges collapsing, buildings exploding, all of that? That's from the war."

"No, it isn't," Harry frowned. He clicked on the link. "See? It says the structures weren't sound… Whatever that means. Nothing about a war at all." He huffed. "What's that all about?"

"Do you really think that all those buildings were structurally unsound?" Hermione asked deliberately.

Harry looked back at her with uncertainty. "Um…" Was she talking about a conspiracy theory? Now she was starting to sound like a loon.

"The government didn't want to panic the public. Details weren't released. But trust me when I tell you that the war was a very important part of our lives." Hermione felt a little better knowing that she was at least telling the truth about that. "All you need to know for now is that the war ended with Tom Riddle's death. That was a year before you got hurt."

"This… accident," Harry said delicately. "It wasn't really an accident, was it?"

Hermione should have known that she couldn't hide such things from him. He was somehow more perceptive than before. "No."

"Someone hurt me on purpose, right? Like Tom Riddle when I was a kid? Was it Tom Riddle? He's dead, isn't he? You said he-"

"It wasn't him," Hermione interjected so Harry wouldn't keep rambling. "We don't know who it was," she confessed. "Riddle did have followers who felt the same way he did when it came to you. He has followers who are willing to commit crime even after his death. That is what makes him such a powerful figure, Harry. He has a hold on the mind of his followers. And we believe that it was that following that tried to hurt you."

"They wanted to kill me?"

"You see… When Riddle failed to kill you all those years ago, he took it as a personal insult."

"Understandably," Harry mumbled under his breath.

Hermione looked up at him sharply.

He seemed to sense it. "Uh, I mean, it's… I just… I would feel bitter too," he stammered. "That's all I meant."

"Bitter enough to kill anyone who stood between him and you?"

Harry blinked at her. "What do you mean?"

She quickly shook her head and bit her tongue. "Sorry," she apologized. "Maybe that's enough for today. Hmm?"

"O-okay…"