AUTHOR NOTES:
Wow... so it's been a super long time since I last posted. Literally I started college and graduated lol. Then I logged into my old account and looked at all the glowing reviews and it made me so happy that I felt I had to update. To be honest, I don't know how much more I will continue but here's an update for now. Sorry if it's rusty, I really haven't written creatively in a long time.
"Harry, please tell me it isn't true."
There was an onslaught of heat, light, and shouting. In one moment he was held in a warm and discomfiting grasp, peels of grainy floo-powder coating his face. In the next, he was wrenched backwards, sent tumbling, the wand held in Severus' hand jettying sparks of red across the room.
Unsuccessfully seizing his sleeve from the man's grasp, Harry took deep breaths, sparing a single glance towards the sallow, gray faces staring back at him. They knew.
"Leave."
"Severus, stop." Harry uttered, scrubbing at the fine dust coating his mouth, "It wasn't them."
He screwed his eyes shut, half-expecting he would vanish, half-knowing - no, completely certain - that when he opened them again, the sensation of pain shooting up his arms, the wet wooden floor, the mottled yellow and purple bruises, would reappear in an instant. He was certain that he'd never left that small, second bedroom. Certain that these people were just specters more comforting to imagine than looking at the peels of sun-bleached wallpaper stripped from the wall. Harry, none of this is real, you are dying, and no one knows enough to care. Nobody is coming for you.
But it was somehow all worse when he felt the presence directly behind him shift, the fingers tightly wound on his robes loosening, when he heard pairs of feet stagger back, as if in relief, and when he felt the light crackle of the diminishing fireplace still waiting there to greet him.
When he opened his eyes, he did not see the broken black bars around one small window or the padlocks on the door, no - he only noticed the curiously red shade of the stone floor underneath his new trainers.
"He'd kill me if anyone knew," he suckered in a breath, speaking mostly to himself. "He'd kill me."
Distantly, he noticed a sharp cry muffled almost instantly. James' ashen face filtered into his awareness more slowly than the sensation of warm hands perching on his shoulders. "Harry, who?"
"It wasn't so bad - it was only when I wouldn't finish chores, or when - when I talked back. It was normal. At first it wasn't..." Harry tried to swallow the hot coal situated in his throat, "But it just got worse. Every summer it would get worse and every summer I would just get sent back there, even though I told Dumbledore. And I kept telling him. I was drowning and he just kept sending me back there. I begged to stay at school during the summers and no one ever listened."
He noticed that he couldn't keep digging his nails into his palms when warm, rough-hands gripped his own.
"Muggles - they don't, they ... when they heat food, they turn up a dial that makes these, uh, rings on the stove get hot and red. Once, when I burned the eggs, he pushed my arm up against the stove and he wouldn't stop. I spent all night in the cupboard crying and then when I woke up, it was healed ... I thought, thought I just imagined it, for the longest time."
"Cupboard?"
He blinked and was no longer submerged, the sense of two weighty presences sitting right beside him on Severus' settee wrenching into focus. The confused question lingered in the air.
"They kept me in a cupboard under the stairs before I came to Hogwarts. Dumbledore knew, someone must've known, 'cause that's how all the letters were addressed," a heat flared in his chest that forced him to expel a humorless laugh. "He thought the wizards were watching us so he moved me to Dudley's second bedroom after that."
"Dudley?" Lily's face balled into a tight furrow, as if searching for a distant memory. "That's... that's my sister's son. Dudley Dursley? Harry, what could... what could the Dursley's have to do with this?"
"I'm sorry," Harry clapped his hands over his mouth, hating the way his voice wavered. "I'm not from here. I'm not your son."
He leapt to his feet, the world lurching violently to one side. Harry peered up when he felt himself steadied, meeting Severus' dark gaze lined with every emotion aside from surprise. He zeroed in on one question amid a wall of noise, "What do you mean?"
"I swear, I didn't meant to do this," he said, "I just - it was a bad night. I mean, a really bad night. Vernon got home from work, and I think he was laid off, or he got into an argument with his boss. And I talked back at him. He was so upset. He was drunk. He messed me up pretty bad."
The burning spread out from his chest and prickled his face. He wasn't sure what was worse, the sense of shame or the guilt.
"I couldn't call out for help - I couldn't move - I was going to die. Who knows, maybe I did die, that night." Harry suckered in a breath, taking in the muddled expressions of his parents. "You don't understand, in my world, you died when I was a baby and I was sent to live with the Dursley's."
His parents blinked at each other silently.
"There was a dark wizard named Voldemort, set on taking over Britain. Dad, you were one of the aurors fighting him, and there was a prophecy that said I had to be the one to vanquish him. You were in hiding and - and - Peter Pettigrew was the secret keeper," he had to fight to keep from tripping over his own words at their disbelieving looks. "That rat betrayed you. Voldemort - "
"Harry, this doesn't make any sense." James said, easing up gently from his place on the settee so as not to startle the boy.
"Listen to me," he spat, trying to back away before realizing Snape's grip was still on him. He pushed back the fringe of his hair. "This isn't from a quidditch injury. Voldemort tried to use the killing curse on me but it didn't work, all that was left was this scar. Why do you think it hasn't healed?"
"Are you feeling alright?" Lily blinked away the wetness in her eyes and shook her head vigorously. "This doesn't sound like you. We just want to know what's going on, Harry."
"That's what I'm trying to tell you! Why do you think I don't act anything like your son? Suddenly I'm really good at Defense, suddenly I don't know who my friends are, suddenly I'm not acting like myself and I have unexplained injuries - " Harry smacked his mouth shut at the worried glances his parents shot each other.
"Harry - "
"I believe him." Harry whipped back to look at Snape.
"Severus, there's no way this can be true." James voice sounded gritty, as if he hadn't spoken in weeks. Tightening his hands briefly into fists, he trained his gaze on some distant point beyond the edge of the room.
"Consoling yourself by acting in denial will merely hurt him," Severus shot back. "We all know there's no way he could've received those injuries in this timeline - I've poured over those pictures and those dates. There's timestamps that date back to when he couldn't possibly have been hurt, back to moments when he was in our company. Either he's an impossibly good actor or he's telling the truth."
James didn't spare a single look towards either of them. Lily fastidiously examined the patchwork of veins on the back of her hands. Their son was gone.
"I'm sorry," his voice quivered for only a moment, "I never - never for a moment - I promise, I never wished for this to happen. I didn't mean to make him disappear. I don't know where your Harry is."
He'd never needed so much to make it right. These were not his parents, this was not his world. He didn't know them. Yet somehow he had supplanted the life of someone who should've grown up, someone who should've gotten into arguments at the dinner table, should've taught Felix pranks, or spent way too much time playing gobstones with Ernie. Instead a boy was scribbled out of existence and the only thing remaining was someone who barely recognized his mum's smile.
Of course they were angry with him.
"Petunia." Lily broke the meandering silence, "Did Petunia ever hurt you?"
"What?" he asked, feeling devoid of anything recognizable. Why would she ask that?
"My sister, your aunt," she said, gripping the edges of the settee hard enough to make the frame creak. "Did she ever hurt you?"
"No," he searched his memory, so put off by the soft look on Severus' face that he trained his attention back on the floor. They should be furious. "No, it was mostly Vernon. Sometimes she would swing a newspaper at me, and she didn't like me, but she was never like Vernon."
She pitched forward and buried her head in her hands while James turned his back on them to gaze at something on the other side of the room infinitely more interesting.
"I'm sorry - I - " he swallowed back dizzying nausea, not sure what response she needed out of him. "They never wanted me."
"Why couldn't they leave you with anyone else - Sev, or Sirius, anyone who would've taken you in a heartbeat. Remus?"
He felt small enough to fit comfortably back in his cupboard, "Sirius was," Harry felt his face burn, "Sirius wasn't able to take care of me, Snape and I weren't exactly friends, and the only thing that could protect me against Voldemort was my aunt's blood protection."
James turned back, his features sharp and eyes red-rimmed, voice held steady and giving nothing away. "Was anyone, anyone at all, coming to find you?"
"Find me?"
"The moment before you appeared here. Was anyone on their way to come find you?"
The man couldn't hide the way the question rose furtively, laced with desperation.
"Not for another two weeks."
"So if you switched places with Harry, then - then -"
At first, Harry was confused at how James' expression flickered then diminished, his shoulders slumping forward like he'd been punched in the chest.
There was a muted sob somewhere on his right. "Don't say that James, don't you dare put that idea in his head."
Then, it dawned on him. Their son bled out on his bedroom floor.