Written for the QLFC Season 6, Round 3

Team: Wigtown Wanderers

Position: Seeker

Position Prompt: Each position has been given a different prompt associated with the 90s to interpret as you wish - Home Alone

Word Count: 1263

Beta(s): CUtopia, DinoDina, Aya Diefair

Chapter 21: Christmas Wishes

It was cold when Harry woke up.

The cold wasn't particularly unexpected, as the little cupboard under the stairs was excluded from the greater heat of the house, but in this instance it was. It would be early, the Dursleys would be asleep, and that meant that the heating would be on. Should be on. That heating filtered just a little warmth into his cupboard, and it was enough that waking wasn't always a brutal trial.

Except for today. That day, Harry woke chilled to the bone.

Curled beneath his blanket, head buried, he listened for the hum of the heating system. The drip-drip-drip of the boiler as it struggled to pump heat throughout the house, the faint whispering hiss as steam rose and funnelled through the pipes infiltrating the wall at his side. Harry listened, ears straining, but…

Nothing.

Reaching a darting hand out from the folds of his blankets, Harry snatched his glasses from the little shelf alongside his bed and tucked them into the darkness and minimal warmth within. He shoved them onto his face with half-frozen fingers and, with an effort, drawing his blankets tighter around his shoulders, he pushed himself up into a sitting position.

Silence. Utter silence. No dripping, no hissing, and no creaking from overhead as the Dursleys rose and started their day. Petunia should be up and readying breakfast. She should have already hammered on Harry's door to wake him, all but dragging him from his cupboard into the kitchen to help her as she worked. She should be—

Harry blinked. No. That wasn't right. More importantly, more significantly, Dudley should have been up. He should have been thundering down the stairs, raining dust and spiderwebs onto Harry, and filling his cupboard and the hallway beyond it with echoes of noise, enthusiasm, and abrasiveness. That was how it should have been, because that was how Dudley always was on Christmas morning. How had Harry forgotten that it was Christmas?

Shivering, his shoulders hunching, Harry tugged his blanket more tightly around his shoulders. His cupboard was dark, darker than it should have been, because he always woke up when just a little bit of light filtered under the door. Usually, his waking was even before Petunia demanded he wake up with a fist to that door and a sharp word.

But there was no light, and as Harry crawled from his bed, one hand grasping the front of his blanket around himself, it was to hear no telltale step of his aunt just outside. Hesitantly, almost nervously, for sometimes his cupboard door was locked and it never felt very nice to be locked in from the outside, Harry nudged it to open.

It swung easily with only the barest squeak of hinges. The sound was still deafening in the otherwise silent house.

Inching forwards, his skin crawling with discomfort, Harry poked his head around the frame of his cupboard. The hallway was dark, draped in the gloomy shadows of winter morning and unbroken by artificial light. Shuffling forwards a little more so Harry could peer towards the kitchen one way, and to the front door and the foot of the stairs in the other as he strained his ears for sounds of movement.

The kitchen was empty, white tiles turned grey in the darkness. The front door was closed, the bottom of the steps bare of Dudley's feet. It was simply… nothing.

A part of Harry was scared. A big part of him wondered what in the world had happened that would withhold Dudley in his race throughout the house to tear his presents open and grumble his disgust or exclaim his approval with each unveiling. The change, the abnormality, the echoing silence that dragged on, and on, and on – it was just a little scary.

But another part of Harry tingled with something very close to awe. To disbelief, but also a strange upwelling of excitement.

Did I… make my family disappear?

Magic wasn't real. Harry knew that. He knew because Uncle Vernon told him, and because even when sometimes something happened – like his hair growing really, really fast overnight, or him somehow ending up atop the roof of a house when he was being pursued with a terrifying vengeance – he was told that it was happenstance. That he must simply have very fast growing hair, or that he must have climbed up onto the roof, silly boy, and to climb down immediately.

Magic wasn't real, but Harry felt just the slightest upwelling of belief in that moment. As if his Christmas wish, the wish that he'd never voiced aloud because it was wrong to wish for such a thing, had come true.

I've made my family… disappear?

Harry clambered from his cupboard, and on socked feet, shuffled into the kitchen. It was bare and empty, not a surface touched by the remains of breakfast or a stain of juice on the very edge of the counter just as Dudley always left when he spilt a little in pouring himself a glass. The fridge hummed contentedly, the oven sat unheated and stoic, the chairs at the table tucked neatly in just as Harry had pushed them the previous night.

No Dursleys. Not a single hair of them.

The living room, draped in a reserved garment of tinsel, was just as dark and untouched. The Christmas tree, darkened from green to grey in the wan morning light creeping through the window, stood like a silent, watchful sentinel in the corner beside the fireplace, Dudley's presents still visibly poking from beneath as though too wondering just why they hadn't been torn apart just yet.

Harry wandered through the house in a stupor, clutching his blanket to his chest, the tail of it trailing after him. He absently hooked the chain back into the lock on the front door, because he was always supposed to when he was at home alone, and shuffled up the stairs. Dudley's room – empty, the sheets askew and half fallen off the bed to spill between the mess of his toys and games. The bathroom – unlit and as grey-tiled as the kitchen had been. Petunia and Vernon's bedroom stood with the door half-open and nothing but darkness within, but when Harry paused just alongside it and strained his ears, he couldn't hear Vernon's snoring as he sometimes did even in his cupboard under the stairs.

Something like a laugh slipped from Harry's lips. It tasted of excitement, of wonder, and despite the cold that flushed through him, the cold echoing the snow that fell outside and the frost that coated the windows, he felt something else in his chest swell with real joy.

Maybe I really did. Maybe I really made them disappear.

It wasn't much, but as Harry spun on his heel and tore through the house, blanket flying behind him like a cape in his excitement, he thought that this might just be the best Christmas ever.

The Dursleys came back. Of course they did. "An emergency", Harry heard Vernon grumble to himself as he shouldered his way through the door, and "She'll be fine, Dudders" from Petunia to a visibly uncaring Dudley. Harry didn't know what had happened or who 'would be fine' but it didn't really matter. It didn't even matter that for the rest of the day Dudley wrought havoc on the house and turned it upside-down in his usual explosion of Christmas entitlement.

For that morning at least, in the company of only himself, Harry had experienced the ultimate of Christmas wonders.