Fifteen months later.
It had been six weeks since Ron looked in Harry's direction without scowling, and Harry was fine with it. He was fine! He wasn't angry. Just a bit… horribly, achingly lonely.
In the grand scheme of Harry's short and terrible life, this wasn't a new sensation. But he never knew that it was possible for him to feel alone at Hogwarts. School was supposed to be his escape from that feeling. Ron and Hermione were meant to be his escape. But here he was, sitting at the Gryffindor table picking idly at his breakfast, by himself. A little over a month ago, Harry would have been digging into this food with relish, still starving after months at the Dursleys. Then the stupid Triwizard Tournament had to go and ruin food for him.
Harry mournfully chewed his scrambled eggs. They tasted like chalk in his mouth.
A burst of laughter rippled across the table. Harry glanced over to see Ron, obviously in the middle of telling a joke to an enthralled group of Gryffindors. Seamus was guffawing—way too hard to be genuine, Harry thought snidely—and thumping Ron repeatedly on the back. Hermione rolled her eyes and turned back to her Transfiguration textbook, which she had propped up against the edge of the table. Harry tried not to feel hurt by Hermione's choice to sit next to Ron today. It wasn't personal. It was just that Hermione was of the opinion that they were both being stupid, so she had decided to split her time evenly between them. Very diplomatically, she refused to take sides. Which was fair. Probably.
But Harry couldn't help feeling a bit stung. After all, Ron was being the unreasonable one. He was the one who believed Harry put his name in the Goblet of Fire. He was the one who decided to abandon three years of friendship because of a bizarre case of misplaced jealously. Really, what was he jealous of? Hufflepuffs were aiming tripping hexes at Harry's feet in the corridors. Students started whispering behind their hands whenever Harry walked past them and almost every one of them had a lurid, flashing Potter Stinks badge pinned to their chest.
Why on Earth could Ron think I want this? Harry thought, stabbing his fork viciously into a sausage. Doesn't he know me at all?
Seamus smirked and leaned over to whisper something in Ron's ear. Ron shook his head, grinning, and turned away. Then, almost as if he sensed he was being watched, Ron's eyes landed on Harry and his smile died on his face.
Slowly, the rest of the group followed Ron's gaze and the sniggering stopped, fading into an awkward silence. Face burning, Harry quickly looked back down at his food. A horrible thought dawned on him. Had Ron's joke… been about him?
The pit in his stomach yawned wider. His eyes prickled dangerously.
"You alright there, Harry?"
Harry looked up to see Neville, watching him with concerned eyes from the opposite side of the table.
"Yeah," Harry muttered, grateful for the distraction. "Thanks Neville."
Neville frowned and opened his mouth as though he was going to say something when an owl's screech spilt the air. Harry looked up in time to see dozens of owls descend from the rafters. To his surprise, a barn owl swooped down to land in front of him. On the envelope was one word – Snuffles.
Reaching to untie the letter from the owl's leg, Harry felt a small pool of warmth bloom in his chest. Maybe he wasn't totally alone after all.
Across from him, Neville unravelled the latest edition of The Daily Prophet and winced. "Not again."
"What's up?" Harry asked. The barn owl took a bite of Harry's toast and ruffled her feathers before taking off again.
Neville grimaced and passed Harry the paper instead of answering. Harry let out a breath of relief when he saw that the headline wasn't about him, but the relief didn't last long.
PARENTS SEEK ANSWERS: "WHERE IS MY BABY?"
Minister of Magic remains tight-lipped about Parentium Custodium Legislation, Rita Skeeter reports.
Harry did a quick scan of the article, a knot tightening in his chest.
"As it stands, the details of all adopted children remain confidential, says ministry official Lucius Malfoy," Harry read aloud. "This is great tragedy that the Ministry is working hard to rectify…blah, blah, blah. Minister Fudge unavailable for comment."
"This is never going away is it?" Neville murmured, sounding exhausted. "Gran says she has friends who are practically camped out at the Ministry every day, trying to get answers. It's been a year. It's never going to end."
The Great Hall grew louder as more students read the day's headline. Harry did his best to tune out the noise and read the rest of the article. There was a quote near the bottom credited to an unnamed ministry official. It snagged his gaze like a hook.
"It's been nearly forty years since they took my daughter," says one Ministry worker. "I don't know where she is, or if she's alive. I don't even know her name."
Unwittingly, Harry's gaze went to Ron, who was now hunched over his own copy of the Prophet with Hermione. All the mirth from before had drained away. His freckled face had taken on a sickly hue, like curdled milk.
Harry looked away, guilt clawing his insides. He stood up, shoved the paper into Neville's arms and hurried out of the hall, Sirius's letter clutched tightly in his fist. Once he made it into the quiet of the entrance hall, he let out a breath and slumped against a wall.
Parentium Custodium. The words had been haunting him since he first read them on that horrible, damp day at Leaky Cauldron last year. His initial, irrational thought when he saw the adoption papers was, they know.
Mr and Mrs Weasley know, he'd thought, holding the papers in trembling hands. This explained why they were so nice to him! This explained why they were willing to take him in and feed him. At last, Harry had an explanation for their kindness. Pity. They felt sorry for their scrawny, unwanted grandson and they were kind to him to make up for the fact that they didn't want him, just like they didn't want his mother.
But after the shock and panic wore off, and Harry was able to pick himself up from the cold floor of the bathroom in his hotel room, he realised that didn't make sense. Mr and Mrs were fiercely protective of their children. He couldn't see them giving a child away, even if they were…
And that's when Harry looked at the dates on the adoption certificate. Fifteen. Mr and Mrs Weasley were fifteen years old when they had his mother. More than that, the certificate was signed and witnessed by Collette Prewett and Nathaniel Weasley, which Harry thought was quite strange. Shouldn't at least one of the child's birth parents have to sign the adoption papers, to give up their rights to the child?
Answers came the following morning, when The Daily Prophet published an explosive article, announcing that an archaic piece of legislation had finally been abolished, and sent shockwaves through the wizarding world. The legislation in question, the Parentium Custodium Act of 1806, stated that if any witch or wizard had a child before they themselves were of age, that child would be in the legal custody of their grandparents until either the mother or father turned seventeen years old. Molly and Arthur couldn't have signed away their rights to their child because until they turned seventeen, the law didn't recognise them having a right to her at all.
Harry had been horrified to learn that this wasn't unusual. Until Parentium Custodium was overturned in 1993, many teen pregnancies in pureblood families ended with the child's grandparents quietly giving them to a company called the M.W. Adoption Agency. The agency, in turn, gave these children to muggle families.
Everything about the kids – their names, their birth parents and their adopted parents – was made confidential.
I don't know where she is, or if she's alive. I don't even know her name.
Harry's mother was wanted. This, he became sure of when the Weasleys eventually arrived in Diagon Alley after their holiday in Egypt. Mrs Weasley had greeted Harry with a warm hug and fussed over his weight, like always, but there was something distinctly drawn about her appearance. She snapped more harshly at the twins than usual and sometimes she would look at Ginny like she was about to burst into tears. Meanwhile, Mr Weasley was frowning a lot and twice Harry caught him staring vacantly at a copy of the newspaper.
Slowly, the horror of the situation had dawned on Harry. Mr and Mrs Weasley's parents had taken Lily and given her away. To this day, they had no idea what happened to her. They…
They had no idea she was dead.
Mr and Mrs Weasley were desperately looking for answers that Harry had been in possession of for over a year – hidden in an innocuous envelope that was stuffed in the bottom of his trunk.
Harry was shaken from his thoughts by the sound of chairs scraping as they were pushed back. Voices grew louder and Harry stood up in time for all the students to start spilling out of the Great Hall, heading off to their first class. Hermione emerged, clutching Ron's arm and talking to him quietly while Ron remained silent, face was pinched and pale. They blew past without seeing Harry, disappearing into the crowd.
Shortly after, Ginny and the twins shuffled out of the hall, heads bowed, whispering furiously.
Harry watched them all go, the pit in his stomach growing wider. Since his name came out of the Goblet of Fire, Harry had frequently found himself standing on the sidelines, watching his family from a distance. In second year, at least Harry had had Ron, even while the rest of the school turned against him. He'd also had Fred and George, who made it a point to escort Harry through the corridors, scaring everyone off by shouting, Make way for the Heir of Slytherin! This year, the whole Weasley family was preoccupied with petitioning the Ministry for his mother's adoption papers and with Hermione so intent on being there for Ron, she'd rather forgotten to be there for Harry.
It was, all in all, terribly lonely.
But however lonely Harry felt, he knew it could get a lot worse. Because how could any of them ever look him in the eye if he told them their sister was dead? How could they ever forgive him, when it was his fault?
Sometimes Harry lay awake at night imagining the look on Mr and Mrs Weasley's faces, dreading how they would react if they found out that their daughter had been dead for fourteen years, and that she died so Harry could live.