Somebody Who Cares
by
MagicWand
Summary:
On 31ST October 1981 Sirius and James are together when the attacks take place. To avoid being hit by the killing curse, they stumble through a threshold of a door. But it's not James' kitchen door. No, it's a door that transports them forward in time, through the same timeline, to nine years later.
Harry has a scar on his forehead; Hermione has a scar on the left side of her face; Theo doesn't seem to have visible scars but he's blind. Does it count?
Three children who have a lot in common and spend most of their free time in the same place will soon meet two very young adults who have been friends for many years. The five of them will build a friendship and an out of the ordinary family. After all, how can you consider your dad as a parental figure if he's only 21 and you're 10? But they can't do worse than the Addams' family, can they?
AN
Hello and welcome to this fic! This story has been in my mind for a short while and it has been insisting that it wants to be written. And so, here I am, trying to channel the stories of these characters.
The door is heavily inspired by the book "The Drawing of the Three". Do you remember that scene where Eddie is in Balazar's bathroom with the door that opens on the Western Sea just right behind him? So fashinating! The door, not the bathroom.
This idea has been taunting my creativity for a while and… why not apply it to twist the Harry Potter plot?
It's not a crossover.
The story is gen for the moment, no pairings.
I'm writing another fic, where I am exploring the loss of your sight when you are an adult, link is below. Here, I'll explore what is an easy topic to write about, that is being blind from birth, since that's who I am.
James and Sirius will be very young, 21 years old for James and almost 22 for Sirius. They will have the shock of their life, but that's how I like it.
English is not my mother tongue. I'd be very thankful if you point out grammar mistakes such as using do instead of make.
Harry Potter belongs to J. K. Rowling.
The door belongs to the king of all suites, the king of all chessboards, the king who knows more about the dark arts than any of the HP characters might dream of: mr. Stephen King.
This story is published on AO3 under the same title, where I update more frequently due to the website being easier to use and far more accessible to screen readers.
Thank you!
Chapter 1
Part one: Réunion
1. families are overrated
I
Harry liked spending his afternoons at The Dark Side of the Moon. He never had the money to buy himself a fruit juice — the Dursleys — not his relatives just the Dursleys — had never given him a single penny. But Harry was a resourceful lad and he hearned his fruit juices by volunteering at the bar, carefully storing the liquors in the fresh cellar, lining the boxes of biscuits at their rightful place, against the far left of the storage room and piling the cases of glass water bottles they served to their clients. But it wasn't all: Harry helped to put the newly delivered books on the shelves of the Room of One's Own, the small library that was above the Dark Side of the Moon — the inventory, thank goodness, was handled by adults and by his friend, Hermione, who just knew what they had in store without even needing to consult the registries. How she did it, He couldn't understand, but she had said it was something about her photographic memory.
Harry liked both the library and the bar, although you couldn't drink in the library and you couldn't read at the bar. It was forbidden to drink something while you were upstairs, unless it was water; there wasn't a rule that explicitly forbade you to read when you were downstairs, but the Dark Side of the Moon, as its name suggested, was dark. It was plunged in the darkness. It was a bar managed by a group of blind people who used it for their meetings and to offer to the sighted public the experience of having a dinner or grabbing a cup of tea in complete darkness. Harry found the lack of visual stimuli deeply relaxing and soothing. He could focus on his beverage or on the music. Upstairs, in the library, where you could read books but not borrow them — you needed to put them back on their shelves after you had finished reading for the day, the music wired more toward mellow jazz and classical. It was soothing if you were reading, but Harry's ears preferred the sound you could hear downstairs, where radio Rock 106.5 was playing all day long. Dudley was a tv junkie and so Harry hadn't had any true musical knowledge before discovering the bar. Now, he believed he was quite on par when it came to rock, folk and some country too.
Harry received a pay for his work, although he was supposed to be a volunteer. He guessed Hermione or some of the employees of the upstairs library had seen the state of his ragged, hand-me-down, too large and fading clothes and his broken glasses; or they had noticed he never bought a drink if he were thirsty after an hour of going back and forth between the shelves. He couldn't even afford a bottle of water, if it were up to the Dursleys.
The opening of the bar and the library had been heavily publicized when their activity had started, back in 1987. Harry couldn't believe such an original place would open in a hole like Little Winging, but he had immediately grabbed the opportunity and thanked whoever had made that decision. Yes, because Dudley the doodle would never land his ass in such a place. He didn't get along with books or with the radio. It was either the tv or stupid games Harry didn't find exciting at all. or, of course, Harry hunting. But if Harry was protected by the walls of the library, he would not be hunted.
And, when Harry thought about Dudley the dud trying to eat while immersed in total pitched black darkness, he couldn't refrain from wishing for the bar tender to turn on the lights just for a second, to enjoy the splattery show Dudley would make. No, this magical place was Harry's and Harry's only.
Not that there weren't other people, there were, but none of them was in his blacklist. He had made two friends, a boy and a girl around his age. The girl's name was Hermione, a reserved avid reader who mainly volunteered upstairs, helping in cataloguing books and doing some easy paperwork. Then, there was Theo, a boy who spent most of his time downstairs; being blind, he couldn't take advantage of the impressive books collection the Room of One's Own owned. He didn't mind reading his braille novels while submerged by the constant night, disturbed only by the clicking of glasses and the guitars stringy notes coming from the radio.
What money Harry earned, he used it to buy himself a juice, some hot chocolate or a piece of cake, a true homemade cake, not those stale bricks mrs. Figg offered him when she had to babysit him. What remained in his pockets, he stashed it in a pair of unkle Vernon's old socks as savings.
He dreamt he would accumulate enough money to run away. Not going to happen, with the galloping inflaction and all that financial jazz.
When I can't keep it up anymore, I'll just beg Tracy Stanton — the president of the club that owned the pub and the library — for shelter and asylum.
Harry had never seen a bedroom, other than the mess that was Dudley's ravaged sleeping waste land, a place that seemed to be inhabited by Attila and his battalion of Huns.
No, Harry was too plebeian for an humble bedroom. He had been assigned the royal grand suite of the five stars hotel the Dursleys Inn, at number four Privet Drive: the cupboard under the stairs.
The suite offered the following extralux features:
– No ensuite bathroom;
– No confy slippers kindly provided by the staff;
– no ensuite wardrobe;
– yes to tons and tons of dust, thank Good he wasn't allergic;
– yes to spiders and cobwebs, thank God he hadn't arachnophobia;
– yes to all his 'personal' did someone say personal? Effects on the floor, thank God he wasn't a squeamish hygiene inspector.
Price per night, did you ask? Cooking breakfast for two adults and a kid who ate like a gluttonous boar.
You are wondering whether breakfast is included in the price? Nope! Sorry to deceive you, but the only food Harry was allowed were the leftovers. And, mind you, not much remained. Harry could try to cook more, but it was pain perdu. Dudley the well with no bottom but with a bottom as large as the backseat of a limousine ate it all. The more you gave him, the more he swallowed, like the hungry vacuum cleaner Petunia the perfect housewife ran on week-ends.
Harry's only luck was that he ate at the school canteen at lunch. At least, he was sure to get one full meal if it wasn't time for holidays — Harry hated holidays. Dinner was a similar affair to breakfast. Harry had to cook, being allowed to eat only when the Dursleys had finished banqueting and unkle Vernon went in the living room to watch some political debate and Dudley ran upstairs — feet beating on the stairs like Frank Beard's drum in Velcro Fly — to his jungle of bric-à-brac and plastered his football balloon like face to the TV screen to inject himself his daily dose of cartoons.
But Harry had some luck, the days he went to the Dark Side of the Moon. He could have some biscuits, some cake or, when his savings allowed for a luxury meal, a grilled hamburger.
The days he spent at four Privet Drive were the saddest and the ones you could call a representative of the FAO to talk about famished children. Harry either had to cook, wash the dishes, move the lawn and prune the dry branches of Petunia's roses. When Harry was finally allowed to rest, he just sat on his miserable bed in the cupboard, imagining a better life. His mind went flying to a dream which liked to visit him often: he was surfing the waves of the sky on the backseat of a flying motorbike. He couldn't see the rider, but it didn't matter. He loved the sensation of limitless freedom, of weightless happiness, of jolly exhilaration that flowed through his veins.
Harry often played the notes and words of 'Glory Days' by the Boss in his mind. At that point, his thoughts turned bitter: he had no glorious days to recall. Weren't you supposed to build your happiest memories during your childhood, while you were in school with your group of friends?
Maybe my dad had glory days, Harry thought. Maybe he was an accomplished, popular student with loving parents and close friends.
Harry was an outcast at school and he couldn't say he was very close to his friends. They all had a silent agreement not to ask any personal questions to each other. Harry understood it better than anybody else. If these children had similar experiences to his ones, he'd be the first to establish the 'don't ask' rule. Your family misery wasn't something you discussed openly with your peers.
Harry's thoughts often went far away, to the place he supposed his father's soul rested, maybe it was somewhere behind the rainbow. A father whose name he didn't even know. He imagined the only reason he knew his surname was because the Dursleys would never allow their family name to be tainted with such a walking oddity. Harry had been hated and despised since forever. He had never known love and affection and he was sure his predicament was shared by his other two friends. Hermione's story was of public domain, for all those who bothered enough to do a quick research and Theo never talked about his family, as if it was a tabu. They never asked. It would break their tacit contract.
Families are so overrated, Harry thought.
You pass by a nice detached house with a well kept garden and you think it's idyllic. You see a mother, a father and a child playing in the park and you believe this is happiness.
It's a lie, Harry had realized. Family was just an inherited burden full of inherent hypocrisy and fake bounds.
When the doom and the gloom were threatening to smoke him out with their grey rings of desolation, he daydreamed in his inner sanctuary.
I wish I could fly; I wish that I had a wand and with one swing I'd be happy. Maybe, one day, something will happen and I will belong somewhere. After all, strange things happen around me. Once, I was running from Dudley's gang and, all of a sudden, I found myself on the roof of the school. I've no idea how I managed that. Another time, when aunt Petunia went nuts and decided that if the two options were my rebel hair or being bald, she'd pick baldness, my hair had regrown to its usual lenght and its usual mess by the time the morning came. Maybe, one day, I'll meet somebody who cares.