AN: I do not own the Harry Potter franchise.

Chapter 9: The Library

With their hope for a proper, loving family like ones they had read about in books thoroughly squashed, the smaller of the Potter twins practically moved into the library. If the people who were supposed to love them and take care of them ignored them unless they had something rude to say, they could avoid them all they want. It was perfectly justified and reasonable to them, even when they felt a bit of guilt for being so willing to hide from their own family.

Given their new residence in the library, they were bound to happen across some new pile of dusty old books eventually. And happen across old dusty books, they did. The books may not have been the ones they were looking for, but they certainly provided entertainment to an extent. Sure, they were a bit more gruesome than, say, the book they'd found in the main room of the library that discussed magical theory, but the information within it wasn't bad, per se. Just a bit less tame than other books they'd found.

But the book did scare them just a bit, so they went back to the nice, bright room with the soft green chair and what they had realized were old journals of Potter ancestors. They never pursued any more gruesome books, but the books certainly started pursuing them. They started showing up everywhere, even in places they had already looked for books.

At first, it was just thinking they'd missed one or two books on a bookshelf they'd perused a few times. Then, it was finding books and doors where they were not meant to be. They'd been finding solace in the library for as long as they could remember, and that obnoxiously ordinary-looking door was not there and had never been there in the first place. It was all very suspicious, and to suddenly find their library so drastically changed was rather scary for them so they stopped spending quite as much time in the library.

With the library seeming more scary than comforting, they returned to their investigation of the house. On one noteworthy instance of poking their head around doors and looking through things, they had found their way into James' office. He must have started drinking before locking it the previous night. They knew they should walk away and leave everything untouched, but they were just so curious…

They should have left when they had the chance.

The moment they started investigating James' desk, James stumbled into his study bleary-eyed but quickly waking up with the force of his fury. As had become typical with him, the moment he saw the smaller of his twins his face got splotchy and red as he started screaming, "What are you doing in here?! I locked this goddamn door, and you don't have magic anymore, so how the hell are you in here, you pathetic little waste of space?"

The smaller of the Potter twins, the one caught under the furious stare of their father, cowered. They were already crying in remembrance of previous confrontations with James, and their voice cracked as they stumbled through saying, "The door was u-unlocked, and I-I'm sorry, I d-didn't mean to go into your study I p-promise!"

James didn't care for the explanation, and showed this through his shouted response of, "You liar! I locked the door last night, so what dark magic did you do to unlock it?!"

"I can't do any magic, you made sure of that!" The child screamed back in a sudden rush of anger over what James had done.

"It must have been a ritual. Tell me which one, you filthy half-breed!"

The child knew nothing of rituals, and responded, "I don't know any rituals!"

James assumed their slight delay in responding was proof of lying, and so caught up was he in his fury that he didn't realize he had slapped his child until said child was running away sobbing. His somewhat hungover mind reached clarity for a moment as he realized what he had just done. He felt genuine regret for hitting his own child and resolved never to do it again. He may be willing to scream at his child, but he drew the line at physical violence. Not that his traumatized child knew that.

He spent a week completely avoiding his smallest child, instead doing things to avoid his guilt over hitting a child. Eventually, he decided on giving the child a stuffed toy as compensation and his conscience was cleared.

Said child was so anxious and fearful that James would start hitting them and screaming at them that they rarely left those rooms that had randomly appeared. While there, they read those ever-so-slightly gruesome books in favor of going somewhere where they could be hit again. If they were correct in their assumption that the rooms have only shown up for them, they were safe once they were inside the rooms with the conspicuously normal-looking doors.

And just like that, the child had a brand-new safe place to read and avoid their family. Sure, the safe place had books on wards that could skin people alive when activated, but it also had a means to stay away from James. And besides, it's not like the little eight-year-old would be using those wards. They were just reading about violence and a darker side to magical theory. There was nothing wrong with that.

They convinced a house elf to move the soft green chair from the first room they had found in the library to the new room they had just found, and so the child started reading in that particular dusty corner, where James couldn't get to them.

The sounds of turning pages, quills on parchment, and a child walking on hardwood floors only existed in the new rooms found by the child, and to everyone else in the house those sounds completely disappeared. Maybe their twin brother occasionally heard soft humming coming from the library, but once his magic tutoring started the humming softened in volume until not even he could hear it.

The smaller twin had finally found someplace where they felt completely and totally at ease.

It was nice, after years of living with the looming shadow of James' temper hanging over their head.