To the idiot who reviewed the first short story of this collection:
Why don't you write a supposedly original Harry Potter story? I can guarantee it has already been done. In any case, the Dursleys were hateful in canon so why should it be different in Fanfiction?
To other readers - my apologies but I needed to get that off my chest. I am tired of people telling me my stories are cliched when they haven't even written a story before.
Harley Potter - The Black Cat.
The calls of the seagulls woke Harley up from her already uncomfortable sleep. The small girl winced as she felt the hard brick she was resting on behind her back - she hadn't had a very comfortable night's sleep, and resting with her back to a brick wall had not helped her one little bit. Harley stood up slowly and taking off her small sleeping bag which she'd purchased from a shop a few weeks ago, wincing as she got up before she looked around. She was in the Brighton North Laines after deciding to doss in the small doorway of one of the shops.
In the shadows of the night, Harley was able to get some sleep and with her dark coloured clothes and the navy blue of her secondhand sleeping bag, she was practically invisible.
"I can't keep doing this," she muttered to herself as she took a look around.
The street was practically empty, though there were one or two people nearby though they were too far away to have noticed the small child nearby. Harley wasn't bothered one way or another; she was used to being ignored, and although she had checked the newspapers to see if anyone was looking for her or had reported her missing by now, Harley just could not take the risk someone like Mrs Figg or the school might have done it.
She didn't care. She was a long way from Surrey, and truthfully the further away from Number 4, the better she felt.
In any case, Harley had a good idea of why no-one was really giving her a lot of attention after what she had just found out about herself and her past.
Harley had time to think while she rolled up her sleeping bag - she had learnt very quickly shop owners didn't like it when homeless people used their doorways like a shelter, and more than once she had needed to get away from well-meaning people who kept trying to stop her from sleeping in places like this by calling in the police. Harley had always run away because she had no idea if any of those same police officers were under Dumbledore's thumb, and besides, she had managed to survive on the streets of Brighton ever since she had arrived here. Alright, so she hated having to doss in doorways, and she had learnt to find places when it was particularly wet and windy, and sometimes scrounging out for food and water was hard, but so far she had survived.
Harley finished rolling her sleeping bag up and she shoved it into the backpack she had bought shortly before she had gotten out of London. It had shaken her that she had managed to get out of London so easily; she would have thought a small girl travelling by herself would have garnered a few looks, but she had really not wanted to be seen, never mind bothered and so she wasn't.
Harley suspected that she had used her magical powers to stop people from noticing her, and indeed in the early hours, she put a lot of thought into hoping no-one noticed her.
I wonder if I can do the same with other spells, Harley thought to herself, wishing she had the help of an experienced witch to teach her her powers. If there was one thing she disliked about being on her own, it was that she had no-one to teach her anything about magic.
She remembered all the incidents where things happened around her, things that had resulted in a terrible beating from Vernon. All magic, she thought to herself with a grimace, remembering how many wasted chances she'd had to learn more about magic. She also wondered for a moment about why the Dursleys hated her before she decided not to dwell on it right now. She had a lot more to concern herself with. Harley blew out a breath as she straightened her light but warm coat and she walked out of the street.
This was what her life was, now, really; she would sleep in one place, wake up, find whatever she could eat with the money she got from begging (Harley wondered if she had used her magic to persuade people to give her small change and maybe even a few notes, and her desire to survive in this new world had something to do with it), while at the same time explore Brighton.
Despite the way she lived her life now, Harley actually quite liked Brighton. She loved being close to the sea now, but then she had longed to see it from the moment she had seen pictures of the ocean as a younger child. Her desire had grown even more since the Dursleys always went on holiday.
Harley knew the Dursleys did it out of spite. They knew how much she had wanted to be a normal kid, normal being loved instead of reviled…
Harley shook her head as she got herself something to eat, hoping to keep the shop owners who were serving her food from truly paying her any attention while she kept on walking.
Her legs were exhausted when she got to the beach, but she pushed it aside as she came to a stop on the small, gentle slope going down into the sea. She smiled and she sat down and watched as the sea pulled back and then crashed back on the pebbles before it was pulled back. She always came down here to eat when she could, never once getting bored with the beautiful view the sea.
She would just…sit down. Sit and stare at the sea, listening to the seagulls, and trying hard to stop them nicking her food from her.
She often thought about everything that had happened to her.
When she had left Privet Drive, Harley had waited outside the railway station for dawn. She had walked into the station nervously with the ticket that she had purchased from the automatic ticket machine before she had caught an early morning train - she had seen it work when she had been forced to go with Aunt Petunia and Dudley into London when Vernon was not around.
Petunia had not liked that, Harley remembered, but with no-one willing to babysit and Mrs Figg herself unavailable - Harley didn't know the details and it didn't matter now - she hadn't had much choice. And besides, she had only needed one look at how the ticket machine worked for her to get the basics of how it worked.
When Harley had reached Victoria she had headed down for Brighton - she hadn't known for sure where Dumbledore and his people would look when they realised she was gone, but she was sure they were looking for her. London was a big city, but she wasn't going to leave anything to chance. At the same time, she decided to use the opportunity to travel down to the coast to form a new life, preferably as far from the Dursleys as she could get.
This was just her enjoying her freedom. The only problem was she had little idea what to do next: when she had left Number 4 and Little Whinging behind she had originally imagined her biggest problem was simply getting away, but the existence of magic and the revelation some old wizard had some grand plan for keeping her locking her up at Number 4 in the first place only complicated things.
When she had come up with the plan for escaping Number 4, Harley had thought it would be straightforward. All she had needed to be was patient while she waite for the Dursley's holiday while she waited at Mrs Figg's place where she would wait for a short time while the Dursleys were gone, and leave one night. Then she would escape. She would travel as far as she could get while no-one was suspicious, and then she would lie low again in case the Dursleys tried looking for her. At the same time, she would pick up skills to survive on the streets before she went to the police and give them a false name and hope they didn't make any connection in case she was being looked for. Harley didn't know if it would happen; the school had never particularly given a toss about her, though now she was sure magic had been involved.
Magic….
Just thinking about how one old man had messed her life up shocked Harley, but what made it worse was she didn't even understand the point. What was going on?
But all she did know was magic had complicated matters even more. Originally she had thought she could simply find a new place to live while being as far from the Dursleys as she could get; the Dursleys wouldn't care, but even if the did try to find her after a couple of weeks it would have been too late.
After a short while, she had thought at the time when she had thought up her plan to escape the Dursleys, she could go to the police and get herself put into foster care after lying low for a period of time.
But with Dumbledore, a wizard….
Just…thinking about the way the old wizard had manipulated and messed her life up, ensuring she stayed at the Dursleys. Harley just didn't understand what the point was, except there was an agenda, though what it was she didn't know.
In the end, Harley decided it didn't matter.
But the police…
Although after what she had learnt about the magical world and what Dumbledore had been doing made her realise that the people whom should have been helping her hadn't turned away because they had thought she was faking, because of the manipulations of an old wizard…
Truthfully, Harley had no idea how she should feel, to be honest.
But she knew she would never trust authority.
Never.
Not ever again.
She would never forget the number of times she had trusted authority, told someone what was going on in that house of horror, what Vernon was doing to her from the day she had become old enough and therefore strong enough to take the beatings, only to be let down and forced to undergo something worse than usual…
All because of a wizard….
Something told her she would eventually discover what the agenda was, though the chances were she was not going to like it. If she ever encountered Dumbledore, and she was sure of it, then she would need to be ready. When she had learnt she herself was a witch Harley had wondered if she could teach herself magic, but aside from herself wondering if her desire to go unnoticed had something to do with her powers, she hadn't had that much luck.
Harley finished her meal and stood up, wondering just how many of her plans had been screwed. She had decided to double the time she spent on the streets without being found before she looked to the police to help her, though she wondered if Dumbledore had done something to ensure she didn't alert the authorities about what the Dursleys had been doing to her, or if he had someone monitor her to alert him at once if someone was paying a lot of attention to her.
As Harley explored Brighton, feeling the sun beating down on her back, she headed straight for the Churchill Square to the shops. She spent twenty minutes looking around, but as she was looking around she spotted something. Three kids, a couple of them around her age - two girls and one boy, maybe a little older - it was hard for her to tell - were clustered around a pair of older ladies who looked as ancient as Mrs Figg except not as loopy. Harley frowned as she noticed one of the kids, the boy who had a shock of light brown hair standing behind the two old ladies while the other two were speaking to them.
What was happening?
Harley continued to watch as the two ladies were distracted by the two younger girls, while the boy carefully and slowly lifted out the purses out of their handbags. Harley gasped as she realised what she was seeing, and she mentally punched herself for being so thick. The girls were busily distracting the older ladies while the boy went through their handbags and stole their purses. They were pickpockets. The girls acted as a distraction while the boy did the work.
As she watched them with interest Harley realised practically they were her only hope. While she had her own plans to go to the police and get herself put into the foster system and hopefully putting distance between herself and the Dursleys though she had no idea if it would work on a wizard like Dumbledore, Harley had no idea what she would be doing in the interim.
But now looking at the sight of three pickpockets Harley realised what she could be doing to help her survive in case foster care was yet another bitter disappointment for her since she had no idea if it was going to be as cursed there as it had been in the prison that was life in Little Whinging.
Harley walked over to the three pickpockets curiously, her mind still racing as she tried to work out what she was going to do, how she was going to get this gang to accept her. None of the kids whom she had wanted to be friends with as a child had really accepted her, thanks to Dudley's threats, but because of those experiences and her time on the streets it had been a long time since Harley had spoken to anybody else.
She followed the gang as they walked away from the old ladies - Harley almost snickered when she happened to overhear the two old women comment on the good manners of those children, she wondered whether they would change their tunes when they discovered what had happened to their cash, but she didn't care - and she watched them from afar while making sure she was quite close to them since she didn't want to lose them.
Idiots, she thought in disdain as she noticed one or two of the people the kids stole off didn't realise what was going on, still, they're good. I hope they do help me. I need all the help I can get.
Harley observed the trio use the same technique more than once, on different people. As she observed them she noticed that they took it in turns, and they did it smoothly as well with no fights - it was obvious to her these pickpockets had been doing this for a while, but she wasn't sure if they were, like herself, living on the streets or if they had family but this was just their way of getting more pocket money.
At the same time, Harley noticed that one of the girls was older than the other two, though the boy was quite close to her in terms of age, whereas the third child was clearly younger. She noticed the three of them shared traits. All of them shared the same light brown hair, the same moonlike face and the same eyes though she couldn't see what colour they were.
She didn't care.
All she was interested in was trying to find a way to make them accept her.
Harley followed them around, doing her best to remain unnoticed. Finally, she followed them to a shop that was being rented out but was clearly not being used for anything just yet. She watched them silently as they went in through the backdoor and she followed them in, willing herself to be noticed.
"Hello?" she called. "Hi!"
"Who are you?" a childish voice asked and Harley turned and smiled when she saw one of the girls whom she had seen with the boy and the other girl.
"Hello," Harley smiled at her, hoping that whatever it was that put other people off her worked here as well. "I watched you come in. Mind if I stay with you?"
"That's up to my brother and my sister," the girl said, looking at her hesitantly.
So they are related, Harley thought to herself as she tried to work out how she could take advantage of this… Pushing that aside now she could hear soft footsteps coming closer, Harley smiled at the girl. "My name's Harley, nice to meet you," she said.
"Why are you here?" The footsteps had stopped and now Harley turned when she heard the voice. She saw the boy standing there, looking at her with worry.
"My name is Harley," Harley repeated herself, smiling at the boy, mentally cursing herself for not spending that much time with other homeless children so then she could pick up what to do and what not to do.
"What do you want?" the boy asked, sounding more guarded rather than dismissive like the kids at Stonewall Primary. Good. That was hopeful.
Harley had been mentally preparing herself for this encounter, but she had no idea what to say without these three kids losing it. "I saw you picking those pockets over at Churchill Square," she said finally.
The boy and the girl stiffened, though the girl who was much younger than either her two siblings looked like she was about to cry. Harley noticed the younger girl's reaction out of the corner of her eye, and while she felt bad she had no intention of breaking her story off.
"Are you gonna tell on us?" the boy asked.
Harley shook her head, ignoring the sounds of footsteps and guessed the elder sister was coming to investigate what was going on. "No," she replied. "I want to join. I want to learn how to pick people's pockets."
"Who do you wanna do that?" Harley turned and saw the elder sister, watching her curiously with some worry that was identical to her brother's. Harley studied the three of them who were now close enough for her to judge and she took a moment to think about what she saw. It was clear all three of them had been living rough for a while so they had no reason to trust her.
"I'll make you a deal. You answer a few of my questions, and then I'll answer some of yours. How does that sound?" Harley compromised; she knew she was pushing the limits, but aside from her own guesses about these three, she wasn't going to say anything unless she had all of the facts.
The girl bit her lip and frowned in a manner that said it was taking all of her patience to agree. "Okay.
"Do you live here?" Harley asked simply, waving a hand around the empty shop.
The girl looked around for a bit and then nodded reluctantly, clearly not liking having to admit it. "Yeah, we do. We've been living here for over two months," she added.
The younger sister piped up, drawing Harley's attention back to her. "We left our dad because he couldn't look after us after mummy left us."
Harley turned to the older sister. "Is that true, what happened?"
The elder sister sighed but not before she sent a mild glare towards her little sister, clearly, she didn't like being reminded about what had happened and that they didn't want their uninvited guest to learn too much, though truthfully Harley didn't care about their reasons. "Our mother just went out to work as normal. But she never came back. We later received a letter saying she was not coming back for us. Life was hard for us, especially since our dad," the girl spat the word so there was clearly no love there, "couldn't hold down a job. Our mum was always overstressed; she had to work, cook and clean for us, although we helped, and our dad did nothing. He is like a kid trapped in a man's body. Anyway, he slapped Colleen and she went to school the next day with a massive bruise on her face, sobbing her heart out."
"And social services were called in," Harley filled in the gaps, momentarily feeling jealous towards these three kids for having social services coming to get them out of that life whereas they had ignored her. It was petty and stupid, especially since she now knew about Dumbledore's involvement and meddling in her life. But that didn't mean she couldn't help but feel jealous.
To her surprise the mention of social services made the three other kids look annoyed, though in the little girl's eyes Harley could see the onset of tears.
"W-what happened?" she asked.
"Social was going to split us up," the brother replied, holding onto a scared Colleen's shoulder.
"They didn't have a foster placement for three of us, just two. We'd have lost Colleen," the elder sister finished making Harley flinch and curse her own lack of experience with social services, though now she wondered if it would have been bad at all, though she wasn't going to comment on it, "so we had to escape. We've been living on the streets ever since. We started pickpocketing soon after when we had trouble getting enough to eat or drink."
"I understand," Harley replied, getting the picture now.
And indeed she could.
In a way, these kids had lived much as she had. Sure, she had never had her own mother walk out on her, but she had lived in fear of her own life which had been one of the most important reasons behind her decision to leave Privet Drive.
But what these kids had gone through was worse in two ways to what she'd endured. Harley didn't have siblings to miss, but if she'd had a younger sibling and social or someone else wanted to take that sibling away from her, then she wouldn't have hesitated to have run away either.
The second point was the fear they both held for what could have happened if they had stayed. For her it had been Vernon, who she could see one day going too far and when he came out of his rage-induced violence he would see he had gone too far. It wouldn't have surprised Harley in the least if her thug of an uncle would have buried her someplace as far from the house as possible while Petunia struggled to clean out the blood soaking her precious carpets and the car, both knowing if they took the car to the garage to get it cleaned out, then the police would be on top of them before they could blink.
The Dursleys were stupid, but not that stupid.
In the case of these kids, they would have been scared of what their father would have done. Harley didn't know what their family life had been like, though her abuse-riddled mind had to wonder to herself if the reason their mother had left was that she was sick of looking at them, though she wasn't going to say anything of that kind to them.
"It's our turn now," the brother said, folding his arms and staring at Harley as if expecting she would be trouble. "Where are you from?"
"Surrey, originally," Harley replied, thankful that they were moving on with the topic and she had the chance to tell them what she wanted from them, "My parents died a long time ago, and I was dropped off on my aunt and uncle's doorstep. Literally. They did not like that."
"When you say dropped off, do you mean-?" the elder sister asked, looking at Harley with horror.
Harley nodded, knowing what the other girl was thinking. "I was a baby at the time," she said softly, remembering all the times her aunt and uncle had yelled at her, saying they had never wanted her at all but that she had been foisted on them in the middle of the night by someone Harley guessed was Dumbledore though she had no intention of telling them anything like that. "I don't know why whoever did it didn't knock on the door and let my relatives know what had happened to my parents, so don't ask. All I know is my relatives didn't like it, not one little bit; my aunt hated my mother, and my uncle was just a hateful, spiteful man in general. He's very handy if you know what I mean," Harley added, using a description she had picked up somewhere, "with me. I don't know if he's capable of fighting other men, but I don't care. But the moment I was put into their care, they blamed me for anything even if I wasn't there. They made me do everything in their home, from the cooking to the cleaning. They also beat me. It got worse as I grew older."
The siblings looked at each other in horror. Whatever they had been expecting, it was not that.
"H-how did you get out?" the elder sister asked while the younger girl looked like she was about to cry at the thought of someone going that far to a child.
Harley sighed. "I waited for a chance to escape when their holiday came up; my relatives always sent me off to a neighbour who has an obsession with cats in a cabbage smelling house. But she's not as paranoid as my relatives. I chose my chance and escaped. I went to London, got a train, and came all the way down here."
"And no-one thought that was odd?" the brother asked.
Harley shrugged. "I don't know what was going through their minds," she replied, and she decided to show them the worst of the Dursley's abuse. She took off her jacket and her shirt and showed them the injuries she had taken from Vernon Dursley, the ones that had scarred. She smiled when she heard their gasps when she had her back turned.
"Will you help me?" she asked.
Harley looked from the elder children to the youngest. She had no intention of ditching the three of them. These three had a skill she felt could benefit herself. Truthfully she didn't know or see any clear reason why they would refuse to help her. They had a lot in common. So why would they refuse?
The elder sister looked at her with narrowed eyes and then nodded. "You can stay," she said.
Five weeks.
It was amazing how much your life can change in just five short weeks. To a child, a fortnight or a month was like an eternity. To a child, it felt like a thousand years to Christmas.
For Harley Potter who had escaped from her abusive family five weeks ago while she had waited for a short period of time for the holiday where her relatives would be leaving her behind with a mad cat-woman for a couple of weeks, and security would be so lax it would be easy, those five weeks had changed her entire life, and yet she felt as if her entire world had been turned upside down.
Sure, the magical thing had surprised her. The fact her entire life had been meddled in by one man with an agenda, who for some reason she couldn't yet work out at the moment, which involved her getting brutally beaten up while stopping the authorities from doing anything about it.
She smiled as she watched Colleen speaking to their latest target. It was a young woman about twenty or so years old. She looked foreign, but because Harley's knowledge of the different nations of the world was very limited, the young girl couldn't tell. Harley didn't care; unlike the Dursleys, who had never concealed their racist attitudes, she was neutral towards people from other countries simply because she hadn't really met any before to form an opinion of them.
But from what the elder sister, Vanessa, had told her after she and her brother Liam and Colleen had accepted her into the fold, tourists were always the best because since this was a country they knew nothing about, they were more readily taken in. Harley, despite being young, wondered about the logic of that; surely there were pickpockets in places outside Britain, right? Surely they couldn't be this stupid.
The tourist little Colleen was speaking with had her back turned so Harley could not see for herself what the woman's general reaction was, though Harley had been picking the pockets of tourists, acting as both the pickpocket and the distractor to notice the confusion and surprise on their faces each and every time.
The Dursleys were right about one thing, and Harley did not like admitting that; if foreigners came to another country, surely it would not kill them to learn somethings about the language. But still, she wouldn't say anything since their cash gave them more to live off.
Harley gently folded a small pamphlet she'd picked up somewhere and switched it to her right hand. Then she slowly lowered it to form a shield so no-one would see what she was doing, just like Vanessa and Liam had shown her while she slipped her hand into the handbag. She wasn't entirely sure if the pamphlet was necessary since she was willing herself not to be noticed, much like she had done when she had made her escape through London, and it seemed to be working.
But this was not the time to get into that.
She needed to completely concentrate on what she was doing. Taking a deep slow breath, Harley's fingers pinched the purses' corner and she felt a tingling sensation in her fingers while she breathed in and out gently before she took it out of the handbag slowly. She then transferred the purse to the pamphlet, sandwiching it in the folds of the pamphlet. Harley then slipped the purse into her own pocket before she nodded to Colleen, letting the little girl know she had finished.
Harley stood to the side while she waited for Colleen to come over to her, mentally thinking about what she had learnt with this little gang. She had been with the siblings for two weeks now. When she had first gone out with them, Vanessa and Liam had been responsible for picking the pockets and handbags of their victims while she and Colleen had distracted them. Harley hadn't been surprised when she had heard their plans. It made sense the older and more experienced pickpockets would be the ones to do the work at first for her to get used to it.
During that point, the siblings had been teaching her what to do and what not to do.
The siblings had revealed they hadn't been taught by anyone to pickpockets, all of their knowledge came from their own experiences. They revealed stories where they had made mistakes and came close to being caught out. Once Little Colleen herself had been grabbed, only for Vanessa to punch the man who was holding the little girl painfully by the arms in the gut while Liam had kicked him in the groin.
But the siblings had learnt from their mistakes, refining their work until they were better at what they did. And now they were teaching her their skills, making sure that they taught her about their own mistakes.
Harley was pleased they were patient. It took a while, but with some practice, she became better and better until she could pick Vanessa and Liam's pockets without them knowing about it. More than once she had done so to keep her nascent skills sharp, much to their surprise.
But when she had picked the pocket of the first man she saw, Harley had managed to do so without being noticed, and she had felt a great wave of power over what she had done surge through her.
She had done it, she was a pickpocket.
And over the weeks, the gang had changed their approach.
Originally because there had been three siblings, they had needed to take it in turns to pick the pockets of their victims. But when Harley had joined the gang, they had quickly seen the advantages because with four in the gang, two could pick the pockets or handbags while two others caused the distractions without putting the rest of the gang at risk.
The siblings had known the theory of just having two picking pockets of course, they weren't stupid or ignorant. But they were worried about little Colleen, who was the youngest and the timidest of the siblings. But with Harley around, the other siblings could double their takes. More than that, they could also practice their solo pickpocketing.
But the last two weeks had taken the issue off of Harley' s shoulders about what she was going to do next. Now she wasn't in a great hurry to find a policeman and tell him she was on her own, and she wanted to be fostered or something like that when deep down she was tired of being hungry and cold.
That didn't matter to her anymore.
Now there was food and money in abundance.
With these siblings, she had finally found a family.