Uncle Vernon doesn't remember because he wasn't there. He was at work most of the day. Dudley doesn't remember because he was too young, as was Harry, and Aunt Petunia does remember but doesn't want to. For the most part she doesn't but, sometimes if it's too still and quiet and dark or if there is a certain cold in the air… If she wakes up in the middle of the night she feels the fear and rage of it all in a tangle and goes and draws a hot bath and cries until she starts forgetting again or smudges over the edge of the memory by blinking very quickly like she used to as a child and dries herself, gets back into bed and falls asleep.
That autumn, a column of sea water evaporated into the air and spread out with the space of all the sky, invited many more water particles, cooled and returned back to Earth that winter as some of the worst snow and ice storms England had in over one hundred and twenty one years. England froze nearly to breaking. Ravenclaws in their tower looked to the forest and found it paved over in the white of shimmering snow and sparkle of clear, ice encased trees. They looked toward the lake and it too was covered in snow and they rightly assumed it had frozen over. Instead of Quidditch, which was too cold to play, they shoveled the snow with their wands and skated on the lake which only held slow moving, pleased grindelows who love the cold because everything in the lake left temporarily on a type of holiday.
The merpeople made for the Western coasts of Africa, the giant squid rolled its lidless eye and asked why it should put up with the cold and decided to leave also. It squeezed through a cleft in the mountains where they originated underwater and made for Argentina and the coast of Brazil to sun itself and enjoy spiced jellyfish, eat crunchy snail filled logs at the bottom of the ocean and sip at the cool, aerated streams that lead from the mountains over waterfalls through rivers that led to the ocean. It wondered if it would come across giant lobsters to continue their long, never ending discussions on the benefits and pitfalls of living amongst people who knew you existed. The giant squid insisted it was not bad. The giant lobsters insisted that they were both called giant by the doublets but they were giant in different ways and that the lobsters would stay as far away from humans and their dinner tables as they could. The squid would shrug. The lobsters would shrug. They'd go eat some jellyfish and continue the conversation a few days later.
At the Leaky Cauldron, wizards and witches gathered and suspected that the cold might be a curse it was so cold. Maybe he would return. Maybe it was him and others pointed to knots in the ceiling representing clusters of stars in the sky and insisted that it was foretold and they would argue and argue. Even if they actually agreed, someone would look around to include more people in the argument so they wouldn't have to leave into the chill. The door would swing open occasionally letting someone in from the frost or the snow or the hail or whatever cold was falling out of the sky that day and the entire establishment would swing around furious even as several fires roared away making it hotter than anyone might have been able to stand on a regular basis but it was the principle.
Tangenti Alley, like the lake, had been all but deserted. Anyone who had a home outside of England had long decamped on their brooms or acquired floo or whichever method they used in their country of origin to make for home. Like the Leaky Cauldron, it didn't matter if home was or had always been colder, this was not this cold. This was a cold suffused with death, relief and exhaustion. It held suspicion in place and maybe this was what gave rise to how the trials started because they did not start until after winter when they should have started immediately. They should have started right away when everyone still remembered even if they didn't want to but everyone was tired and needed a break. They used the cold as an excuse to stay at home with their families. They used the cold as an excuse to take time off from work. They used the cold as an excuse to add a pat more butter 'for the overcoat' said one man winking at his daughter while his wife stared at his paunch. 'For the overcoat, I suppose.', she said and added a small pat more. They used the cold as an excuse in a distinctly and uncharacteristically un-English way. It was a very good excuse and so all of wizard England and its satellites used it. Even Aunt Petunia.
Dudley recognized the chill and behaved strangely accordingly. He did not understand or know who this other person was but knew he could not be played with because when the sound of the door closed and the sound of his father's car started, Aunt Petunia had already scooped the other baby into her arms. His mother held this little other stranger baby and wept. She shook with tears and sometimes the baby cried too but not often enough given that this other baby did not know who this other baby was either or where his parents were or what any of this meant so mostly he tried to understand and, without crying, let himself be held.
He knew there was a green light but did not yet understand what the color green meant. He knew there was a scream which sounded a lot like a laugh but was not the same thing and still contained in his baby ears was the ringing from a blast but he did not understand that either. He only knew this lady looked unfamiliar but had his mother's voice a little bit. He was a sweet, good baby. He slept and ate well and might have played quietly if it weren't for that winter. Instead, he was whisked out of his crib and away from the other baby at the sound of a door closing and held like his mother would have held him and rocked like his mother would have rocked him.
"Harry," the woman said in his mother's voice. "I'm sorry, Harry. I'm so sorry, baby." She cried softly, kissing the top of his head and where she should have smelled the clean, milky sweetness of a baby, she could have sworn she could make out the faint smell of burned hair.
One day, after the man who was not his father left and the woman who was not his mother had cried while holding him, Harry was placed back in the crib with the other baby who regarded him with something like recognition. The other baby giggled. Aunt Petunia turned and watched the two of them. Dudley reached out and mimicked the gesture he saw his own mother do so often that winter. He placed his small hand on the other baby's small face with a look of sincere and pure love. He looked at Harry as if he were his own brother.
Later on that very same day, Harry could feel in his baby heart that something had changed. This woman was not his mother. These people were not his people. This was not his home. He was fed and cleaned but the coldness had made its way into the house and like many trees all over England it encased the woman who was not his mother and made it to the man who was not his father and finally and eventually, it would make it to the other baby though it took many more winters. There had been a time when if he screamed, everything in the house would be rearranged but he perceived no threat or held no animosity towards this other baby. His mother still held and loved him too and the other baby and he would sleep side by side comforted by the others warmth and cooing. There was a time Aunt Petunia had enjoyed the comfort of something like this also but, of all the things she remembered, this memory was inaccessible to her. What she knew was that she had had so much taken away from her and she, in turn, had taken some of her attention away from her own child and given it to him! Her own darling sweet boy had been neglected and she resolved never to let that happen again.
The mutant crocuses planted by a third year Hufflepuff peaked purple and bright orange through the snow, calling the spring out of hiding or banishing the cold of winter. The ice melted from the trees leaving the trunks black with wetness and the forest started to stretch and yawn itself awake. When the thaw came, the tides shift imperceptible to most humans but the Great Squid tasted the moss of the Great Lake like one might smell petrichor. It waved a long tentacle and bid the giant lobsters goodbye as it made it's long swim back home. The merpeople had long since arrived back at the Great Lake rolling their eyes at the grindelows who were back to swimming erratically and irritated for the crowding even though there was none since the lake was so enormous. The merpeople only put up with it because they knew it would all get back to normal soon enough.
The wizards and witches of all of England and Great Britain took even slower to enjoy the warm weather because that would mean they would have to get back to work and they shuddered remembering what that meant. What it meant was that they had had a war to understand. Alastor, Scrimgeour, Kingsley, every auror who had not had the luxury of taking a vacation and some members of the what should have been the Wizengamot at the end of the war knew they had taken too long. There would be something like another war even if Lord Voldemort had died.
Harry heard the door close downstairs and waited in baby anticipation to be swept into the arms of the woman who instead struggled to pick up the other baby and hold him to her but she did not cry this time. She told the other baby, who was as confused as Harry at the disruption of their ritual, that she loved him. Harry heard all of this not understanding the truth of it all in his mother's own voice.
