Seven-year-old Harry stared at the boy in front of him, unsure of what to do with this guy he'd just seen on the streets, and who was now talking to him about his parents. The word brought some memories of Aunt Petunia's explanations back into his mind; 'Dead. Don't ask.'. 'They died in a car crash, boy'.
Then how did he remember a flash of green light and a laugh? He knew better than to ask excessive questions, for he received zero to none answers in return - and it often came with a few days in the cupboard, too.
Yet even as this boy offered him a safe place to live and a promise to find one of his parents, he couldn't help but feel like a fraud.
He wasn't what the boy had told him he was, and he knew it.
"I'm not a half-blood," he said suddenly, interrupting the boy's speech about how he was being saved - and the boy looked at him in surprise.
"You've got to be," he insisted, sniffing loudly, "you smell like - you smell like magic."
The boy looked at him pleadingly, but Harry just shook his head firmly and told him, "I'm not."
"My parents died in a car crash," Harry repeated, "Aunt Petunia says my dad and mum are freaks. They're both normal people."
The boy looked at him sympathetically. "Listen, kid. Have you ever seen something weird on the streets?"
Harry hesitated. Strange encounters and unexplainable situations...
"There was this one time a funny old man waved at me in the grocery store. He had a nice hat."
"Well, he could just be a stalker," the kid muttered, "but still, there's a chance."
"Um - the snake said hello to me at the zoo?"
The kid's eyes brightened. "Sacred animals!"
"But I'm not a half-blood!" Harry argued, eyes darting to where the Dursleys' house was. They wouldn't help him, not if this guy was one of Dudley's friends, which he wasn't sure about; he'd be punished too if he gave away their address to a creepy stalker...
He decided to risk it and ran, ignoring the kid's protests as he burst through the door back into the house - no matter how he was treated in there, it was still home.
Wasn't it?
He blinked back tears, surprised that he'd teared up so easily. The boy had offered him a home. He'd declined it because the boy had mistaken him for something else, something that Harry wasn't.
It was the right decision, he convinced himself, heading back to the cupboard before Uncle Vernon could catch him wandering around.
He would wonder, when he grew older, what that boy was and who he had been referring to when he told Harry that they had a group of people who formed a camp of some sort, hiding from the world, away from nosy muggles.
He brushed it off, thinking it was just another strange encounter with a foreign wizard.
But it didn't matter now.
Not when he had Hogwarts, not when nothing would ever replace the school as a home for Harry Potter.