If I owned Harry Potter, this chapter probably wouldn't mention nudity.

A/N: If you read Chapter Three in the first three or four days it was up, I've made a small, surgical revision to better explain Harry's frustration with Hagrid after returning from Diagon Alley. There's no pressing need to read it, but if you felt like the return to Diagon Alley was a bit gratuitous, you may find that it helps.

In the first chapter, I stated I had five chapters written and didn't know if I would continue. Well, I have continued writing, and I now have drafts through Chapter Seven. (They aren't publishable yet, and I keep revising earlier chapters as I write later ones, so they'll continue to be released one at a time.) I still don't make any promises that I won't drop this with no warning, but progress has been continuing apace, and so far, I've enjoyed both the writing and the reviews I've been getting from all of you.

(By the way, if I don't split it in half, Chapter Seven is going to be awesome.)

Chapter Four
The Photograph

After he had put his knives and illegal charms book in the secret compartment, Harry and the portrait of his grandparents talked late into the night.

The first thing he'd asked them about was how they'd ended up in his trunk. It turned out that the Potters had been quite the businesspeople, and after their deaths, Samson Strong had commissioned a portrait of his shrewdest investors so he could keep asking their advice.

"When one of his employees said she'd just sold a trunk to Harry Potter and wanted to use our portrait to guard something inside it, though, he couldn't say no," Dorea said.

Why not? Harry wanted to ask. What was this man thinking when he gave a boy he didn't know something he found so valuable?

After a bit of thought, Harry came up with a couple ideas: perhaps he'd done it out of loyalty to his old investors, or perhaps he wanted to ingratiate himself to the Boy Who Lived.

In either case, Harry decided to send a thank-you note later.

The rest of the evening had been spent in deep discussion of the Potters. The Cloak, Harry had learned, had been in the family for generations. Even Charlus didn't know how many Potter fathers had given it to their eldest son on the day he received his first wand. Apparently Invisibility Cloaks were forbidden at Hogwarts, but there was some kind of exception for family heirlooms: as long as Harry didn't try to hurt someone using it, the staff couldn't take it away from him.

Mostly, though, they had talked about his parents. Charlus and Dorea had doted on their only son, and had been quite taken with the woman he fell in love with. And though they had never gotten to meet Harry in person—James and Lily had already been in hiding when he was born—they'd spent hours cooing over the photos James's friends had brought them.

They'd ignored Harry's eyelids drooping, but when he gave a jaw-cracking yawn, they'd told him it was time for him to go to bed. "We can talk again any time you'd like," Dorea told him.

"I'm sorry," he'd told them. "It must be boring guarding a secret compartment all the time…"

"Don't worry," Charlus had said. "Samson wasn't the only person who owned a portrait of us; we can travel to our other frames. Just give us a shout if we're not in this frame—we'll be able to hear you no matter where we are."

And so Harry had pressed down on the top of the bookcase sitting below their portrait, just as they'd instructed him to. It slid back into place with another click; Beedle the Bard, the book he had shelved upside-down to reveal the secret compartment, was back in its proper orientation. He closed the trunk and went to bed.

Now it was the next morning, and Harry was unexpectedly in a hurry.

He'd awoken at seven, figuring that would give him plenty of time: a half-hour to shower and dress, a half-hour for breakfast, an hour to get to King's Cross, and he'd be there two whole hours early. That had all gone out the window when Hedwig fluttered in through it, carrying a letter with a Gringotts seal on the back.

It was his first bank statement, and besides his trust vault and the Potter family vaults, it listed a vault for "post sorting, curse-breaking, and storage". The inventory of that vault included eye-popping numbers of letters, items of clothing, and magical objects, plus more books than he owned himself, even including the titles at Privet Drive.

But most importantly, it said there were photographs. Harry had realized with a jolt that some of them might be of his parents.

So instead of pulling his now-lightened trunk out the front entrance to Muggle London, he was carrying it out the back entrance and all the way down the Alley to Gringotts.

Much to his irritation, the goblins acted like, well, every other goblin he'd met so far. They tried to charge him a fee for the "inspection visit", then when he pointed out that his statement had said there was no fee to withdraw items from the vault, they'd acted all surprised that he intended to actually put anything in the trunk he was pulling behind him. Then they'd tried to charge him to carry his trunk to the vault; he'd scoffed and set it in the empty cart seat beside him.

When he finally got down to the postal vault, he gasped. It was an enormous space, like a warehouse hewn from stone instead of built from steel. On the left side, dozens of filing cabinets contained every letter he'd ever received, apparently organized by date and sender in some sort of grid. In front of him, racks of clothes were neatly hung, sorted by size and type. To his right, rows of shelves held items of every size and description. High overhead, shafts of sunlight streamed through a series of narrow tunnels to the surface, painting bright rectangles on the floor of the gloomy room; even as Harry watched, a shadow blotted one out, and a barn owl emerged from the center shaft, swooping down to a perch.

Harry turned to the goblin in charge of his mail sorting. "This is an impressive operation."

"Thank you," Inkeye said.

"If I provided you with a form letter, could you send it to everyone who's mailed something to this vault?"

"For a price," Inkeye agreed.

The price he proposed, though, was one hundred Galleons. Harry balked, then spent the next fifteen minutes haggling, his irritation growing with Inkeye's toothy grin. In the end, he talked the goblin down to nineteen Galleons, sixteen Sickles and twenty-eight Knuts.

All this had taken so much time that he had to shelve the books in his trunk without even glancing at the titles; he quickly sorted through the clothes, putting a few things that looked to be about the right size in his trunk's closet compartment and leaving the rest, and stuffed the packets of photos into his mokeskin pouch unopened. It all took far too much time and far too much bartering on a morning when he was in a hurry.

The strange thing was, he got the sense that the more he argued and fought with the goblins, the more they liked him.

Even with all that, he still reached the Tube station at nine-thirty. Unfortunately, there was some kind of horrible problem on the Victoria Line, and he'd had to backtrack to Leicester Square to catch the Picadilly Line instead, then pull his trunk through what seemed like miles of underground tunnels to reach the train station. Then he'd had to find Platform Nine, which was nowhere near Platform Eight, and when all was said and done, he'd reached Platform Nine and Three-Quarters with only minutes to spare.

Then he'd stopped and stared at the gorgeous scarlet engine, a thing out of a dream, for two whole minutes until the train blew its whistle. He ran through clouds of steam, pressed through crowds of parents and children, and felt the train start to lurch out of the station mere seconds after he set foot upon it.

Harry started pulling his trunk down the corridor, a bit unsteadily in the moving train, looking for Hermione. He found her in a compartment with three boys looming over her.

The smallest boy, the one in the middle, was mid-sentence when Harry arrived; all he heard was "—move if you know what's best—"

"Is there a problem here?" Harry said, stepping into the compartment.

The three boys turned to look at Harry. The two boys on either end looked thickset and mean, but probably none too bright; the boy in the middle was smaller, with blond hair and a pale, pointed face. "Just making sure this witch knows her place," the pale boy drawled. "She seems to think this compartment is hers. You're Harry Potter, aren't you?"

"Yes," Harry said, glancing to Hermione. She looked small and frightened; it was a look he'd seen many times before, most memorably on a girl climbing a tree across the street years before.

"I thought so. This is Crabbe and this is Goyle," the pale boy said, carelessly indicating the boys next to him. "And my name's Malfoy, Draco Malfoy."

Hermione stifled a giggle. Draco Malfoy looked at her.

"Think my name's funny, do you? You shouldn't even be on this train to hear it, not with your filthy background."

Malfoy turned back to Harry. "You'll soon find out some wizards don't have the heritage to back up their powers, Potter. You don't want to go making friends with the wrong sort. I can help you there."

And Malfoy offered his hand.

Harry recognized the surname from The Ministry of Magnates—Lucius Malfoy was one of the title characters, a wealthy, powerful man whose sterling reputation had fully recovered once it was "confirmed" that he'd been forced into Voldemort's thrall. Malfoy, Harry realized, would probably be a popular boy, at least in some circles.

But he was also a bully. He was Dudley Dursley with a wand and a diet. And Harry knew how to handle bullies.

"Malfoy…your father is Lucius Malfoy, I take it?"

"That's right," Malfoy preened.

Harry smiled and took his hand, and as he shook it, he said, "Then I guess you'll want to thank me, right?"

"Tha-thank you?" Draco stuttered out. Harry risked a glance at Hermione; she looked half-crushed, half-confused.

"Well, yeah," Harry said, still smiling sweetly. "I mean, maybe your father didn't like talking about those long, dark years when he was bewitched by Voldemort—"

Draco's hand jerked in Harry's, but Harry didn't let go. "You said the Dark Lord's name!"

"Well, of course I did," Harry said. Dumbledore had mentioned that most wizards didn't, and Hagrid had started every time Harry used it, but Harry affected puzzlement. "I killed him, after all. But think about those terrible years," Harry said, his voice going soft in sympathy, "committing one atrocity after another…torturing dozens of people…killing innocent witches and wizards…marrying your mother…" Harry's smile grew into a smirk, and his grip tightened, though his voice stayed as soft as before. "…siring a pathetic excuse for a son so thick that he tried to bully one Muggleborn witch and then immediately befriend the son of another…and powerless to stop any of those horrible things from happening until I freed him…"

Malfoy didn't go red, but a pink tinge appeared in his cheeks. He tore his hand from Harry's. "I'd be careful if I were you, Potter. Unless you're a bit politer you'll go the same way as your parents. They didn't respect their betters either."

Harry narrowed his eyes.

"Who left a trunk obstructing the corridor?" a voice behind Harry said.

Harry spun around. A much older boy with a shock of red hair was standing at the door. He was already in his black Hogwarts robes, and a shiny gold badge was pinned to his chest.

Harry recognized the badge from Hogwarts: A History—this boy was a prefect. And that meant— "I'm sorry," Harry said to the prefect. "I was carrying it when I saw these—"

"We were just leaving," Draco Malfoy interrupted. He shoved past Harry and rushed out of the compartment, Crabbe and Goyle following behind.

"No running in the corridors!" the prefect yelled, chasing after them.

Harry grabbed his trunk and pulled it in, closing the compartment door behind him. He lifted it into the luggage rack, then sat down across from Hermione.

She was staring at him with wide eyes.

"Erm, sorry about that. I—"

She launched herself across the compartment and into his lap, hugging him tightly.

Harry stiffened in her arms. He had never been hugged before; Ellie was never a hugger, and he hadn't known anyone else before who might have wanted to.

"Thank you," Hermione said thickly.

Harry patted the back of her head.

It was actually rather nice.

—

Once Hermione had let him go, she quickly asked about his disappearing act in Diagon Alley.

"It's an Invisibility Cloak, isn't it? Ignotius's Index of Occult Objects had an entry on them…"

He showed her the Cloak, and they took turns trying it on for each other. As he were putting it away, Harry heard a knock on the door. Hermione opened it, and they found a food trolley with such an interesting assortment of candies, Harry instantly decided he'd erred in giving the sweets shops in Diagon Alley a miss.

Hermione was reluctant to get anything, thanks to her dentist parents, but Harry ignored her, bought some of everything, and then coaxed her into trying a few things. Soon, they were tearing open packets with abandon.

"You don't suppose they're actual frogs, do you?" Hermione said, peering at a boxed Chocolate Frog.

"I doubt it," Harry said. "I mean, wizards in general seem a little barmy, but they're not Frenchmen."

Hermione rolled her eyes. "I happen to like France," she said as she opened the box, and then she let out an "eep!" as the Chocolate Frog leapt into her lap.

"Well, what's the problem, then?" Harry asked reasonably.

Hermione giggled as she pinned the frog to her lap, waiting to see if it would stop moving.

Later, they ripped open a bag labeled Bertie Bott's Every Flavor Beans.

"Mmm, peppermint!"

"Yuck! I think this one's grass-flavored," Harry said. "Why in the world would they even make that?"

"Maybe they use a spell and they can't control the flavors they get," Hermione suggested, and she bit into another jelly bean. "Oooh, I love a good curry…"

When they'd just about finished the sweets, Hermione looked around ruefully. "Oh, Mum would kill me if she saw how much sugar I ate…"

"You have your trunk with you," Harry pointed out. "You could just grab your toothbrush and nick down to the loo for a minute."

"I suppose…" Hermione pulled out her trunk and started looking through it, then glanced over her shoulder at Harry. "Coming?"

"What?"

"You should brush your teeth, too."

"My guardians aren't dentists. Uncle Vernon sells drills—he probably approves of tooth decay."

"Harry!"

He finally gave in, and they went off to brush their teeth. When they came back, they found a boy poking through their sweets wrappers.

"Excuse me," Harry said loudly.

The boy jumped and whirled around. He had a round face and a troubled expression. "I'm sorry! I didn't mean to snoop! I lost my toad, and I can't find him! Have you seen him at all?"

Harry shook his head, but Hermione started asking questions. "How big is he? Does he wander off often? Where have you looked?" The boy stumbled through the answers, and in a few minutes of whirlwind discussion, Hermione had somehow turned this Neville boy's search into a Quest for the Lost Toad, and conscripted Harry into it.

When she reached for the door to the compartment across from theirs, Harry had to remind her that Neville'd said he'd already checked the rest of their car.

Hermione's cheeks turned pink. Neville slipped around her and opened the door to the next car for her—hapless or not, someone must have drilled manners into the boy—and the three of them headed to the first compartment.

Hermione opened the compartment door and demanded, "Has anyone seen a toad? Neville's lost one."

Harry winced. Perhaps Neville would be a better spokesperson.

There were three boys in the car. One of them had sandy-blond hair, and when he answered with a "No," it was with an Irish accent. Another was a black boy in a jersey from West Ham FC; he shook his head mutely. The last of them was a red-haired boy with lots of freckles; he was looking at Harry as though he'd never seen black hair before, and instead of answering Hermione, he said, "Are you—Harry Potter?"

"That's what they told me to write on my homework," Harry grumbled.

"Really?" Seamus sat up straighter, now peering at Harry.

"Really," Harry said.

The black boy, Neville, and Hermione all had surprised looks, but they were different sorts of surprise. The black boy looked at his two companions as though they'd suddenly revealed they belonged to a strange cult. Neville looked at Harry as though he hadn't really seen him before; apparently he didn't realize which "Harry" he was being hastily introduced to. Hermione looked like she'd handed in an essay and only then remembered she'd meant to add a paragraph in the middle.

"Do you—d'you have the scar?" the red-haired boy asked.

"No, I left it back in my trunk."

The Irish boy guffawed; the black boy looked even more confused; the redhead's ears started turning pink.

"Look," Harry said, and he lifted his fringe. "There you go. World's worst Halloween trick. Now have you seen Neville's toad?"

The red-haired boy was staring at Harry's forehead. "No," he finally said.

"Well, if any of you see him, let Neville here know, yeah? We'd better try the next compartment."

"R-right," Hermione said.

But the next few tries weren't much better. Finally, after escaping from a compartment where he told four girls that his scar had been bought by the National Trust and was closed for restoration, Harry turned to Hermione and Neville.

"Look, I'd like to help, but this will go a lot faster without the Boy Who Lived sideshow. Why don't you two keep going, and I'll wait for you in our compartment?"

Hermione frowned, but finally assented. Neville politely thanked him for his help.

"I'm not sure how helpful I really was, but you're welcome."

Once back in their compartment, he lifted his and Hermione's trunks back into the luggage racks and carried all the empty candy wrappers to a rubbish bin in the corridor. Then he kicked off his shoes and stretched out on one of the benches, back propped against the wall. He reached into his mokeskin pouch, withdrew the packets of photos, and started looking through them.

People had sent him a lot of photographs for a lot of different reasons. Each photo had a bit of parchment stuck to the back identifying the sender, receipt date, and subjects of the photos (along with some scribbles that Harry assumed were Gobbledygook), but without the original letters, sometimes Harry had to guess why the photo was sent. A small boy in robes with a face-paint scar on his forehead, pushing glasses up his nose, was obvious enough. So were three wizards standing in a row, baring their left forearms to show lightning-bolt tattoos. A photograph of a squirming newborn baby mystified him until he turned it over and saw that the child's name was Harry Crockford. Even after checking the labels, though, he had no idea why four witches, three relatives of witches, and one wizard had sent him naked pictures.

Between the children he'd met looking for Trevor and the stack of photos in his hands, Harry wondered if he had the patience to be popular.

As he looked at each photo, he tossed the previous one on the floor next to his seat. He was starting to become frustrated when he came across a photo that stopped him cold.

A man in fancy black robes lifted a witch in gauzy white. He twirled her around—they both laughed silently as her crimson hair trailed behind her—and set her on her feet with a kiss. They smiled to each other, and then both turned their heads to smile to the camera, cheeks and brows touching.

The man looked just like Charles and Dorea. Just like Harry.

And the woman had Harry's eyes.

Hands trembling, Harry turned the picture over to look at the label.

James and Lily Potter. Sent by R.J. Lupin, 31 July 1985.

Someone had sent this to him for his fifth birthday. Somewhere out there, some kind wizard or witch had been thinking of him when he was still huddled in his cupboard.

Why?

He turned the photo back over, staring hungrily at his mum and dad, and tenaciously held back his tears.

"Who's the bird?" someone said behind him.

Harry spun and reached into his pockets, and before they could even blink, each of a pair of redheaded twins had one of Harry's daggers pointed at his chest.

The two looked at the blades, then at each other.

"Wicked!" they said together.

"Sorry," Harry said, pocketing the knives. "You startled me."

"No worries, I do the same thing when Mum wakes me up before eight," the twin on the left said reasonably. "I'm Fred Weasley, by the way, and this is my brother George."

"I thought I was Fred!" the other protested.

"No, I'm Fred," the first said. "Fred is the handsome one, remember?"

"Maybe you're both Fred," Harry suggested.

The two boys looked at each other. "Then who's George?" they said together.

"I guess I'm George," Harry said.

"But Fred is the handsome one," the twin on the left said. "Nobody gives George pictures like this." And he turned around a photo in his hand—one of the naked witch photos.

Harry turned red, but after a moment, he said, "Then I guess I'm Fred."

The two boys laughed and clapped Harry on the shoulders. "You're all right for an ickle firstie," the twin on the right said. "Good luck with the Sorting!"

"And if you decide you don't want to look at these," the one on the left said, giving the photo back to Harry, "I'm sure we can find someone in the upper years who would."

The twins left. Harry gathered up the photos and pulled down his trunk; on reflection, he put the nudes in his secret compartment and the others in the main one.

The photo of his parents, he put back in his mokeskin pouch.

—

A/N: Rowling messed up certain aspects of King's Cross in canon, but after trying to sort things out for myself here, I can hardly blame her. King's Cross St. Pancras is possibly the most complex set of Underground stations and train junctions in London, and it's undergone so much remodeling in the last couple decades that I just can't figure out what it all looked like in 1991. It's quite possible that the long tunnels I remember in the Tube station were connected to different lines than the ones I described here. If you're a Londoner and found yourself shouting at the screen about how that's not how the station is at all, I apologize—just imagine I'd given details that would make all this make sense.

Also, I hope nobody feels like I'm bashing Ron here. In canon, the Weasleys run into Harry on the platform, and when Fred expresses curiosity about Harry's encounter with Voldemort, Mrs. Weasley explicitly tells her children not to pester him. When Ron and Harry meet a few minutes later, Ron is obviously extremely curious about Harry's scar, but he has his mother's warning in mind and is trying to be as tactful as he can be about it. Here, Ron didn't get such a warning, and even if he had it would've been hours before, so he lets his inner doofus show a bit more. (Ron is not an idiot or an asshole, but he is a bit of a doofus.)