Author's Note: The muse has shifted gears once again for my week off. I'd like to thank jim trigg for providing assistance with this chapter.
This chapter has been updated on 7/30/18
Chapter Six: A Hug for the Tears
"Severus Snape residence. Professor Snape isn't here," Harry said as he picked up the phone. It had rung four times, and something told him that Ginny wasn't going to pick it up, despite being closer the table in the hall where the very old fashioned phone was.
"Harry?" It took Harry seconds to identify the voice of his cousin Dudley. It was not a voice he expected to hear again the rest of the summer.
"Dudley? How did you get this number?" Harry asked, his free hand pushing back his red hair.
"It's in Mum's address book that she threw at me," Dudley explained, his voice sounding tentative and a bit rough. "I just barely remembered the name of the Professor that took you away, and well, with what happened, I had to ring you up."
Harry had never heard Dudley speaking in such a tone. It sounded like he was at the edge of crying. Not the fake crying that his cousin had long ago perfected but real tears of profound sadness. Harry wanted to know why, but didn't know how to ask. "Well, you got me, your sex shifted cousin."
"You're still a girl?" Dudley asked, as if he was grasping any thing to avoid saying something.
"Still a girl, B-cups, red hair, and everything a boy shouldn't have personal knowledge of with for the summer." Harry said, his hand going to adjust the unfamiliar presence of his new bra. It was actually fitting well for the moment.
"That's got to be weird," Dudley said.
Harry rolled his eyes, knowing that Dudley couldn't see him. Of course it was weird. He'd just come from the bathroom, in fact, and had almost tried to pee with equipment that he no longer had.
The silence from Harry at the statement extended to Dudley for a few moments, before Dudley said in a rush, "Dad's dead. He had a heart attack and died last night. Mum's all upset and can't do anything but cry out that Dad left her and what was she going to do. I don't know what to do either. I mean, I'm thirteen, and not ready to be man of the house. At least my schooling is paid for, but I don't know how we're going to you know, live."
Harry was shocked at Dudley's news. He'd heard Aunt Petunia trying to calm Uncle Vernon down with the line of 'you're going to give yourself a heart attack' several time when he was growing up, but the idea that Uncle Vernon would die. That Uncle Vernon would always be there to call him a freak, something he had to be more of than usual, given that he was currently disguised as a girl.
"He's dead?" Harry could hear the uncertainty in his voice, even with the change in pitch that his involuntary disguise had caused. "He can't be."
"I can't believe it either," Dudley replied. "I mean, I've always expected Dad to be there, and suddenly, I don't have one any more, like you don't."
"I don't think I can tell you what it's like to lose a dad, Dudley," Harry found himself responding. "I don't remember my parents, really, Dudley. You at least know what it is to have a real Dad who loved you. He may not have been good to me, but I don't think he ever did anything wrong to you."
"Dad was responsible for those scars on your back, wasn't he?" Dudley asked.
"Yeah," Harry admitted to his cousin for the first time. "They're from his belt."
"I never believed that was what he was doing to you," Dudley said. "Not until I saw the scars the night you left."
"Well, no one else seemed to believe me either," Harry said, in resignation. He'd often wondered why no one ever tried to help him. He'd once flat out told a teacher, showing her the scar, and the teacher acted like she hadn't even heard him say a word.
"I should have," Dudley said, his rough voice rolling without stop. "I should have seen how Dad treated you. I should have known that it was wrong that you did all the chores, that you slept under the stairs. I should have never treated you like I did. I shouldn't have hunted you. I should have stopped Ripper from going after you. I should have stood up for you when you were bullied. Instead, I did it to you."
"Yeah, well, that's what life at the Dursleys has always been to me." Harry said, slumping against the wall, and sliding down so she sat on the floor. "No one has really cared for me, ever. Not until I went to Hogwarts. And why do you care?"
"I don't know, Harry," Dudley said. "I kind of accepted everything. I mean, that's the way it's always been. Then when Dad died ... when I tried to think about what he did for me, suddenly I started to see you, and what he did to you. I couldn't get the image of you, as a girl, the dress sliding down to cover the scars on your naked body. I knew those scars had to have been Dad's fault. I mean I saw him create some of them.
"I couldn't think about Dad. I couldn't see him as the man I thought he was. Suddenly, I couldn't help but remember all the times he had gone after you, how he'd called you freak, how he kept confining you to your cupboard. I couldn't even look at a picture of him. I fled upstairs, not to my room, but to yours, were I couldn't see anything that reminded me of him. Oh, and I'm sorry that you had to put up with my old mattress too."
Harry had no idea what to say to Dudley. This didn't seem to be the Dudley she knew. The voice was the same, and the news wasn't entirely unexpected. Those give yourself a heart attack lines of Aunt Petunia's were not exactly a recent addition to the Dursley household. She knew she needed to say something, but all she could do was sit on the floor, holding the phone to her ear and wonder where the tear came from that was suddenly tracing its way down her cheek.
"Harry, are you still there?" Dudley said.
"Yes," Harry said, surprised at the roughness to her voice. She didn't care about Uncle Vernon, that was one thing she was sure of. Suddenly though, something had pierced the wall she'd placed around her. With the words Dudley had said, for the first time in her memory, a member of her family had told her that he cared for her. "Sorry Dudley. It's a lot to take in."
"I guess it is," Dudley said. "Do you have our number? I'm writing down my own copy of Professor Snape's so I can call you again when we know about the funeral."
"I still know it, Dudley," Harry said with a bit of exasperation briefly breaking through the weak and vulnerable feeling that had her sitting on the floor.
"Good," Dudley said. "Can I call you again, sometime? Not about Dad. I feel like I should know you better than I do. I don't even know your favorite color."
"Scarlet," Harry replied, the word almost catching in her throat. "Call me the next rainy day."
"I will Harry," Dudley said. "I think Mum wants the line now, though. Good bye."
"Good bye," Harry said, and suddenly the line was dead.
Harry didn't get up from the floor, she just reached up and hung the headset up on the receiver. Then she pulled her knees up against her breasts, and she let herself cry like Doctor Chalice had told her was okay. Tears flowed down her cheeks, and she let herself wallow in the feeling. There wouldn't be any Uncle Vernon to push her back into the cupboard under the stairs again.
Somehow letting her emotions rule her for the moment felt right. As a boy Harry knew he couldn't let all of his emotions show. He'd learnt to be tough, to not show how anything hurt him. No matter how much they called him a freak, he tried to never let it show. But now he was a girl. Sometimes girls cried for no reason he could tell at all, at least that's what Hermione had explained to him.
Now Harry was a girl, and she didn't feel the restraint that he'd had at the Dursleys. So she cried, releasing everything feeling that she had held back. She didn't think, she just cried, letting go.
Eventually, her sobs ended, and with one last sniffle, she stood up. Harry took a tissue from the box on the table and blew her nose. She felt a lot better after crying, which surprised her.
Then out of the corner of her eye, outside of her glasses's field, she caught sight of what she had been leaning against when she started the call. It was the door to the cupboard under the stairs.
Harry couldn't help but giggle, a sound he'd never done, but now, it felt right. He'd been sitting right outside what would have been both his safe haven and prison if he'd been at the Dursley's, crying. The giggle was short, but it left a smile on the boy turned girl's face as she headed into the kitchen to check on ingredients for the pie she intended to bake.
Ginny escaped Number Seven as soon as Harry started to speak to Dudley on the telephone. She didn't feel it was proper to listen on someone's conversation, and once Harry had identified the other side of the conversation, she decided that it would be best if she was elsewhere.
So, for the first time, she walked down Spinner's End. Not toward the end of the street, which ended in the wall of a big building of some sort, on which someone had painted a picture on the wall of a woman at a spinning wheel. Ginny wandered to the corner where Spinner's End met Weaver's Way. She didn't cross the street. Instead she found a seat on the retaining wall and laid back to watch the traffic.
Ginny had lived her life out in rural Devon. Until the first time she'd accompanied her family to King's Cross, she'd never seen a large number of cars. She'd seen two of them close up, her father's Ford and her mother's Stag, but those had been stationary for the most part, and as the youngest, she'd never gotten a good seat until the journey that had taken her to Spinner's End.
Being stuck in the back, between her brothers, she hadn't seen anything really. When she got to sit in the passenger seat of her mother's Triumph Stag, everything was different. She'd never realized how fast cars went. She'd been pushed back into the seat when her mum floored the gas to get on the M5. And then, watching cars come up on the left, or her mum passing them on the right. Her mum said that the Stag went zero to sixty as fast as a Comet 260, and was a lot more comfortable when it did.
She'd told her mum that you couldn't play Quidditch with a car.
When she was little, she hadn't really thought how many cars there were, and more so the implication of it. As she watched the cars going past her on Weaver's Way, she noticed that most of them seemed to just have a driver in them, though here and there, the passenger's seat would be occupied. One car that came to a stop on the other side of the street had a pair of young children, a boy and a younger girl in the back seat.
The boy looked a little like Harry. Ginny smiled as she watched the mother get the children out of the car. She'd dreamed more than once that she was going to be Mrs. Harry Potter. She was certain that she wasn't the only one.
She'd once dreamed about Harry rescuing her, and she was sure if she hadn't been having nightmares about the event, she'd be extending her memories of Harry waking her up with kisses, and perhaps more. Of course at the moment, she figured her mind would change the cute black haired boy into the ginger haired girl he current was in the middle of a kiss, which would be another nightmare.
The family went inside the house across the street, and Ginny turned her attention to the other cars going up and down Weaver's Way. A car went by without a top, its occupants singing at the top of their lungs that they were to be wild or something like that. A dog hung out the window of one, his tongue loose in the wind.
The wind of the passing cars lightly buffeted the sidewalk, sending a few pieces of paper across Ginny's feet. She looked down at her new footwear. She'd never had new footwear before. Her new shoes were so comfortable. She was wearing socks that nearly reached half way to her knees, instead of the ankle socks that her mum always insisted. Maybe it was time to do a little walking instead of watching.
Severus carefully opened the slim package that had been shipped to him. Inside was a paper wrapped hard cover. He carefully removed the paper, and bit of plastic, taking in the scent of a freshly printed book. On the top it read "Archive Editions," and it was the only way Professor Snape knew he'd ever get to own these comics from 1940. His hand touched and traced the outline of the Caped Crusader. He was a professor of potions at a boarding school, and paid appropriately for it.
He'd never own Batman #1, no matter how much he wanted to, so this was the best he could get. Severus opened Batman The Dark Knight Archives Volume One, so carefully as if it would explode if he wasn't.
"Professor?" Harry said from the doorway.
"Yes, Harry?" Severus said. It was quite strange to call Potter that, almost as strange as seeing him as the spitting image of his mother instead of his father. It was part of the girl's cover, though, and Severus hadn't spent years as a spy by failing to keep the cover going.
"While you were gone, I got a call from Dudley," Harry said, still standing in the doorway. "My Uncle Vernon finally had that heart attack that Aunt Petunia had been warning him about. He died yesterday."
Severus stood and walked around the desk. "Come here Harry." He could see the drying tracts of tears still on the Gryffindor's face. He'd never seen him cry at Hogwarts. He sat down in a chair against the wall on the other side of the desk, and pulled the girl into his lap, holding her against him, like he'd done to many Slytherins in the privacy of his office.
Severus was sure that most Gryffindors would not expect him to be able to comfort those in his house. After all, he was the unfeeling bat of the dungeon. It was true that when he first became Head of Slytherin, he hadn't known how to deal with it. Fortunately, his fellow Heads of House had helped him through it.
Tears were running down Harry's face again. He held her tightly as she sat across his lap. No words were said. It was not yet time for words. He let Harry cry herself out for what he was sure had to be at least the second time since she'd gotten the news. Only when the tears had stopped, did Severus wandlessly conjure a cloth, and gently wiped the tears from his charge's cheeks. Then he handed the cloth to Harry, so she could blow her nose.
"I don't know why I'm crying," Harry said wiping his nose. "It's not like I really liked Uncle Vernon."
"Have you ever tried to get your Uncle's approval," Severus asked. "Tried to get him to praise you like he did his son."
"Of course I did!" Harry said. "Not that it did any good. It never does any good. Just once, just once, I'd like to have been praised. Just once, I'd like to be called normal, not some freak! It never happened though. I tried so hard to get his approval.
"I think he knew I wanted it to. A few times when I had just about given up, he'd ask something about my grades, or some chore he'd told me to do — and just for a minute after I told him, thought that he might just finally say that at least I was as good as Dudley. I never was. I never am."
"Harry, you are better," Severus said, as the young girl instinctively sought comfort by resting her head against his shoulder. "You're ninth in your year. You beat all but one of my Slytherins. True you're not on the level of Miss Granger, but there aren't many who are. You are the best Seeker at Hogwarts from the entire time I have been there ... though you shall not tell that to any of my Slytherins. I may call you an attention seeking celebrity at Hogwarts, but you are only the latter, through no fault of your own."
"Then why do you call me that?" Harry asked, raising her head off Severus's shoulder to look at him with her deep green eyes.
Severus had never been able to lie with those green eyes seeming to peer into his soul at that close of a range. Not with Lily, and as Harry looked into his eyes, he found he couldn't to her daughter either. He might have been able to if it had been her son, before his temporary transformation, but Severus didn't think he could. "Because I can't bear it."
Harry's eyes seemed to widen, the pools of emerald green drawing him in with unspoken questions. They seemed to ask for more.
"Every time I see you, I see your father, the man who won your mother. I've never really told anyone just how important your mother was to me as I grew up. I don't generally talk to anyone about how I grew up. If anyone deserves to know, you do. However, this goes no further."
"Yes Professor," Harry replied, somehow finding a comfortable position with Severus's arm around him.
"I grew up in this house, the son of a muggle mill worker, Tobias Snape, and a witch, Eileen Snape nee Prince, who was estranged from her family. We were not the richest of families, and I've never quite figured out how father managed to scrape enough together to own this house outright. He was also abusive, more so to my mother than to me, though I was not unscathed.
"I met your mother at a nearby park. She lived on the other side of the park, just a street over. We were nine or ten years old at the time, and Lily had just discovered that she could do magic. This disturbed her sister Petunia. Petunia's reaction to magic nearly drove Lily to tears, but I saw her and recognized what she was doing. I told Lily that she was a witch, and nearly got my head taken off as a result. Do not ever tell a girl who grew up as a muggle that she's a witch.
"We became friends, and she even managed to invite me to her house for dinner on a regular basis. Your Aunt Petunia eventually overcame her initial fear of magic. In fact, I understand that when she turned eleven, the year after Lily, she even wrote the Headmaster begging for a letter. Unfortunately there was not a spark of magic in her, and she grew bitter.
"The Evans House became my safe place, as Father turned more and more to drink. My mother encouraged me to go there, as often as I could, to protect me from father. In a way it was more magical to me than Hogwarts was. And the one person who brought me there was Lily. I so wanted to return the favor.
"When we got our letters, I promised her that I would try to help her like she helped me. We went shopping for our supplies together. We even sat together on the Express. In some ways that first ride on the Hogwarts Express was the best day of my life.
"Then she was sorted into Gryffindor, and I into Slytherin. That didn't end our friendship though. We were the rare friendship between the houses. She stood up for me with Gryffindor, and I for her in Slytherin. Your father and his friends were the bane of our existence, especially after we hit our fourth year, and he started trying to ask Lily out.
"She always said no, and I always treasured that. I promised myself that I would ask her out someday, but I was not a Gryffindor. I did not have a Gryffindor's boundless courage. And one day near the end of our fifth year, I managed in one short rant lose her friendship.
"I called her a mudblood. I never should have. I'd fallen under the sway of Lucius Malfoy and his friends, who were trying to recruit me for the Dark Lord. He made me feel like I belonged in Slytherin, and I didn't realize how much he was changing me. So after I had suffered yet another prank from your father and his friends, I ranted, and ended up, when she tried to make me feel better, calling her an ignorant mudblood.
"I almost got her friendship back that Summer, but she never trusted me again. Then when she started to go out with your father, I gave up. But still..."
Severus went silent as he drew his wand to his free hand, his off wand hand, and silently cast his patronus. A doe appeared and bounded around the room before stopping and lightly touching its nose to Harry's, and disappearing.
"What was that?" Harry asked.
"That was a patronus. It chases away dementors. A full bodied patronus, like my doe, embodies that which we love. In my case, the doe of your mother's animagus form."
"It made me feel kind of warm and ... wanted maybe ... but something more."
"Loved," Severus said. "Never doubt it, Harry. Your mother loved you. Even today her love protects you. My patronus would have never done that if her sacrificial love was not evident within you."
"Really?"
"Really, Harry," Severus said. "Now, put your tears away for now. There will be plenty of time for them at your Uncle's funeral. I have a new book to look at, and I believe you still need to start on your Summer assignments. I shall be holding you to above last year's excellent work on your Potions assignment, given the greater resources available to you this Summer."
It wasn't until the second dinner that Ginny hadn't attended that Ron noticed that his little sister wasn't at home. It shamed him a bit, that even after everything that happened at Hogwarts, he had still ignored his sister.
Harry had told Ron what happened in the Chamber, that his little sister had been possessed by You-Know-Who. He had felt that he let her down. That he hadn't done the job of a big brother to the one person he could. He had promised her never to ignore her again.
And then she was gone.
"Mum, where's Ginny?" Ron asked, as he helped clear up the dishes, a task that he and Ginny had shared ever since he could remember.
"Your sister is getting help for being possessed," his Mum replied.
"Where?" Ron carefully stacked the twins' dishes. It wasn't beyond them to set a prank to trigger when he stacked them a bit too forcefully.
"I am afraid that I can't tell you that, Ron." Mum wasn't looking at him. She was already starting the charms to wash the many dishes that the Weasleys produced every day.
"Why?"
"Because she's not the only one under the treatment of the mind healer living there."
Ron puzzled over that statement for a moment, as he collected the last of the silverware. There were very few who knew what happened to his sister. There were very few that Ron wanted to know what had happened to his sister. He enumerated them in his mind, subtracting some as he went. It did not take long for him to narrow it down to those who knew and could do something, and less than that to conclude who the other person was.
"She's getting help along with Harry, isn't she?" Ron concluded.
"And what makes you think that Harry needs help," his mum asked with a curious tone.
"Mum, it's about time he gets help. He's my best friend, and I know he needs someone to help him. Just getting him away from those bloody Dursleys alone would be a big help."
"Ronald Weasley, language!" His mother turned to face him. "And what do you mean about the Dursleys."
"Come, on Mum, don't tell me you didn't see how he was when we brought him here last year? Or the bars that we brought along that was keeping him in his locked room with Hedwig. You saw how thin he was. The bloody Dursleys have never fed him right. And the scars on his back? Don't tell me you managed to miss those?"
"I did," his Mum said in an unusually quiet tone.
"And that's before we get to what happened at Hogwarts. Thanks to his mother's protection, Quirrell turned to ash in his hand, being possessed by You-Know-Who. He had nightmares on that at least until last October. Then there was this year, with half of the school, if not more thinking that he was behind the petrifactions, then going to rescue my sister ..." Ron trailed off, somehow not being able to give the energy to say anymore, yet feeling as if he had to go on, to make his mother understand what his best friend had gone through.
Ron found himself somehow on his mother's lap, her arms around him, his head resting against her shoulder. The unexpected thought crossed his mind, when had he gotten tall enough so his head could rest against her shoulder.
His mother's next words were soft, almost pleading. "Ron, what happened this year?"
"You know the thing in the diary left a message when Ginny was taken down to the chamber?" His mother nodded. "I actually read the message, not until after we saved her though. All of us brothers did, before it was removed. 'Her skeleton will lie in the Chamber forever.' If it wasn't for Harry, it would have."
"I thought you went along with Harry."
"Not all the way. I never can go all the way. And I wasn't much help either. Not after bloody Lockhart stole my wand, and then took out the ceiling when his memory charm failed. Harry was on the other side of the rock fall, and had to go alone, just like he had to do last year."
Ron's tone turned accusative. "The Boy-Who-Lived must go on. He must face the Dark Lord alone, and somehow survive. Never mind he hasn't completed the year. Never mind that he's just another student. No my best friend must somehow face the cerberus, the basilisk ... next year it will probably be a dragon or a dementor, or something even worse!"
Ron found that tears had suddenly started to flow down his cheeks. He wasn't sure how they had started. "He faced the basilisk alone, and I wasn't there for him again. It even bit him. If it wasn't for Fawkes, Harry would be dead. And my sister, the sister I never should have ignored, she'd be dead too, if Harry hadn't killed the basilisk, and You-Know-Who again too."
"Do you know what happened in the Chamber?"
"Harry told Hermione, Ginny, and me about it. Of course Ginny saw the basilisk when she woke up, and says that he's underestimating the size. He says she's exaggerating." Ron took a deep breath. "I guess the best place to start is once Harry entered the chamber. He'd already been separated from me and bloody Lockhart.
"He says that all that was in the Chamber at first was Ginny, Tom Riddle's Diary, and the ghost of a teenage Tom Riddle. Ginny wouldn't wake up, and Harry dropped his wand trying to wake her up. Riddle told him that it was too late and soon Ginny would be dead and he would be back. Then he did something with his wand, and ... well, I now know You-Know-Who's real name."
"Tom Marvolo Riddle ... if you rearrange the letters you get 'I am Lord Voldemort.'" Ron could feel his mother's shock as he leaned against her, her protective arms still holding the teen. "Apparently he thinks he's the greatest wizard who ever lived. Harry thinks Dumbledore is, but You-Know-Who thought that he'd been driven out. That's when Fawkes arrived with the sorting hat, and You-Know-Who called in the Basilisk.
"Harry wouldn't say much about the fight, other than the Sword of Gryffindor came out of the Sorting Hat. It apparently hit him on the head." Ron chuckled once, before reasserting his serious tone. "He put the sword into the basilisk's brain through its mouth, and getting a fang into his arm. I saw the scar.
"Fawkes healed him. Then he put the fang though the diary, which he said leaked ink as if it was blood, and Riddle disappeared like the fang had stabbed and destroyed him."
A voice that Ron hadn't heard in years interrupted the silence following. "Did Riddle disappear into a dissipating black cloud?" Ron looked up to discover his oldest brother, fang earring, long hair, and all.
"Yes," Ron replied.
"William Weasley, when did you get in, and why did you not tell me you were coming?"
Ron quickly got off his mother's lap, fully expecting to be thrown off.
"I came home to see what happened to my sister, and maybe offer the family a trip away from it all."
"The family is getting along fine without the need for you to chip in, Bill. Save it for your family some day ... not that I expect you to get one soon. Not with that hair and fang."
Ron had long thought that the fang was cool, and would have preferred just a bit longer hair style than what his mother permitted.
"Yes, Mum," Bill said, quickly dismissing it. "What I want to know is what is being done to care for my sister after she was possessed by a horcrux."
