A/N: First ever longfic I've written, and I'm so stoked for you all to enjoy. It's Harry and Hermione's friendship, with a dolloping of Granger parents because who doesn't love them? It does take a few chapters to get going, since there's some ground to cover early on that all ties into the end (you'll see when we get there). So, I've posted three chapters to start with, and from then on it'll be weekly chapters on Saturdays (afternoon GMT time, since I'm in Britain) until the end. 21 chapters in total, so 18 weeks roughly.

Without further ado, enjoy Swings & Memories

Chapter 1 - Harry-Man & Book-Woman

Little Harry Potter hated the cold. Hated it even more than he hated Dudley—his cousin and absolute mortal enemy in this world. In fact, his hate was so much that sometimes he wished he could turn into one of those superheroes Dudley liked to get action-figures of—his own kind of Spider-Man or Superman. Except, as Harry-Man, he'd take away cold from the world, every last bit of it, leaving only the sun and summers and warmth.

And then he would never have to worry about the icy tendrils of British November circling around his feet, snaking over his legs, and biting through the shirt that was too-thin in far too many places to stave off the cold. The chill was venomous, and spread like it was specially made to infect Harry's nine-year-old body.

Harry really, really hated the cold.

And given he was in Privet Primary School, a stone's throw away from where he lived with his relatives, that cold sifting through the playground was anything but kind to him, as though Dudley himself had caused it.

Harry huddled by himself, alone, on a discarded and abandoned bench in one of the playground corners. The swingsets and roundabouts and little jungle gyms were all on the other side, where the cool kids were playing. Snow formed a little path along the ground, cascading towards where Harry sat along the edge of the school building, hiding more than anything else.

He shivered, then tucked his chin into the collar of his shirt for more warmth. The bench was no more comfortable than his cramped cupboard at home, but it was a reprieve at least. Rickety yet sturdy, unnaturally cold yet once composed of fine oak, as a teacher had told him.

Casting furtive glances towards where the rest of the children played, their noise suffocating and stifling even from this far, Harry leaned to one side and brought out something from his opposite trouser pocket.

It was a little pocket watch—circular, with the strap made of leather, the second and minute hands ticking elegantly as the watch's sheen reflected in Harry's gaze. Harry's hands, scrawny and bony and far too small, struggled to hold the slippery watch.

It looked rather unremarkable. The gold had long since faded despite its last-gasp attempts at shining in the light. The strap was no closer to tearing than when Harry had first discovered the watch, but his finger stains over the years had discoloured the material and were noticeable. Even the face of the clock looked sickly, as if coffee had stained the once pure white.

But the pocket watch held a special quality to it. A quality only Harry was privy to.

On the top side of the watch was a small hole, almost imperceptible to the naked eye. Harry gripped a toothpick he'd taken from his Aunt Petunia's little basket in the bathroom and pushed it into the hole.

A pop seized the air, and Harry's hands shook with both excitement and from the icy wind. The lid of the pocket watch had snapped off, revealing something hidden inside—the only secret young Harry held in the world, the only thing that was his, and his alone. Depositing the toothpick back to his pocket, Harry opened the lid with glee, fingers careful not to damage what was inside whilst he sent further anxious glances to the rest of the children to make sure he couldn't be seen by Dudley and his friends.

The air rushing through his nose was colder than what he imagined the weather was like at the North Pole where Santa and his elves supposedly lived. Though he didn't reckon Santa was real—if he was, why didn't he get Harry any presents, and only Dudley?

His relatives had told him it was because Santa didn't like unnatural freaks. But Harry now knew the truth—Santa was as fake as they came, and all those presents for Dudley were really from his aunt and uncle.

The snow reflected the sunlight and bashed bright spots into Harry's eyes, and his head ducked unconsciously for a better view of what the watch contained.

Harry slipped the note out carefully, grainy paper textured rough against his skin, yet warm and soft at the same time. He rubbed his fingers against his trousers for extra warmth—it didn't work. Harry wiped his nose of some snot, then focussed his attention on the note again. Read it like he had done a million times before. Drank in the letters and words like he was latching onto the last dregs of life.

Dearest Harry, a lovely pocket watch for our sweet little boy on his first birthday. If you are reading this note, then that means you have probably worked out the secret. Or, Daddy let it slip and told you the trick when I was absent. In any case, we hope you are as excited about finding this note as we are writing it.

We hope you enjoy the picture, too.

With love,

Mummy and Daddy

Harry didn't fully know what 'love' meant. He'd heard Aunt Petunia saying it many times to Dudley. "My lovely Dudley-kin" and "Dudley, my love" and other terms of endearment were common in the Dursley household, but never once were they directed at Harry. He suffered in the shadows of his relatives, not the glow. In the darkness of his cupboard, with not a light in sight.

A lot of times, Aunt Petunia gave Dudley hugs. She would wrap her arms around his shoulders and pull him close, letting him bundle into her stomach and giggle, with many hugs featuring her lowering herself to his level, as if she, too, was a child.

Was that, then, love? Was that the love Mummy and Daddy were speaking about in their little note hidden inside the pocket watch?

Or was it something else? Something out of little Harry's grasp, something that naughty freaks like him didn't deserve, and would never get despite even a lifetime of searching.

He'd been told that his parents were drunkards killed in a car crash, and that they'd never cared for him. Not even a little bit. But Harry knew that was a lie—the note in the pocket watch, not to mention the pocket watch itself, was a testament to that.

But Harry never let the secret slip, never told his relatives that he knew the truth. It was his secret, and he guarded it with a courage Spider-Man and Superman would be proud of.

Harry's fingers felt almost frozen as he folded the note once more, as neatly as the first time he'd discovered it, and looked to the pocket watch again. This was the best part, the part he always looked forward to the most.

He shook some warmth into his hands, then pried open the pocket watch's lid further. A click later, and he was 'in the money,' as Uncle Vernon sometimes said when discussing business deals at Grunnings where he worked.

Harry poked his gaze inside the pocket watch and uncovered another folded slip, then brought it out carefully, with a precision not unlike threading through the eye of a needle as Miss Hargreaves showed them in a sewing lesson.

This wasn't regular paper, though. It was something otherworldly, the one mystery in young Harry's life that he just couldn't solve, no matter how much he thought on it. But it was his secret, his mystery from his parents, and Harry wouldn't let it go for the world.

He unfolded the paper with one hand whilst settling the pocket watch and handwritten note on the bench beside him.

The air he breathed carried a supercharged scent, like every emotion within Harry had waited for this moment to crescendo. A wintery whisper almost spoke to him, like the spirits of his parents, at least some form of them, were infused in the paper.

Because the paper held a family portrait, the only family portrait Harry had ever seen. Of himself and his parents, their true selves outside the grimness painted by the Dursleys. He gazed down at it now, chest blooming and heartbeat rising as he pored over the image once again.

It was of his father, with his owl-like glasses a little askew as he balanced a baby Harry on his hip, held up high for the camera. His father's eyes were shining, twinkling with the kind of love that Aunt Petunia held for Dudley, a love that Harry was no longer privy to.

Beside his father, a few inches shorter and with luscious hair cascading down to almost her hips, stood Harry's mother. Her smile's beam reached through the image to upturn the corners of Harry's lips, and he wished—wished with every fibre of his being—that he could speak to her once more.

That he could hear their voices, feel their touch, see them with his own eyes rather than through a sole picture.

Snow gathered at his feet, as if clamouring to see the image with him. The cold lessened, ever so slightly, with a warm tingle shooting from Harry's head to toe. The secrets of the pocket watch, no matter how many times he viewed them, never ceased to delight.

As of now, other than the pocket watch, his only memory of his parents were a series of crashes and screams and whispered words long forgotten, perhaps a subconscious remnant of the car crash his relatives said took their lives.

His relatives also said they were worthless idiots who didn't deserve to live, let alone spawn a freak like Harry.

Harry, of course, didn't listen to them about any of those things they said.

The intriguing part of the picture, the part that tantalised him so far beyond words, was that it moved, like a show on the telly but in his hands. That was Harry's secret, and his alone, and he would protect it with everything he had.

He glanced around to make sure he wasn't being watched, then down at the picture. His father's eyes were really twinkling, and he adjusted Harry higher on his hip. His mother laughed at something, then tugged herself closer to his father, gazing at him tenderly, then at Harry. Then they all smiled at the camera, Harry giggling throughout with no sign of that lightning-shaped scar on his forehead.

And then something else joined the movement. Not inside the picture, but out.

"What's that in your hands, freak?" Dudley said.

Harry's eyes snapped up, gasp tearing through his throat before he could stop it. With frantic hands, he shoved the watch and letter in his pocket, but couldn't hide the picture without Dudley noticing.

Dudley's eyes were narrowed, and Harry shivered from far more than the cold. The twisted expression marring Dudley's face was so reminiscent of his uncle that Harry whimpered involuntarily. Surrounding Dudley were his two friends, his partners-in-crime, Piers and Morgan. Their eyes held similar disdain for Harry, as if hate for raven-haired freaks was a genetic trait.

"Give it here," Dudley ordered, hand outstretched.

When Harry shook his head and stood up, all hell broke loose.

What he didn't know—the worst was yet to come.

Meanwhile, thirty miles away from where Harry lived in Surrey, a young Hermione Granger, having turned ten-years-old that September, was down with a fever, and down bad. She lay in bed, the sea-blue covers bunched right up to her chin. The material was comfy, though, and succinctly warm to her chilled toes, and that was what mattered the most.

She glanced around her room, at the pink-washed wallpaper, antique door, and desk with curled French legs like hockey sticks, wishing she could grab a good book and escape into worlds far better than her own. But all the tomes lavishing the deep oak shelves plastered against the wall she'd already read more than a hundred times it seemed. She looked over at the fraying edges and withered paper and spines with more lines than the tree bark in Hampstead Park nearby. Even from her place at the bed, she could smell the wonderful winds of fantasy that awaited her, their nature far more interesting than the dreary peripheries of Hampstead.

But no, not a one of them would do. Hermione needed something fresh, something novel, something to really tingle her mind and transport her to a place she'd never gone before, not a familiar universe she'd visited many times.

She sighed, and coughed violently into a tissue. She didn't usually get fevers, or any kind of illness in general for that matter, but Niall with the dreaded brown hair and mean smile, a bully at school, had dropped a dollop of his school dinners right on her head. She hadn't fed that story to her parents, of course, since the embarrassment would cause her face to turn a permanent shade of tomato.

But regardless of the lies she told (the guilt still ate at her like a nibbling rat), the fever wouldn't leave. She sniffed once more, and mucus shot back into her throat. The taste was, well, rather disgusting, like stomach acid had gurgled up to sting her throat.

Really, this is a lot worse than I thought it would be. She shivered from heat rather than cold, and inspected the books on the shelf once more. The Hobbit as well as many books by Terry Pratchett spanned the wood, leaning on each other for support as though they shared Hermione's illness, but Hermione had already delved into their worlds before.

She sighed again—there was only one thing for it. And that was taking a novel from her mother's bookshelves. In her mother's study. The shelves her mother said she wasn't allowed to peruse, under any circumstances.

Except…Hermione had a technicality. And technicalities, or loopholes as her father sometimes called them, were made to be used, not stared and marvelled at. And Hermione Granger, at the big age of ten-years-old, was about to do just that.

Of course, at ten-years-old, Hermione felt like the biggest girl in the world. That was what her mother told her, after all. That when a girl hit double digits, she was officially a big girl. And big girls were allowed to read big girl books.

And, one day when relaxing with her family on the sofa with a book in hand and conversation seamless, her mother had said the books in her study were for big girls. And big girls only.

And, since Hermione was now a big girl at ten, it meant she could read those books with utter freedom, caution to the wind.

See, a technicality was what she banked on. So, no rule-breaking here. Not at all.

She slipped out of the covers of her bed, then turned and neatly folded back the duvet's corner. The bed looked smooth as the granite steps leading to their house's front door. Untouched, as if Hermione had never been there. Not a crease in sight, perfect for the rule-abiding big girl that Hermione was.

Even though she was home alone, with silence her faithful companion, she felt like one of those spies in the action movies her father watched. She imagined herself wearing a jet-black hoodie, tucked down to cover her current sweatshirt and thick leggings made to shield against the chills of winter. Guns and gadgets would be carefully positioned along her torso, perhaps across a metal belt, hidden from view but easily accessible. And if an evil person shot through the door, Hermione wouldn't hesitate to zap them into thin air, back to the shadow realm where they belonged.

A shake of the head, along with a cough and shiver, rid her fantastical thoughts of being a galactic spy. Her fever was getting worse, and would worsen the longer she spent out of bed. Steps across soft carpet that sunk underfoot led her to her bedroom door.

Click, turn, and pull.

She was through, shutting the door behind her, and into the first of the winding corridors that defined the Granger residence.

See, the Granger house was rather large, especially for two high-level dentists working at their private practice in the heart of London. Four bedrooms languished in distinct corners of the house, like the inhabitants hated one another yet were forced to remain in the same building (the furthest thing from the truth), with hardwood flooring furnishing the spaces in between with a gleam that felt like solar energy had been trapped inside.

Hermione had read all about solar energy from one of the books in the school library. She'd also read about other types of renewable energy, and how humanity needed to do things to stop the environment from degrading. Now that she was a big girl, saving the environment was, of course, part of her responsibilities—in addition to keeping her room tidy (which she already did, thank you very much) and washing the dishes from time to time.

The house was as silent as a mouse playing Chinese whispers. Hermione crept ever so slightly towards the other end of the first floor, careful not to press the creak points in the hardwood. After a more-perilous-than-necessary journey, she was face to face with the door to her mother's study. She pulled open the door as though held within were the secrets to the universe, fingers careful, breath bated.

Glancing behind her—a rather fruitless act since she was home alone—she stepped into the study. The door shut so easily Hermione could've mistaken it as having a life of its own.

Breathing in the deep silence and heavenly smells of old books marinating on shelves, Hermione finally opened her big girl eyes and gazed at what her mother had been hiding.

Her escapade did not disappoint.

Hermione knew the attic was thinner than the width of the actual house, with a wall jutting out for seemingly no reason to hedge the attic's far side. Well, now she knew why that was the case.

It was to make extra headroom for her mother's study, not that any of their heads could reach the high ceiling whose walls pirouetted to a singular point at the top like the tip of a castle. All around, filling Hermione's vision, stood bookshelf after bookshelf as guards on duty with books their weapons, one stationed across each of the four creamy walls.

In the centre of the study (more like battle station in Hermione's mind) a circular desk, composed of solid oak wood, positioned itself comfortably. On the desk were folders and stationary, along with half-open books on dentistry. A high chair with wheels, jet-black and made of leather that felt soft to even look at, sat before the desk. Boxes filled the space beneath the desk, files poking out from them to greet Hermione over.

Hermione drank in the details, mesmerised. And she hadn't even taken a step yet!

She bounded over to the first shelf, heart rate rising far beyond regular excitement—she was near ecstatic. Dizzied with the smells of fresh books to be devoured, her eyes perused at double-speed, titles whizzing through her mind in a blur. Spines and covers meshing into a tie-dye-like array of colours.

Then she saw it. The book her mother had always spoken about, had promised Hermione she could read when she became a big girl.

'It' was the title, by an author called Stephen King.

Hermione had never read King, but her mother expressed her delight at the man's novels. And Hermione, now a big girl, would use her technicality to full advantage and discover just why her mother loved the book so much.

Hermione had just snuck into her mother's study like a well-trained spy, and then located her most prized novel. She felt too much like a superhero, instead of Bat-Woman maybe…Book-Woman.

Content with the name, Hermione reached up on her tippy toes and tipped the book over onto its cover. That let her grip the upper edge (carefully now, don't hurt the poor thing Hermione) and pull it off the shelf.

It was a rather heavy book for the ten-year-old since it was hardback, but with a determination she only sprung when tackling reading and school work, she lugged the novel over to the desk.

Seating herself in the high chair, comfort oozing into her body, leather sighing as she leaned back and reclined, she forgot about the cold and her bed and even the fever, instead turning open the first page and drinking in King's imagination.

She never heard the front door open. Nor the creak of the stairs, for King's words entranced her senses so strongly it was as if nothing else existed. But they couldn't mask the cough that emanated, a few seconds later, from a narrow-eyed Catherine Granger standing at the front of her study, staring right at Hermione.

Sneaking into Mummy's study whilst also running a fever—Hermione was going to need a lawyer-level technicality to escape this one.