They've left the pub and the alley with all the magical people, but there are groups of cloaked people hugging and whispering no matter where they go. A few of them even see him and point excitedly.
The cloaked people are everywhere now. Maybe they followed Harry and Logan out of the pub.
Same with the owls. They swoop through the sky, and Harry wonders if someone freed all the owls in the store. He can't see them clearly enough to recognize any of them.
Harry's white owl joins the others in the sky, and she's a bit easier to spot, except when the sun's too bright. She's part of the owl party, while the witches and wizards party below.
Harry and Logan don't join the party, but Harry doesn't mind. He likes his cigar cakes with Logan just fine without a crowd.
After a while, Harry's owl swoops back to fly alongside them, and Logan eventually lets her in the truck when they park for the night.
Instead of letters, Harry's owl brings dead mice, which she drops in line with Harry's toy animals. Logan makes Harry toss them out, saying they'll reek.
Harry's owl frequently perches on his shoulder, or on his hair. Her claws don't bother him, unlike Dumbledore's not-a-fox bird.
The owl spends so much time perching on Harry that Logan says she looks like a second head. Or a wig.
The thought echoes through Harry's head until he realizes he's thinking of his owl as Hedwig.
He wonders if Hedwig wants to carry mail like all the other owls, so he gives her his old, chopped-up toy motorbike to carry around. While she's gone, he starts to worry she'll give it to someone else, but she returns with the toy still grasped in her talons, along with a newspaper.
She drops the paper and perches on Harry's shoulder, lightly tugging his hair with her beak.
Hedwig's in the photo on the front page, along with Harry and Logan. And they're moving, like a telly screen on mute. Harry's shaking his head as the cameras flash, and Logan's glaring and pulling Harry out of the frame.
Logan starts reading the story and snorts. "I ain't a superhero."
He'd killed the evil wizard though, and Harry helped. Harry rather likes the idea of killing villains with Logan, but he hates all the attention. He'd been treated like a hero and a disappointment at the same time, which was almost worse than just being seen as a burden.
Harry wishes everyone was like Logan, who doesn't treat Harry like he's special or useless. Logan sees Harry as just Harry.
The newspaper doesn't. Logan's voice drops to a growl as he reads "The Killing Curse seems to have addled the young Harry Potter, similar to the fate of Frank and Alice Longbottom after suffering the Cruciatus Curse."
Logan tosses the newspaper at Harry. "Feel free to shred it, bub."
Harry stares at the picture. As much as he'd hated Privet Drive and is glad not to have seen it for years, he can't help thinking about how there had been countless photos of Dudley framed in gold.
They don't have any pictures on the walls of their home; Logan can't be bothered, and Harry only draws if he has to in order to get his point across.
Even if this isn't the best family photo, it has all of them: Logan, Harry and Hedwig. Even his toy wolverine, tucked under his arm.
Harry carefully slices around the edge of the photo and sticks it at the end of the line of his toy animals before shredding the rest of the newspaper.
Now that Dumbledore made their truck and motorbike their real size again, they're sort of stuck in England, like when Logan first rescued him before they freed the dogs on the plane.
They can't exactly bring their home on a plane, and Harry refuses to even think about leaving it behind. Still, he wants to leave. The wizard parties have finally ended, but Harry wishes they were back in Canada or the States, where nobody knew or cared who they were.
Sitting beside Logan in the front of the truck, Harry pokes a map insistently, making sure Logan looks. It really isn't fair for Dumbledore to strand them here. Couldn't his bird have at least taken them back, too?
"We'll have to take a boat if we want to get our home overseas." Logan tells him. "You wanna see Japan, bub? We ain't gonna be celebrities there."
Harry doesn't know anything about Japan, aside from a dim memory of a golf joke he heard his uncle tell at dinner parties. He never understood what made it funny, but he'd always been locked in his cupboard anyway.
A boat trip sounds boring, and far too long. Flying is so much faster.
He doesn't want to go to Hogwarts, but he wants to learn magic, so he can shrink their truck and motorbike down again. Maybe he could shrink himself and Logan to bug size, so Hedwig could fly their truck to Canada with them inside. Or she could carry their truck while they flew alongside on the motorbike.
Harry cuts a branch off a tree and waves it like a wand, but nothing happens.
He climbs atop their home, but his weight doesn't help squeeze it down. He lugs the largest rocks he can carry up the ladder, and tries to squash the truck down that way.
Logan tells him to quit it, and Harry drops the stones off the roof so they thud on the ground.
Harry waves his hands wildly, but he has no clue how to get his magic to listen. It's almost worse knowing Dumbledore can do it but he can't. He's no closer to shrinking their truck than he was before the letters and witches and wizards showed up.
Hogwarts can't be the only way to learn magic, can it?
As they drive through Devon, Harry sulks part of the time and bounces on the seat, trying to squash it down. He groans when nothing happens, and Hedwig nips his ear affectionately.
They pass through a small town called Ottery St. Catchpole without stopping, but Hedwig swoops out the window, headed down a dirt road. Logan drives the truck down that road too, but mutters "I ain't followin' yer bird."
At the end of the road is a ramshackle house that looks like it's being held up by magic. Harry sees three figures on broomsticks dip beneath the trees, and flaps excitedly. If they can get broomsticks to fly, surely they'll know how to make their motorbike fly forever. Maybe they can show Harry how to shrink their truck.
Logan sniffs and scowls. "I smell a rat."
The newspaper is obviously wrong, but considering some people blame vaccines, blaming the killing curse doesn't seem too far-fetched, and I don't know how big the wizarding world is on neurodiversity, especially back then.
I thought Logan's last line was too fun to pass up.
