Nothing is mine.

Harry takes a brief stroll in the rain.


I Shall Not Feel the Rain

Gentle drizzle pattered down on the neat green garden and spotted the glass of his bedroom window, falling from a blanket of grey clouds with an air of cheerful determination, and bejewelling every blade of grass in the back garden of Number Four Privet Drive in tiny glistening drops that gleamed like diamonds. Only the clink of Aunt Petunia stirring her morning coffee with a little union-jack-handled teaspoon and the distant hum of the motorway disturbed the peace and quiet before the suburb started its final August Sunday in earnest. Unperturbed by either, a small wren fluttered from among the lilies clustered at the edge of the garden pond to the windowsill, peering up at Harry as it preened its small wings and tapping its small beak upon the glass..

Harry stared up through the rain at the veiled summer sun and smiled, quite sure that Dudley's plans for molesting Tesco trolleys had just been ruined. He swiped his wand out from under the bed and stuck it up the sleeve of his jumper, poking it all the way up with the tip of his finger and sauntering out, rather keen, all of a sudden, of taking a walk in that gentle rain.

Aunt Petunia caught him halfway down the stairs, poking her head out of the kitchen in a way distinctly reminiscent to Harry of the velociraptors of Jurassic Park. 'Where are you off to, boy?'

'Outside.' Harry pointed his hand toward the door. 'It's free to see it, don't worry.'

She wrinkled her nose and gave her mug of coffee one more stir, the spoon clicking against the china. 'It's raining. And you have chores to do.'

'It's definitely raining,' he said, stuffing his feet into his trainers. 'But a little bit of rain never hurt anyone. All sorts of good things happen in the rain—' he considered that for a brief moment '—although, I actually can't think of any right now that aren't those sappy rom-com films Aunt Marge likes to cry and watch when she's babysitting Dudley and pretending I don't exist.'

Aunt Petunia stared at him, the spoon frozen in her fingers. 'Well—' she opened her mouth, closed it, opened it again, then gave her coffee another stir '—as long as those toilets get cleaned properly this morning, I don't see what trouble you could cause out there. But don't come back and make a mess with all your wet clothes; I won't have dirty water on my clean kitchen floor.'

'And undo all my hard work cleaning them?' Harry pressed his hand to his heart. 'The very idea.'

She sniffed and turned away into the kitchen. 'If you see Dudley on the way back from his friend's house tell him this time he really is going to be in trouble with his father.'

'Oh, I'll pass it on—' Harry skipped out into the drizzle '—with great glee.'

And out there with the smell of the rain, free in the breeze beneath the grey sky, and among Aunt Petunia's tidy roses and the scent of damp grass, a strangely indomitable cheer stole up on him, creeping across his face in a broad grin as the cool gentle rain caressed his face and beaded on his jumper.

'It's not so bad.' He glanced around at the quiet houses and neat gardens, smiling into the drizzle as the breeze swept it against the skin of his face, and wondered where he might go. 'I guess wherever I want.'

His feet led him along the cracked tarmac, over the grass and dandelions that sprouted out of the gaps in little bursts of green, and toward the underpass beneath the ring road and the fields of the park beyond. Water trickled down the gutter at the path's edge, gurgling down into the small drain where the road crossed overhead, but the rain couldn't quite wash the faint whiff of weed from the air. The familiar broad figure of Dudley leant against the wall beneath the underpass, digging through his pockets and chucking loose cigarettes into the drain.

'Didn't want to stash those under your bed again, Diddiekins?' Harry chuckled to himself. 'Worried mummy will find them?'

'Shut up.' Dudley hurled the box at him.

Harry laughed and swatted it away with the back of his hand. 'You know those kill you, right? Didn't you listen at school? Or were all the words too long for you?'

'Fuck off.' Dudley's jaw twitched and he balled his fists. 'You think you're all so much smarter than I am, but you're not. Just some freaky weirdo who'll never have a proper, normal life.'

'Oh yeah, woe is me, I won't get to spend my life worrying about what everyone will think of my front garden. Or making acid comments about the neighbours' choice of kitchen wallpaper.'

Dudley squinted at him, an ugly flush rising up the back of his neck. 'Better than whatever weird thing you end up doing.'

'Dying probably,' Harry reckoned with a broad grin. 'That wizard who murdered Cedric also murdered my parents, and he seems to have it in for me.' He watched Dudley rummage through the last of his pockets. 'Your mum says you're in trouble with your dad, by the way.'

'What?' Dudley glowered at him. 'What did you do?'

'Nothing.' Harry rolled his eyes. 'You had a bunch of dirty magazines under your bed. And a lighter. You're obviously smoking. You were out at some party probably drinking, too, and we're fifteen. You know what your mum thinks about people who smoke and drink like that…'

'Shit.' Dudley punched the concrete and hissed, snatching his fist back; he whirled on Harry. 'This is all your fault. If you'd just kicked them back under my bed, I wouldn't be about to be grounded all summer!'

Harry laughed. 'You're lucky I didn't arrange them across your floor in the shape of a huge dick, Diddiekins. Maybe you'll actually have to do some chores or something now.'

'You think this is funny!?' Dudley swung a wild arm at Harry.

He leant back and flashed his cousin his most infuriating grin. 'I think it's hilarious. I think listening to your mum try and yell at her precious Diddums is going to be even more hilarious. And you might even have to do some of the chores instead of me for the first time in forever.'

Dudley cracked his knuckles. 'Yeah, we'll see how funny you find this.' He took a step forward, raising both fists, but faltered. 'What are you doing?'

Harry blinked. 'Standing here while you throw a tantrum?'

'You're doing something odd!' Dudley's knuckles turned white and his breathing quickened. 'Stop it. Fucking stop it!'

'I'm seriously just standing here.' He snorted with laughter. 'Are you having a stroke, Diddums? Maybe some kind of very severe early onset diabetes?'

A long rattling breath echoed through the underpass.

'Oh.' Harry twisted about on his heel.

The thin, skeletal figure of a dementor reached for him with withered fingers, drifting toward him across the underpass, its ragged torn black cloak whispering across the concrete. A second floated around the corner out of the rain.

He watched them come, waiting for the fear, for the dread, for his chest to tighten, his heart to pound, and his blood to run cold, but they never did. The dementor released a long hoarse rasp of a sigh, its hooded face turning from Harry to Dudley and back.

'They sound like you after two minutes of the bleep test in PE back in primary,' Harry told Dudley with a small laugh. 'Maybe you can lend them that inhaler your mum insisted you needed.'

Dudley whimpered and backed away. 'What do you mean they?'

'The two extremely creepy looking things right in front of us. They're right there. Don't tell me you suddenly need to borrow my glasses, Diddiekins. All those years of you yelling four-eyes and pulling them off my face would really be coming home to roost.'

'There's nothing there.' Dudley's heels caught on a hole in the concrete and he thudded to the ground, scrabbling back on his hands.

Harry shrugged. 'Weird… maybe you can't see them because you're a Muggle.' He drew his wand from his sleeve. 'They're why you feel so scared right now. I guess they must affect Muggles more, because I don't feel anything from these two and you're rocking back and forth like a baby.'

A dry, scabbed hand brushed his arm.

'No.' Harry slapped it away. 'Bad dementor.'

It flinched back with a low hiss.

'What are you even doing here?' he demanded. 'Did Voldemort send you? I thought you were all meant to be at Azkaban doing whatever it is you do there—' he considered it '—probably ominously floating around; I've never actually seen you do anything else.'

They hovered there, staring at each other, then turned, clutching for him with their twisted, malformed fingers. He took a step back and they stilled, drifting back and forth across the underpass.

'Stand up, Dudley,' Harry said. 'The dementors are being weird, so let's just leave them to it and go home.'

Dudley wrapped his arms around himself and curled up into a ball. 'No. No. No. No. No.'

'Right…' Harry sighed and pointed his wand at the dementors. 'Look, if you don't go away, I'm going to patronus you. I'll almost feel bad, because you're really really bad at being dementors.' He paused. 'Actually, maybe you're not real dementors, but I've no idea how Malfoy would have gotten my address or learnt to float like that.' Harry reached out and tugged the hood back.

Grey withered skin clung to its long, thin, eyeless skull, splitting at the black lips of its maw, and with a hoarse rasp of its breath came a thick reeking musk of dust and death.

'Yeah… I'm just going to…' Harry pulled the hood back up. 'That's much better. You get to have a nice warm head and I don't have to see your nightmarish face anymore. It's a win-win for all of us, right, Diddiekins?'

Dudley let out a little trembling moan and the dementors took long rattling breaths, swooping past Harry toward his cousin.

'Oh no, you don't.' Harry stepped across in front of them. 'There's no way Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon won't blame me if you guys suck out his soul, and then it'll be spam sandwiches all summer, so let's not do that.'

'My soul?' Dudley squeaked. 'What the shit?'

'They'd be your first kiss, too, Diddums, just to add insult to injury, I suppose.' Harry raised his wand; he reached for a happy memory, for his parents in the Mirror of Erised, for Hagrid and his small birthday cake, for Hedwig, for the photo album of his parents, and the invisibility cloak, and all those moments of soft genuine joy and warmth. 'Expecto patronum,' he murmured.

Shining silver mist sprang from the tip of his wand; it tore through the dementors in a gleaming bright wave of fire, tossing them away as it swept through the underpass and swirled back, whirling into a fierce vortex.

A phoenix burst forth from the flames, bright as the midnight winter moon above the mountains and the snow, glowing with its full cold pale light. The dementors burnt and smoked at the touch of its radiance, smouldering beneath their ragged cloaks like damp newspaper tossed onto the fire and crumbling away into less than a wisp of shadow.

And in a flash of fierce silver the phoenix was gone.

'They're dead.' Harry glanced around, checking it was just the two of them. 'And that definitely wasn't a stag…'

'Are they gone?' Dudley whispered.

'Yeah… I think I might have killed them.' Harry spun on his heel and offered his cousin a grin. 'Which, you're not supposed to be able to do at all, so… oh well, I guess let's hope nobody misses them?'

Dudley stared at the cold bright light fading from the tip of Harry's wand. 'You weren't scared.'

'They weren't very scary,' Harry replied. 'There were only two of them. I might be about to get another warning for underage magic, though. You know the last time Fudge personally came and told me it was fine. I thought I'd blown Aunt Marge up and killed her, and he just patted me on the shoulder and smiled and said it was all fine.'

'Fudge…' Dudley squinted at him

'He's like our prime minister.'

'Called Fudge.'

'It's a remarkably fitting name. He's pretty useless. He tried to feed my godfather to dementors, actually. And he refused to believe me when I told him Voldemort was back and about to start killing people again.' Harry considered that. 'I don't think I particularly like him, really. Anyway—' he held out his hand '—get up, Diddiekins, you have to go home and get grounded.'

A little shudder rippled through Dudley. 'At least I'm safe if I'm grounded inside, right?'

'I mean, I have seen them use doors,' Harry replied. 'But I'll just patronus them if more come. I don't like dementors. Horrible faces and a terrible dress sense. They look like some six year old's imagined version of the Nazgul combined with their fear of losing at kiss-chase.'

'The what?'

'Jesus, open a book, Dudley. A real book, not a colouring book. Or more of those magazines.'

'Shut up,' Dudley muttered, grabbing Harry's hand and hauling himself up. 'They're… they're definitely gone, right?'

'Very gone. Normally that spell just drives them off, but I burnt them to a crisp — kind of like a vampire in the sun.' Harry grinned to himself. 'Maybe if people find out about this impossible piece of magic, it will distract everyone from the unsurvivable curse I survived and this massive scar on my face. Rita Skeeter can write a whole page on it if Hermione's actually let her back out of the jar. I think she's still holding a grudge over that hit piece Skeeter wrote about Hermione's love life. It was pretty bad, to be fair.'

'Can we just go home?' Dudley muttered. 'I want to go home.'

'Right, your grapefruit awaits.' Harry chuckled and poked his wand back into his sleeve, wandering back past where the dementors had crumbled away. 'Hey, Diddums, do you remember this morning when the scariest thing you could imagine was having to eat grapefruit and not being able to go nick trolleys with Piers? Wasn't it nice? Welcome to the magical world! But at least you still have your soul, so, you know, this morning could have gone a lot worse for you.'

A hysterical little giggle burst from Dudley as he trailed Harry back along the pavement, trudging through the drizzle as it turned heavy and hammered down on Harry in huge fat droplets, soaking through his jumper and jeans.

He grinned up into the cold deluge and spread his arms. 'See, Big D, it's not so bad.'


AN: The linktree leads to Discord, for a few more chapters, or to where you can support me to read about 20 of my first drafts and all my original works!

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