Content warning: Child abuse by the Dursleys (no worse than canon); some violence, but no worse than anything in the first two books; abuse of Pixie Stix; abuse of the author by Pixie Stix
[A/N: I'm adding a new initial author's note and summary on the occasion of hitting 100,000 words. This story started as a series of drabbles for the HMS Harmony Discord for Harry and Hermione's birthdays, but then Harry introduced Hermione to Pixie Stix and the plot blew up in my face. It's now a full canon rewrite with 50% less angst and at least 200% more chaos. Highlights include accidental kidnappings, glitterpigs, eldritch horrors, tooth-rotting fluff, bad-ass children (though not immediately because they're like 8 when this starts), at least a handful of competent adults, rampant piracy, and unsupervised Lovegoods.]
"Alright, class," Mrs. Riley said. "Like I said yesterday, since summer term is nearly over, we'll celebrate the summer birthdays today. If you have any cards for our summer birthday children, please go ahead and deliver them."
The know-it-all who'd transferred into the class a few months before dropped cards off with Benny, Muhammed, Annie, and Sunita, then, to Harry's surprise, approached him, too.
"Happy Birthday, Harry," she said. "Well, early birthday. I'm Hermione. You can open this now if you want."
Out of the corner of Harry's eye, he saw Dudley's pig-like visage darken. Harry had never gotten a birthday card before, but no card was worth seeing this girl hurt on his account.
"Keep your stupid card." Harry pointedly turned away from her. "I don't want it."
He heard her sniffle and her footsteps shuffle off. Mrs. Riley was glaring at him, but she believed everything his aunt and uncle said about him being a delinquent, anyway, so it wasn't like she could like him any less because of this.
Still, he had to do something to make it up to the girl. But what?
Harry pondered that for the rest of the class period. Girls were complicated and scary and he didn't want to make anything worse.
Hermione was packing up her books for the day, meticulously as always, when a piece of paper fluttered down onto the last one still on her desk. She looked up to see who'd dropped it, but the other children were mostly out of the room at that point and it could have been any of them.
She knew she probably shouldn't read something that belonged to someone else, but her curiosity was a force of nature and would not be denied. Scrawled on it in some of the worst penmanship she'd ever seen was a note…to her! No one had ever slipped her a note before.
"I'm sorry about what I said about your card. My cousin Dudley was glaring at you and would have beaten you up if I'd accepted your card, so I had to pretend like I didn't want it. I really did, though. Nobody has ever gotten me a birthday card before because Dudley beats up anyone who tries to be my friend. -Harry"
Hermione folded the note and carefully placed it in her pocket. She had far more emotions swirling around in her head right then than she was comfortable with, so she wanted to wait and think about it for awhile before doing anything.
Leaving class late enough to drop Hermione a note had nearly gotten Harry caught by Dudley and his gang of Harry-hunters, so Harry made sure he was one of the first kids out the next day. He walked quickly home, almost-but-not-quite jogging, and had quite a lead built up when Dudley and his gang finally came around the corner behind him. That was his cue to run, but a Mercedes sedan of the sort Uncle Vernon drooled over pulled up next to him just then and a friendly-looking woman with bushy hair tied back into a loose braid leaned out of the driver's window.
"Happy early birthday, Harry!" she said. "Would you like a ride?"
Harry had seen all of the videos at school about the dangers of getting in a car with someone you didn't know. He had also received firsthand instruction in the dangers of being caught by Dudley, so he jumped into the car without hesitation.
"Thank you, Ma'am," he said as he scrambled into the back seat. To his surprise, Hermione was also there.
"I tried to catch you before you left school," she said, "but you ran out too quickly today. Mother said she'd be happy to give you a ride."
"Just staying ahead of Dudley," Harry replied. "He nearly got me yesterday."
"Well," Hermione's mother said, "I think I can keep you ahead of those hooligans. Would you like to come over to our house for dinner tonight?"
"I really would, ma'am," Harry said, "but I need to go home and make dinner."
"You help your mother make dinner at your age?" Hermione's mother asked.
"No, I make dinner for my aunt, uncle, and Dudley," Harry said. "My aunt said my mother and father died in a drunken car wreck and I was lucky they let me eat the leftovers after I cook for them."
Hermione and her mother both gasped, a sound so similar Harry got a sense of stereo sound from it.
"Well, then," Hermione's mother said, "we won't keep you long." She sounded angry, and Harry hoped it wasn't at him.
Hermione had never had a friend over to her house before, but she didn't think it was supposed to go quite the way it was. Her mother kept asking Harry all of these odd questions about Harry's home life, and his answers were just as odd. She'd heard of children sharing bedrooms, of course, because she knew not everyone was as well-off as they were, but she'd never heard of anyone sleeping in a cupboard before. And Harry was so hungry! He ate two whole ham and watercress and cream cheese sandwiches.
After an hour, he said he had to go and her mother volunteered to take him home. First, though, she disappeared to make a phone call and looked scary when she returned, like that time a dog had chased her and her mother scared it off.
"Come now, Harry," her mother had said. "I'm going to take you home, but there's somewhere we need to stop along the way."
A single shake of her head warned Hermione off from asking to go with them. Hermione was scared, but she knew her mother would keep Harry safe.
"Aunt Petunia?" Harry pushed open the front door and tried not to let his fear show in his voice. "I'm home!"
"It's about time, Freak!" she shouted from the couch where she was watching EastEnders. "You should have started dinner ten minutes ago. You'll be lucky if we let you eat crumbs tonight."
He took a deep breath and tried to say it exactly right. "I don't think I'll be able to make dinner tonight."
"You'd better, you little freak, or I'll knock some sense back into you with the frying pan," Petunia said.
Harry stepped back from the doorway and a much larger shadow loomed through it. "Petunia Evans Dursley?"
Petunia looked up to see a pair of police officers step into the room and leapt to her feet. "Eep! Yes, officers? How can I help you?"
"You can answer our questions, Mrs. Dursley," Officer Roberts said. "This will be easier if you answer them truthfully, but we have enough on tape from you just now that we can do this the hard way, too."
"I do hope she chooses the hard way," Officer Singh said. His voice was soft, almost wistful. "She'll go away so much longer if she chooses the hard way."
"Now, now, Officer Singh," Officer Roberts said. "We have to at least give her the opportunity to co-operate with us before we take her in."
Petunia gulped audibly. "What do you want to know?"
"Tell us everything, Mrs. Dursley," Officer Roberts said. "Everything."
Hermione's father wore a dark expression when he came home from the office that evening. He made Hermione a quick snack and explained they'd be eating a late dinner. He used the fancy cheese with crackers, though, so she didn't mind. Port Salut was yummy.
While they ate, her father asked her, "Would you mind having a classmate stay with us for awhile?"
"I don't know if that would work out," she said sadly. "I don't really get along with any of them except maybe for Harry, and I don't know him very well."
"Would you be willing to give it a try, though?" her father asked. "His aunt and uncle were…hurting him, and he needs a place to stay."
"Oh, no!" she said. "Of course! I can't let them hurt him. He saved me from being hurt by his cousin just yesterday."
"That's very kind of you," her father said. "I'm sure he'll appreciate it. I'd better get started on the spag bol now, though. Will you help me?"
They were just putting dinner on the table when her mother arrived home with a shell-shocked Harry and a small suitcase.
"Where are his things?" her father asked.
"This is it," her mother replied.
Her father said a naughty word.
"Language, Daddy!" Hermione said.
"When you're older, dear," her mother said, "you learn there is a time and a place for such language. This is one of those times."
Harry ate easily twice as much spag bol that night as Hermione did even after he'd eaten those sandwiches. Did all boys eat this much?
Afterward, when they showed him the guest room, he started crying, and he flinched when Hermione tried to hug him.
When he said no one had ever hugged him before, the rest of them started crying, too.
The next day, Mrs. Riley noticed Dudley was absent and asked Harry where he was.
"He's in a juvenile detention fass…um…"
"Facility," Hermione hissed.
"Facility," Harry finished. "The police said he and my aunt and uncle were doing bad things to me and took them away."
"Balderdash!" Mrs. Riley said. "What lies have you been telling the police about those fine, upstanding citizens? I'll go down there right now and set them straight, and when I'm done they won't let you out of the facility till you're at least twenty-one."
Harry started crying again in sheer terror and Hermione's patience snapped. "My mum was with them and saw and heard everything," she said. "Are you going to call her a liar, too?"
"That'll be detention for lying to me." Mrs. Riley glared daggers at her.
Normally, the thought of getting her first detention would have had Hermione in tears, but all she said was, "I'll need a second detention then, Mrs. Riley."
"Will you now?" Mrs. Riley asked her.
"Yes, because I'm going to call you an awful woman who bent over backwards to be nice to child abusers while ignoring what my mum called your mandatory reporting duties." Hermione smiled brightly. "Would you like me to write that down on the detention slip for you?"
A month or so later, once her parents had temporary custody of Harry established, they moved to Crawley. They couldn't bear to leave Hermione and Harry in the care of a school that had failed them so badly, and it wasn't like any of them had any friends there to miss.
The day they moved away from Surrey was the day a spinning instrument in an old Scottish castle finally ground to a halt.
Harry's disappearance was supposed to be a secret, of course, but secrets and ale could not long coexist in Rubeus Hagrid and soon the rumours spread like wildfire. After a few weeks, the loss of the Boy-Who-Lived was a hot topic of discussion even among the guards of Azkaban.
Most of the inmates who overheard it cheered the news, but in one man it reignited a flame the Dementors had quenched years before.
Harry needed help, and no mere inescapable prison would stand between Sirius Black and his godson.
Pandora Lovegood still had about as much situational awareness as Sirius remembered her having in school, which was to say none at all. As he dashed away from her and her daughter on the forest path with her wand hanging loosely in his Grim-form's jaws, he made a mental note to send her an apology. Anonymously, of course.
The goblins, as usual, couldn't be arsed to care about who had broken what Wizarding laws and were happy to do business with him…for a modest fee, of course. He got a better-fitting wand and a few thousand galleons from the Black Vault, had the goblins ship poor Pandora her wand back along with a dozen galleons and some flowers, and converted the same amount to muggle pounds.
Sirius didn't know much about muggle England, but some of those tee-vee shows Lily had shown them gave him an idea about who might.
The private detective would absolutely have turned him in for the reward, but a quick Confundus Charm helped overcome that temptation and the man went to work looking for traces of Petunia Evans. What a dozen wizards—several of whom bore fading snake marks on their arms—couldn't figure out in months, the detective figured out in mere weeks.
After that, it was a simple matter to Confundus a secretary at Harry's old primary school into telling him where Harry's records had been sent. Sirius gave the man an additional suggestion to burn that information…no sense in letting anyone else follow this particular trail. After learning what had befallen the Dursleys and why, Sirius didn't trust anyone but himself with Harry's wellbeing anymore.
The man shifted back into a Grim and began the long walk to Crawley.