Chapter Text
July 31st
“Morning,” Hagrid greeted the goblin teller. “We’ve come to take some money out of Mr. Potter’s vault.”
“And does Mr. Potter have his key?” the goblin asked rather tersely.
“Got it here somewhere,” Hagrid said and he began emptying his pockets onto the counter, scattering moldy dog biscuits over the pristine book of numbers and causing the Goblin’s scowl to deepen considerably.
“Got it!” Hagrid announced at last, holding up a small gold key, then placing it on the counter for the goblin to examine while Hagrid went about sweeping all the bits and bobs back into his coat pockets.
The goblin examined the key very carefully, as though expecting a forgery, then finally nodded. “Well, that seems to be in order. Before he goes to his vault, there is a matter Mr. Potter must attend to.”
“What’s that?” Hagrid asked with a frown.
“That is Gringotts’ business with Mr. Potter, sir. Private business. He will visit his vault and return to the lobby when he is finished. Follow me, Mr. Potter.”
And before Harry could even wonder what to do, the goblin was striding away. He cast a quick look at Hagrid, but the man seemed equally as stumped, so Harry hurried after the goblin.
He was led through a large door and down a long corridor into a lounge sort of room with a fountain trickling down one wall and several lounge chairs around a low table. The goblin waited for Harry to take one of the offered seats, then tapped on the top of the fancy box on the table. After a moment, he opened the lid of the box and extracted a thick letter, which he placed on the table in front of Harry.
Written across the front in an elegant script, it said Harald James Potter.
“I don’t understand,” Harry frowned as he picked up the letter. “Is this for me? Why is it at a bank?”
“That letter, Mr. Potter, was left in our trust ten years ago, to be delivered to you today or the soonest following. Feel free to take your time. Tap the bell if you need anything. Merely open the door when you are finished.”
Harry watched the goblin go and looked at the letter again. Harald. Was that his proper first name? And the middle. Was that for his father? Hagrid had said his name was James.
His fingers trembled a bit as he carefully pried loose the wax seal holding the heavy paper shut. The whole envelope came unfolded then and he set it aside to focus on the paper inside, filled with small, neat lines of the same elegant writing. He flipped the paper over and his breath caught at the sign off at the bottom. “Love Mum”.
My Darling Harry,
As I write this, you are playing on the floor in front of me, enjoying the new toys you got for your first birthday. I hope so very much that I will be there for your eleventh birthday that I might burn this letter and explain its contents face to face as it should be done. Unfortunately, I know there is the possibility that your father and I will not be there.
There is a war on, Harry, and your father and I are targets. If we don’t make it, there are some things you must understand. Things that only James and myself know. It is for that reason that I put ink to page this night.
First off, if you are not alone, read no further. The information contained in this missive is for you and you alone. The parchment is charmed to ingrain everything about this letter permanently into your mind and then to dissolve into dust, for the contents are far too dangerous to risk their discovery.
Now, on to the point of this letter. I realize that this may not be easy to hear and there is no good way to tell you, but you must know. Some time before you were born, your father and I had a terrible fight. I was furious with him and I went into the muggle world to forget the war and our fight and everything for just one night. I did not intend to do more that night than dance and drink, but I met a man there. He was very charming, beautiful, confident, intelligent… Please don’t blame him, Harry. The fault for that night is entirely my own. The man did not know I was married, only that I was angry and looking to find some small measure of peace before returning to my life.
I used a discreet contraception spell and he used muggle contraception that night, yet nine months later, you were born. It is rare, but magic sometimes does that.
We did not know at first if the child was his or James’, but we decided to test you after you were born. Just to be sure. Please understand that the result didn’t matter to myself or to James. We’d already worked through the issues with our fight and my infidelity. We just needed to know your true parentage to clear up matters of inheritance.
The heritage test we used was meant to display the official name and any magical titles or positions. Take a moment to look at the last page of this letter where I’ve attached a copy of the results.
With shaking hands, Harry flipped to the last page. Across the top of the page was written, “Harald James Potter.” Beneath that, “Biological mother, Lily Rosalin Potter nee Evans, Lady Wife to Lord Potter.”
His eyes fell to the next line with reluctance and his heart sank, though he’d honestly expected it, when he found a name that was not James Potter there. Then his brow furrowed as he read the words several times. “Biological Father, Lucifer, Sovereign King of the realm of Hell, Warden of the Damned.”
He was shaking so badly that he had to smooth the pages out on the table to go back to reading the letter.
First, I would like to say that James fully adopted you after learning that you weren’t his by blood. He is legally your father and he is the man who loves you as much as any father ever could. You are a Potter, Harry, despite also being more.
I hate to drop all of this on you so young, but there are reasons you cannot go any longer without understanding your situation. I had a very difficult pregnancy and it is when we began to suspect that something was very unique about you. I don’t know how long we’ve been gone or how you’ve grown up, so I shall assume you know nothing.
Ordinarily, children begin exhibiting signs of accidental magic — that is, magic driven by a child’s emotions or desires — when they are anywhere from three to ten years old. The very strongest have been known to begin just before their first year.
Your first bouts of accidental magic started nearly four months before your birth. There is, to my knowledge, no other recorded case of this happening. The magical outbursts were so strong that I spent those last four months on bed rest, surrounded by charms to keep you calm and my magic set on protecting me and not fighting against you.
None of this is your fault, Harry. You are just extremely powerful.
Your accidental magic continued after your birth. For months, you routinely destroyed your crib each time you became upset and changing diapers was somewhat dangerous, actually. But then you began to calm down and your magic settled with you. Since about five months, you’ve been a delightful baby. You are very intelligent. Very clever.
Age eleven is when wizards and witches begin coming into their power, but you need to understand that you may experience things very differently from your peers. I can’t say for certain what it will mean, having a father that is essentially a deity. Christianity paints the man as the sum of all evil on Earth and in the hearts of men, but that was not the man I met that night. I hope that my estimation of him was right and theirs is wrong. What I can tell you is that you are a very sweet little boy and I have no fear that you will grow to be anything less than a very honorable man.
You are incredibly magically powerful. Enough to cause alarm should it become well known in the wizarding world. Last month, for example, you found a dead bird in the garden and, before I could stop you, you’d lain a hand on it. The bird then got up and flew away. This is an ability that Wizarding Britain would both fear and covet. You may develop other abilities, in time, that would be even worse to expose. And so, Harry, I fear that I have no choice but to urge you to conceal these things, even from those you consider your closest friends.
Christians and Satanists would call you the antichrist, Harry. Devout Christians would want to kill you for that. Devout Satanists would want to force you to be their champion to rule the world. I cannot say what the wizarding world would make of your parentage, but you should strive to not find out. It is imperative that you conceal this from everyone lest the wrong person learn of it.
Worse, I cannot for certain say that some of these people don’t already know. There are meant to be omens to tell of your birth, so the Christian texts lead me to believe. I haven’t been able to find them, but others may have.
Trust, my son, is not something you can take for granted. Not about this. Not to your best friend or the people who raised you in our stead. Not to Albus Dumbledore or the Minister for Magic. Not to the Queen herself. This must be your secret alone or shared only under air tight magical bindings. I implore you, share with no one until you are much older. Even then, get oaths first. The wrong person learning of this secret could utterly destroy you.
I wish I had better advice to offer, my dear. More encouraging words or infallible plans. I feel that no mother should ever teach her child to shy away from trust and to keep secrets at all costs, but I have no choice. To remain safe, you must keep the secret. Perhaps when you are an adult, when your powers have fully come in, you may be strong enough to weather my fears, but I hope desperately that you never find out.
I will say that you needn’t stop living your life for this. You may still have friends and fun. Don’t shy from love and companionship. Let yourself be open in other ways. Safe ways. Follow your dreams. Your secret needn’t consume your life. Try to put it from your mind most days, if you can. Only think on it when something unusual happens. Something others should not learn.
I wish I knew what powers you may discover. Will you grow wings? I don’t know. Lucifer had them, in the bible. But then he was cast from heaven and I don’t know if they remained. Will you grow horns? I don’t think so, but again, I don’t know. Lucifer as I met him certainly had no horns, but altering shape is something rather simple for skilled witches and wizards, so I should think the devil would manage easily enough.
I am sorry that I don’t have more answers for you. Just be on guard for people who would use you. Those who go out of their way to court your favor. Those that are not close to you, but act as though they are.
Please be careful, my son. You are so powerful and the next seven years while you attend Hogwarts, people will begin to see the depth of that power. They will seek to use you for their own gain or to destroy you if they cannot gain your favor.
Even at only one year old, I can see how very clever you are, Harry. I have faith that you will use that cleverness to stay safe.
Love,
Mum
P.S. When you turn fifteen, the family artifacts vault will open to you. Inside, you will find a collection of my journals. I hope you can find some understanding in them. For everything. In my more recent journals, I’ve included everything I can remember about your birth father and everything that’s happened since then.
Before Harry could even start reading the letter again, it disintegrated into dust in his fingers, just as she’d said it would, heritage page and all. Trying to think about the specific parts of the letter though, he realized that she’d been right in saying he’d remember. Every detail was crisp and clear in his mind, from the words to the handwriting to the exact shade of the paper.
The goblin had said he could take his time, so he pulled his knees up to his chest and rested his chin on them while he just thought about what he’d read. His mum had an affair. He didn’t know how to feel about that. He’d never known much about his parents, so there wasn’t much of a mental picture to be messed up. But she said they’d fought, then after they’d made up, even though she’d done what she did. James not only forgave her, he decided to raise Harry like his own son.
Even knowing that Harry's real dad was…
Finding out about magic had been strange enough, but to learn that Christianity was real? God and the devil and angels and all that. And the devil was his dad. It scared him. He didn’t know a lot about religion, but he knew the Devil was supposed to be evil.
Then again, they said witchcraft was evil and he was about to go to a school that would teach him how to use the powers he was born with. Were all witches and wizards really evil? Did they have a school to teach children to use evil magic? He couldn’t see it.
Maybe he really couldn’t trust popular opinion to tell him the truth on anything.
/ * o * \
**
\ .. o .. /
October 31st
The first two months of school, Harry took his mum’s advice to put the whole issue of his dad to the back of his mind and ignore it. When he was Sorted, the Hat wanted to put him in Slytherin, but he’d begged for anything else and had ended up in Gryffindor. Everything he’d heard about Slytherin suggested that people saw it as the House for people more likely to end up evil. He couldn’t afford for anyone to think that about him. If the truth ever did come out, maybe the fact that he’d been a Gryffindor would at least instill doubt.
Ignoring his heritage wasn’t overly difficult in the beginning. Nothing all that strange happened except that he was usually one of the first ones to get a spell right in class. Hermione usually got things to work quickly because she had perfect execution of the incantation and wand movements. Harry’s magic just seemed to make things work based on his intent even when he didn’t have the other bits quite right. Sometimes the spells came off so powerful that they went a little overboard on whatever they were trying to do. Like when he made his matchstick a needle and McGonagall couldn’t make it a matchstick again no matter what spell she tried.
People whispered about him and that Boy-Who-Lived nonsense, but Harry tried to just ignore it. After all, if they were convinced that anything extraordinary that he did was because of that, then they weren’t looking for other reasons.
Halloween though… That day reminded him that his secret didn’t go away just because he was ignoring it really hard. His mum had said that wizards start coming into their power at eleven, and things were certainly changing.
Halloween had never been very remarkable for him. Dudley would put on ridiculous costumes like cowboys and astronauts and bring home huge amounts of candy, most of it probably stolen from smaller kids rather than earned by proper door-to-door begging. Harry was usually shut in his cupboard for the night.
This Halloween was different.
For starters, he woke to the sound of tortured screams. They’d been distant and followed by gleeful cackling. They’d faded after he’d woken so he’d thought it was a lingering dream.
Only they’d come back on and off all day. It always sounded far away. Like maybe if he went around the corner and up the staircase, he could catch a glimpse of it happening outside the window, but there was never anything there when he did try to follow it.
The veil between the living and the dead was meant to be thinnest on this day, he remembered. Was he actually hearing hell?
He’d hoped, briefly, that it was just a wizard thing. Like seeing ghosts. Unfortunately, he was sure the muggleborns would have reacted and asked questions if they were hearing tortured screams and mad cackling that they couldn’t explain. And no one said a word.
When they heard that Hermione was in a bathroom crying her eyes out because Ron had snapped at her for her really rude attempts to teach him the levitation charm, Ron had looked really guilty. Harry had felt slightly guilty too, if he was honest. It was hardly his fault that he always got the spells down way before Ron, and the other boy had just watched Harry send his own feather slamming into the ceiling when Hermione had started in on Ron. It probably wasn’t only Ron’s fault that he’d snapped at her.
She was really annoying, but it didn’t mean they should hurt her feelings this badly. Harry resolved to try to get Ron to be a bit nicer to her in the future and that was the end of it for the night.
Or, it should have been.
Then Quirrell announced a Troll was in the dungeons and they were all sent back to their common rooms and Hermione wouldn’t even know there was any danger.
He and Ron barely had to trade a look to know that they were going to go after her. The troll was in the dungeons, after all. How dangerous could it really be?
Pretty dangerous, it turned out.
Ron finally managed the levitation charm to knock out the troll with it’s own club while Harry got Hermione out of harm’s way.
So it worked out. And they got a new friend out of it. He just hoped he could temper her more annoying bits or the friendship might not last too long.
/ * o * \
**
\ .. o .. /
June 8th
“As for the Stone, it has been destroyed.”
“Destroyed?” Harry asked blankly. “But your friend. Nicholas Flamel…”
“Oh, you know about Nicholas?” Dumbledore sounded quite delighted. “You did do the thing properly, didn’t you? Well, Nicholas and I have had a little chat and agreed it’s all for the best.”
“But that means he and his wife will die, won’t they?” Harry protested, quite unable to fathom them having a calm chat with Dumbledore and just deciding to die.
“They have enough Elixir stored to set their affairs in order and then, yes, they will die.”
Harry could only stare in disbelief.
Dumbledore just smiled at him. “To one as young as you, I’m sure it seems incredible, but to Nicholas and Perenell, it really is like going to bed after a very, very long day. After all, to the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure.”
Harry thought of the sound of tortured screams and doubted that.
“You know, the Stone was really not such a wonderful thing,” Dumbledore went on without seeming to notice Harry’s doubt. “As much money and life as you could want! The two things most human beings would choose above all — the trouble is, humans do have a knack for choosing precisely those things that are worst for them.”
Harry didn’t think it was possible for “life” to be something bad for you. It was kind of the definition of good for you, wasn’t it? He also thought that someone who went to so much trouble as to create the Philosopher’s Stone just to live forever wouldn’t be so casual about dying. Then again, it occurred to him, an alternative to destroying the Stone would be to let the world believe it destroyed until Voldemort was gone in a few years or decades. They could claim leftover serum in the meantime and the Stone would be safe.
With that in mind, Harry decided not to question it any further. He understood the importance of keeping Secrets, and if this was theirs, even Dumbledore might not know the truth. Pressing the point certainly wouldn’t help anyone.
“Sir, I’ve been thinking,” he started instead. “Even if the Stone’s gone, Vol-“ he stopped himself, remembering how everyone kept chastising him for using the name. “I mean You-Know-Who-“
“Call him Voldemort, Harry. Always use the proper name for things. Fear of a name increases fear of the thing itself.”
“Right,” Harry sighed. “Well, Voldemort’s going to try other ways of coming back, isn’t he? I mean, he hasn’t gone, has he?”
“No, Harry, he has not,” Dumbledore confirmed. “He is still out there somewhere, perhaps looking for another body to share… not being truly alive, he cannot be killed. He left Quirrell to die. He shows as little mercy to his followers as his enemies. Nevertheless, Harry, while you may have only delayed his return to power, it will merely take someone else who is prepared to fight what seems a losing battle next time — and if he is delayed again, why, he may never return to power.”
Harry began to nod but quickly stopped as it sent his head to throbbing. “There are some other things I’d like to know, sir. If you can tell me… Things I want to know the truth about…”
“The truth,” Dumbledore sighed, “It is a beautiful and terrible thing, and should therefore be treated with great caution. However, I shall answer your questions unless I have a very good reason not to, in which case I beg you’ll forgive me. I shall not, of course, lie.”
Harry considered that carefully. It was an important thing to know about Dumbledore, he thought. It meant that he had Secrets, too, and understood the importance of keeping them. “Well… Voldemort said that he only killed my mother because she tried to stop him from killing me. But why would he want to kill me in the first place?”
Dumbledore sighed very deeply this time. “Alas, the first thing you ask me, I cannot tell you. Not today. Not now. You will know, one day… Put it from your mind for now, Harry. When you are older… I know you hate to hear this… when you are ready, you will know.”
Harry frowned heavily. It was one thing to know Dumbledore had Secrets. It was something else entirely to realize that he was keeping Secrets that directly involved Harry’s life. He told Harry to put it from his mind. It was similar to the advice his mother had given him, but she’d given him facts and told him not to let them consume him. Dumbledore was giving him mysteries that directly impacted his life and telling him to ignore them. There was a large difference.
He’d been just a baby. Why would Voldemort have wanted him dead? Did he know who Harry’s true father was and fear the power he would have? Did Dumbledore know as well and think to shield him from a harsh truth?
He didn’t like not knowing and he knew that putting it from his mind was not something he would be capable of doing.
He decided to try another question and inquired as to the reason Quirrell couldn’t touch him. He’d thought maybe it had to do with his heritage, but Dumbledore seemed totally convinced that it was caused by his mother dying to save him. Apparently Voldemort didn’t understand love. And that Quirrell was so consumed with negative emotions that he literally couldn’t touch someone marked by the kind of love his mother had for him.
It was a nice thought, but a little hinky. Of course, he didn’t know what magic could do yet, but it seemed that someone as scary as Voldemort should have been aware of that love magic thing if it was real. Just because he couldn’t understand love didn’t mean he shouldn’t have heard stories about other evil people felled by killing families, right?
As long as the man was being chatty, Harry pressed on with a question about where his Invisibility Cloak came from. Apparently it was from the headmaster himself. He suggested that James had used the cloak for sneaking off to the kitchens to steal food when he was a student. It almost seemed he was encouraging Harry to follow in those footsteps and use it for frivolous reasons.
“Is it true that Snape hates me because he hated my father?”
“ Professor Snape, Harry,” Dumbledore corrected and Harry very carefully didn’t roll his eyes. “Professor” was clearly very loosely defined in this school. Snape was the kind of man that would probably be one of them laughing like mad in hell while others screamed in agony. And they let him alone with children.
Now he thought of it, that was probably reason enough to question Dumbledore’s motives.
“Well, they did rather detest each other,” Dumbledore answered after a moment. “Not unlike yourself and Mr. Malfoy. And then, your father did something Snape could never forgive.”
“What?” he prompted warily.
“He saved his life.”
Harry blinked and demanded again, “ What ?”
“Yes…” Dumbledore said dreamily. “Funny, the way people’s minds work, isn’t it? Professor Snape couldn’t bear being in your father’s debt… I do believe he worked so hard to protect you this year because he felt that would make him and your father even. Then he could go back to hating your father’s memory in peace…”
As much as Harry wanted to loathe everything about Snape and believe he’d lived his entire life as irredeemably loathsome as he was now… Harry had grown up with Dudley Dursley. He knew when he was hearing only one side of the story, carefully crafted to make it appear a certain way. What Dumbledore was saying was true, he thought, but there was a lot of explanation left out. It almost felt like he was deliberately trying to prevent any chance of Harry having a single kind thought about Snape the way he said the only reason Snape protected him was so he could hate James in peace.
It hurt his head to try to contemplate the headmaster’s motives. He insisted Harry call Snape “professor”, then told him that Snape was just an ungrateful bastard and anything good he ever did was only for selfish purposes. Did he want Harry to respect Snape or to go on loathing him?
He decided he’d need more information to form a theory on that, and pressed on instead.
“How did I get the stone out of the mirror?”
And as he listened to Dumbledore congratulate himself on his own genius, Harry had the horrible realization that the Stone was never in real danger. Voldemort would not have been able to get the Stone from the mirror without Harry there. He’d walked the key right down to him.
And instead of chastising him, Dumbledore was joking about candy and smiling at Harry like they were dear friends.
-- Just be on the watch for people who would use you. Those who go out of their way to court your favor. Those that are not close to you, but act as though they are.--
He tried his best not to let Dumbledore see how uneasy he was feeling.
When his friends showed up later, he told them the whole story.
“So the Stone’s gone?” Ron said finally. “Flamel’s just going to die?”
“I guess,” Harry shrugged, because he didn’t know if his theory was right and especially if it was, having it get around would be really bad. As was obvious from the rumors apparently flying about their little adventure to try to protect the Stone, word spread fast.
“Do you think he meant you to do it?” Ron wondered. “Sending you your father’s cloak and everything?”
“Well,” Hermione exploded, “if he did — I mean to say — that’s terrible ! You could have been killed.”
“Maybe…” Harry allowed, because it did seem awfully coincidental. He’d found the mirror, so he knew how it worked. Dumbledore had even taken the time to explain it to him. Then he’d given him the invisibility cloak. And yeah, Hermione was smart and Harry was powerful and Ron was wicked good at chess, but if three first years could get through those challenges… It almost had to be staged, didn’t it? “Just wish I knew why,” he admitted.
Ron just declared Dumbledore crazy in a tone that suggested he hoped to grow up to be just like him, then changed the subject to the upcoming leaving feast.
Madam Pomfrey soon shooed them both out of her domain and Harry spent a long time lying in bed and thinking on Albus Dumbledore and his mother’s advice.