Harry woke up on boxing day, refreshed, happy and thriving. He jumped out of his bed, glanced at his clock, put an ABBA vinyl on the player and turned the volume up to the max. He danced as if he were seventeen to the shower, still hearing the music thrumming through the walls into the bathroom and dressed himself in a long red shirt and jogging pants. His bunny slippers were warm and he could smell the roast that had been cooking throughout the night.
"Funny way of torturing someone, letting them smell the delicious roast that they will only get to eat in the evening," he said to his grumbling aunt who was just leaving her bed-room, hair covered in those twisty thingies he'd never bothered to learn the name of.
"Turn down this racket, or at least put on some Shy Baldwin instead!" she shouted at him as Harry slipped into Dudley's bedroom and kissed his cousin good morning on the cheek before wiggling downstairs.
"Do it yourself!" he shouted back, "but only after I've left the house mind you," he finished as the track switched to Waterloo and he picked up a jacket, hat, gloves and three gift-wrapped presents for his friends. He released his wand from his holster and confidently stepped out of the Dursley home into a snow-covered 24th of December. He stretched his wand high up into the air and summoned the Knight Bus.
"Diagon, Ern!" Harry shouted as he entered the bus that had magically appeared on the street with a loud crack that no one seemed to hear.
"Sure thing, boss!" The driver shouted back jokingly, driving off in a motion that threw both Harry and the conductor who had been approaching Harry off their feet. The young boy laughed, pressed a few knuts he'd made selling muggle pens in Hogwarts into the conductor's hand and went to lay down on one of the unoccupied beds that were rattling around the first floor of the bright red double-decker bus.
"Merry Christmas!" he said as he exited the bus after a horrible drive that had left a stomach-formed dent in his throat and his hair tousled in some approximation of a red pom-pom. Walking into the leaky cauldron, more subdued now, Harry went and asked a not-very-busy owner Tom -It was only nine in the morning- how to open the door to the magical street, a secret method that he'd forgotten.
A minute later he was standing again, after four months, on a packed street bursting with so much magic he could almost feel it.
He twitched his nose. Well, bursting with so many people that he could smell it.
Putting that bit out of his mind and letting the spirit of Christmas get to him he hopped down the street on his way to the post office, a small note in his hand, written for him by Penny, guiding his path.
"Although, I definitely could have found it myself," he mused at the large wooden building made to resemble an owl which had a constant stream of birds flying out of its ears and eyes. The odd, but incredibly cool building was nestled between a gift-box-shaped shop selling pre-wrapped surprise presents and what seemed to be a pet shop with the sign 'Why rent a bird, when you can own a bird.' Upon closer inspection, the post had a similar sign with the words, 'Why own a bird when you can rent a bird' on its front. Harry wouldn't be surprised if both stores were owned by the same person. The pet shop was built in the shape of a sitting cat and Harry didn't know how likely it was to have two neighbours with exactly the same idea on architectural design.
Or, maybe, one of them had come later and had just copied the other. However, these musings weren't likely to lead anywhere so Harry stepped into the owl and deposited his three presents onto the counter in front of a dubious old man whose head was even shaped a bit like an owl. Fluffy hair, big eyes.
"Three presents ready to fly, mister!" Harry said, pushing forward the presents. Cedric's' was filled with an assortment of sweets imported from Asian countries that Harry was sure were at least as weird as some magical candies he'd tried. Penny's present was a book on basic chemistry along with some material to do non-magical experiments with. Tonks was getting the photo that he'd snapped of her without her knowing on top of the Owlery. It had turned out surprisingly well, although that could just be because Tonks was a very pretty young woman. He was also sending her a pink wig because he thought it would be funny.
The old man behind the counter took the packages and put them into a glass tube next to his desk which sent them flying upwards to where Harry assumed a ready owl would pick them up.
"Three knuts, that'll be," the man said with a smile, to which Harry replied with his own.
"Could you interest me instead for a box of magical Chinese fortune cookies? They're a special product of muggle divination and tell the eater their future," he said, pulling out a plastic sack of fortune cookies covered boldly by Chinese lettering. The old man gave Harry an amused look and took the bag.
"That'll be two knuts. My grandson will like this," he said, causing Harry to fork over a pair of matcha Kit Kats that he'd been saving for himself. After some haggling, it was determined that two kit kats equaled two, instead of one knut. The old man was mostly just humouring Harry and gleefully watching a line of annoyed people line up behind the young boy. If this meant that Harry could get out of spending the precious wizarding money that he had very little of, then so be it.
"Do you know if there is an archive of old newspapers somewhere around here by any chance?" Harry asked right before leaving.
"The Daily Prophet has a small library where they keep old editions. Had to check a date for a bet once. It's down the street and left after the Indian restaurant. There also might be something at the ministry," the man replied, before dismissing Harry by sweeping his gaze to the next customer.
Glad for the directions Harry left the building and made his way down the street. Hogwarts carried a surprisingly small amount of modern history books. None in fact. He'd checked and so he was now dependent on finding some sort of magical archive. However, seeing as one library had already disappointed him he was more interested in going straight to the source with his limited amount of time.
Quickly reaching Patils, the aforementioned Indian restaurant, Harry took a left, the street becoming much more abandoned suddenly. Looking around he saw that the reason for that was that he'd left the main road of colourful shops attracting the frantic Christmas shoppers and that he was now on a street beset mostly by businesses, such as the 'enchanting enchanter's' and 'luggage repair for lugs'. On the end of the street as clear as day was a big building, seemingly newer and more modern than its neighbours, made in a Boston-esque red-brick fashion. 'The Daily Prophet' glimmered on its front emboldened in gigantic letters.
Harry moved purposefully past more languidly walking adults and went to conquer his next foe.
The receptionist.
-/-
"No," the stern woman said, causing Harry to nearly pull his hair out.
"Why won't you let me into the archive?" he asked again, looking around the sparse room for something to bludgeon the insufferable harridan with.
The old woman looked down at him from behind her desk imperiously. "The newspaper archive is not a place for children. You'll just damage the paper," she sniffed. Harry really wondered if magic librarians all collectively had one big tree up their asses. They seemed to prefer denying access to knowledge, rather than providing it.
"But I have a paper due for history class, how am I supposed to write about the blood war if I can't read about it!" Harry said indignantly. The woman looked at him dubiously, before straightening up and looking behind him in a startled manner.
"History class, you could have thought of a better lie. Binns hasn't assigned an essay on anything more modern than the Middle Ages even before he died," a female voice drawled from behind Harry, a pair of pale hands with garishly red nails clasping him on the shoulders. Harry turned around to see a blonde woman with the most ridiculously short permed hair in a green dress standing behind him and smiling indulgently.
"Who the bloody hell is Binns?" Harry asked, putting on an offended air. "I'm taught history by Professor Dumont at Beauxbatons. I'm just here on holiday and when the old coot heard I have family in Britain he made me write about the recent conflict," he lied, as if lying was mouthbreathing and he was a professional mouth-breather.
What must have been Rita Skeeter raised her perfectly imperfect eyebrow at him and switched languages. "So you speak French then, your English has an oddly British accent," she said fluently with only the tinge of an English lilt to her speech. It was Harry's turn to raise an eyebrow. The reporter was apparently a woman of more talents than he'd suspected. Or she'd simply chugged a few potions.
"I was born here. My family moved after my dad got a job opportunity. Beauxbatons is just closer. Gladder to be going there as well, now that you told me about Hogwarts' history professor," he replied, with equal fluency.
"Well, we got ourselves a little French boy here, Matilda," Skeeter said, switching back to English with a tight smile. "Why don't we let him inside, we wouldn't want to stand in the way of Professor Dumont, would we?"
The receptionist shrugged and gave Harry another suspicious look before pointing to a door to the side, partially hidden by a particularly big palm tree which he was surprised to see indoors. Skeeter accompanied him, hands still on his shoulder until he was in the large white room, which in the end simply consisted of about a hundred or so large steel cabinets. Each cabinet had a time-period imprint on its front and Harry assumed that they must have been enchanted to hold more because as the Daily Prophet said in its name, it was a daily newspaper. Shaking off Skeeter he walked to the end of the room, where he found a dusty old wooden cabinet with more cracks than content.
"1689-1701," he read off it. "I assume this is when the Daily Prophet was founded?" he asked, not turning around to see if Skeeter was still there. A sad woman, working on Christmas. Was she already the established bitch reporter she had been in the books? Quite possibly not, this was six years before the Triwizard tournament.
"No, the Daily Prophet is actually approaching its 1000th birthday. It's just that the ministry decided to purge all accounts of life before the statute of secrecy when it was established. Is it not the same in France?" she asked suspiciously.
"I've never really been interested in newspapers, so I honestly have no idea." Harry retorted as he strolled back to the beginning of the room past Skeeter and stopped before the drawer of 1981. He pulled it out and as expected, a compartment of about three and a half metres in length came out with a metal screech and almost beheaded him. After dodging the murder attempt Harry picked up the second edition paper from the first of October. There were two, probably covering the events before and after Voldemort's defeat had become known.
'You-Know-Who vanquished, Chief Mugwump Dumbledore confirms: Neville Longbottom, the hero of the Wizarding World.' Harry's eyes flew over the article, talking about Voldemort's mysterious disappearance after his attack on the Longbottom mansion and his murder of all but one inhabitant. The baby that had struck him down in the end, or so Dumbledore claimed. Harry leafed through the next few additions, going forward chronologically. 'Longbottom adopted by celebrated auror James Potter', 'Desperate attack on Potter manor by remnant death eaters, Black and Potter capture Bellatrix Lestrange, slay Greyback', 'Peter Pettigrew, the traitor behind the attack on The-boy-who-lived, captured', 'Malfoy acquitted, Black & Potter protest', 'The best new broom on the market?', 'Lord Malfoy killed in Diagon Alley vigilante attack'. He flitted through several titles and paragraphs of text before stopping at the Malfoy murder.
Harry decided that he'd taken in enough information to make an entry into the journal he'd brought. Pulling it out of his pocket he started writing. 'Malfoy died. Where is Snape? Black & Potter capture Lestrange. Greyback dead. Pettigrew in Azkaban'. Harry flitted through the cabinets of the next few years, looking for a name and found it a few years down the line of Malfoy's murder. 'Minister of magic: Barty Crouch'. Harry wondered what happened to Junior... So much was different… Could he trust anything? he wondered once again, before looking up and flinching at the fact that Skeeter was still there, staring at him with a curious look.
She looked young, not at all indicative of the reporter she'd been in the movies. Although the sense of her style was already apparent. Honestly, Harry thought that she was trying a bit too hard to appear professional. That's what had blinded him to the fact that she couldn't have been much older than 30. Did she have trouble trying to fit into the workplace and was overcompensating, he wondered, before banishing the thought as unimportant.
"Don't you have anywhere else to be?" he asked the woman, whose stare transitioned to a glare at the question.
"Don't you?" she asked, causing Harry to pause and tilt his head and consider the mean implication of the question when asked on boxing day.
He'd come to the archive not because he had no one to be with. He was currently in the process of repairing another car with his uncle and going through an Italian cookbook with his aunt. Dudley of course had been a bit sullen for him being gone so long, but after five days he was back to being the bright kid Harry had left behind. He could have honestly dealt with a few fewer questions about magic, Hogwarts and boarding school life. Although the question of why exactly Harry couldn't simply learn to throw a lightning bolt had been interesting…
Thankfully the card game Magic The Gathering had recently come out and Dudley would get a few packs for Christmas after Harry sifted through the collection for anything potentially valuable in the future. A new game should distract his cousin. All in all, what he wanted to say was, he'd hung out with his family plenty. A short stint in the archives wouldn't harm anyone.
"I don't, not until a bit later in the evening," Harry replied.
"Why spend Christmas here? You're a child, you should be enjoying life while you can. There's just old stories here, nothing real," Skeeter said bitterly.
"There's a narrative," Harry said.
Skeeter snorted. "It's just one framing of what was a horrible time we should all strive to forget. Narrative," she spat, the bitter lines being furrowed on her face working together beautifully with her garish yellow glasses. Harry smiled, thinking for a second that the woman was beautiful, or becoming beautiful. There were different kinds of beauty. Soft with a tinkling laugh but also cold, hard and toxic. Skeeter was the latter.
"Disillusionment suits you," Harry blurted out, before blushing and going back to his newspapers, this time going backwards chronologically and looking at more than just the headliner articles. A startled laugh resounded from behind him and Harry heard the clack-clack of a person wearing heels going away. The sound suddenly stopped.
"You'll be a charmer when you grow up with that tongue of yours, boy." He heard Skeeter's voice say before the clacking continued and she left, for good.
Harry wondered what had been wrong with him, decided that he was beginning to enter puberty and thus starting to act weird and continued looking.
Going backwards in time from the 1st of October 1981 eventually landed him on the newspaper of the 23rd of November 1977. The headliner of the day was a brutal massacre committed against a group of magicals protesting blood purity politics at Diagon Alley. Voldemort himself had made an appearance, but there were no pictures of him available. The day was fittingly dubbed 'the Diagon Alley massacre.' It was on the last page, next to the advertisements for cleaning products and hand-me-down brooms that Harry found what he'd been looking for though. 'Horror at Hogwarts, rapist still at large. Obliviated muggle-born leaves school," he stared at the title for a while, blood boiling and took a few moments to calm himself before reading the disparagingly short story.
'The rape that has occurred recently at Hogwarts still remains unresolved. The victim has awoken from their short-term coma and appears to have been badly obliviated of the brutal attack, remembers nothing. Shockingly little was done to uncover the assailant, reporter finds, potentially due to the victim's blood status.' Breloom Skeeter. The article said in three succinct sentences. Finding his mother's fate, for all that he'd never met her, summarised so briefly on the last page made Harry want to burn the newspaper in his hands with his sorcery. A deep anger rose within him, one that he'd thought suppressed by now, - after all, he'd known about his origins for a long time now, for all that no one saw fit to explain them to his face - but no, all the rage was still there, along with a healthy dose of impotence and an abject disgust for the Wizarding World and humanity at large.
He wasn't aware of the how and why but eventually he somehow ended up back at the Dursleys where he locked himself into his room and tried to drown out his thoughts with incredibly loud music.
-/-
It was a listless young wizard that haunted the Dursley house for the next few days, likely worrying his family that he was regressing back to the apathetic and haunted young boy that he'd been. Even the visit of Aunt Marge, a crude but loyal woman, didn't manage to improve his mood. Neither did the affectionate nipping of the aptly named Ripper, the dog that the woman had brought with her.
The presents that he got for Christmas managed to cheer him up to a certain extent. His family knew that he liked interesting collectables, so they'd gifted him a set of rare vinyls. Dudley had even managed to find a stamp from the late 18th century. Cedric and Penny had sent him a collection of wizarding candy that they thought was interesting. He'd shared it with an incredibly excited Dudley in the living room with all the blinds closed while watching "Mission Impossible" and "It's a Wonderful Life." Even Tonks had sent him something, a few days after Christmas, apparently moved by his gift. Although considering it was a blue wig, Harry didn't quite know if the girl was annoyed or happy.
It was only for New Year's, when his family had driven into London to watch the city's fireworks from Trafalgar Square that Harry managed to reconcile his disappointment with his hopes for the future. Looking around him he saw young people, old people, his family and strangers, all looking into the sky, eyes reflecting the spectacle, unworried for these few short seconds about the inevitable misery that life tended to bring with itself every now and again.
Perhaps some evil force was playing games with him, ripping him away from everything that he'd managed to build up just to stick him into the body of an orphan in a country and culture on the brink of a civil war. No seeming purpose to his existence and the knowledge that he was a result of a rape committed against what should have been the brightest witch of her age.
Or perhaps this was simply the context of the beautiful opportunity that he'd gotten to make something out of a death that he perhaps did not remember, but that a force of good had used to give him a second chance.
But probably it was just a coincidence, a clerical fuck up somewhere in the higher echelons of the soul management administration. These things often were. Maybe he'd get a bill someday that he'd overdrafted some karmic credit card that he'd never known existed. All Harry could reasonably do in the face of these great uncertainties, injustices and ironic twists of fate was to keep going forward as he always would have.
"Are you finally out of your phase?" Dudley asked him in the back of the car, explaining that it was something teenagers were wont to experience and that Harry shouldn't worry overly much about it.
"I guess I am," Harry replied, locking eyes with his aunt in the rear-view mirror and seeing the way she squeezed the steering wheel, Vernon asleep on the passenger seat.
"Happy New Year then," Dudley said. "I wanted to wait until you weren't feeling sad anymore."
"Happy New Year, Dudley," Harry replied and let his head rest against the cool car window and watched the lights of the city blur by. "Let's see what this year has in store for us, huh."