Relics

**********************

Petunia Dursley's screams didn't stop until her husband found her staring at the doorstep, and even then they stopped only because she was startled by her husband's shout of outrage.

"Do they think we're a ruddy orphanage?" he exclaimed, looking down at the carefully wrapped baby. "Filth like that doesn't belong in this neighborhood, people like us live here to get away from the drunks and the vagrants and . . . don't touch it, it might have a disease!"

Petunia was on her knees, with shaking hands removing an envelope that sat on the baby's small chest. "It's addressed to me," she said.

"What?"

She opened the envelope, paying no attention to the fact that the baby, who had been awakened by her screams, had gotten over its initial shock and was now crying loudly. Her face turned green as she read the contents of the letter.

"What is it?" Vernon demanded again.

"Get it inside, it'll wake the neighbors," she said through clenched teeth.

"I'm not touching . . ."

"Fine." She swept the baby into her arms, closed the door, and then deposited the baby on the floor inside the front hall. "It's my sister's," she told him, her jaw still locked in what appeared to be a very uncomfortable clench. "She's dead. She and her husband have been blown up."

"Blown up?"

"The house was destroyed, all they found was the child." Her eyes narrowed. "Exactly the way she would go, isn't it. Her meddling finally caught up with her."

"Caught up with her?"

Petunia's eyes seemed to focus on him again. "Vernon, it's going to become very tiresome if you intend to repeat every word I say. My sister -" her voice seemed to rebel at even pronouncing the word "- and her husband have been killed by some renegade of their kind, and this is their child." She turned her attention back to the letter, and her face turned even paler and greener than before.

"What?"

She looked up at him with wide, horrified eyes, one hand pressing the letter to her heart. "We have to keep him. He has to stay here."

No amount of screaming and arguing from Vernon could shake her determination; the child had to stay. Petunia destroyed the letter before he could read it, and she refused to explain why she was so set on keeping the child. He simply had to stay.

Petunia found it nearly impossible to ignore the baby, whose name she had properly remembered as Harry, despite his status as an interloper in her family and a distraction from her devoted care of her own child. For one thing, Harry made himself quite difficult to ignore by crying day and night.

She couldn't rock him or bounce him around all day; she had her own child and other things to do around the house. Eventually, despite the fact that the child's cries upset her own precious baby, she learned to block him out. She and Dudley would watch television in the living room with the sound turned all the way up, leaving the other child in his bedroom upstairs. They would go for walks. They would play in the yard. She would not allow this child to interfere with her life, no matter how dangerous it could be if anything happened to him.

There were a few unfortunate incidents that threatened to rock the boat. When she took him along to Dudley's regular doctor visit, dressed in a one-piece Dudley had outgrown by eight months and still wrapped in the same blanket in which he'd arrived at Privet Drive, the doctor's eyes nearly fell out of his face.

"This is your sister's child?"

"Yes," she'd replied tersely.

"You're certain this child is eighteen months old?"

"Yes." She could feel her jaws locking.

"Well." The doctor lifted Harry, clad now only in his nappy, and held him close while running a hand over his body. "I'd almost say he suffered from failure to thrive, except that he looks as though he's *lost* weight. He's the size I'd expect from a ten-month-old, but his skin is loose here -" he pinched Harry's armpit lightly "- and here -" his thigh "- as though he'd been a bit heavier but lost it. Has he been ill?"

Petunia shook her head in the negative.

"No vomiting, or anything? Does he eat?"

"Not as much as Dudley, but he eats." It was true. Certainly this child was not entitled to the extra treats she might give her own son.

"Well," the doctor said again. He laid Harry on the table and began performing all manner of strange actions over him. "His eyes follow me well enough - his teeth seem a little slow coming in, I wonder . . . a bit worried about his muscle strength, he doesn't appear to be able to lift himself easily - although his reflexes are all right - ow!" The doctor smiled unexpectedly at Harry, who was clutching tight to his index finger. "Well, the muscle strength in his hand is good enough. He's gripping my finger as if he thinks it's going to be taken away."

Petunia left the doctor's office with her face more set than usual and a sheaf of papers about Harry - diet information, exercises she was meant to be doing with him . . . From then on she made certain Harry ate at least half as much as Dudley - she had no intention of going to any special trouble, if he was runty he was runty and that was that, but she wouldn't sit through another examination like that one.

Then there was the neighbor who commented on how tiny Harry was for his age, who wanted to give him a gift one day but Petunia refused. She talked to the entire neighborhood, it seemed, about Harry's size and about how there must be something wrong with him.

Petunia wouldn't have minded, except that they appeared to be judging her skill as a mother.

It was when Dudley was three that he threw the tantrum about not having enough room to play and about being bothered by Harry all the time. After a brief, whispered conference with Vernon after dinner, Petunia went up into her nephew's room.

Harry was sitting on the floor. The room was practically empty; this would be a wonderful place to store some of Dudley's toys that just wouldn't fit in his room anymore. Petunia had never really bothered to do anything with Harry's belongings; anything he'd ever used was still in the little room. He hardly ever outgrew any of his clothes anyway, since they all started out so big on him. The blanket Harry had been wrapped in when he arrived was spread across his bed - it was still nearly large enough to cover him as he slept.

Clutched in Harry's hands as he sat on the floor was the other blanket, the thin cotton crib blanket that someone had folded inside the larger one when they wrapped Harry for delivery to Privet Drive. He had only a small assortment of toys; all things Dudley had broken or rejected. There was a small toy horse (Dudley thought animals were for girls), a toy car with one wheel missing, a stuffed cat given to Dudley by Aunt Marge and immediately rejected, and a few other relics. On a table beside his toys was a crayon drawing that looked as though it was intended to be an owl, or some other large bird. It was done all in brown, Dudley's least favorite color.

"Harry," Petunia said. The boy barely responded, as usual, but merely glanced at her before returning his gaze to the floor and the corner of his blanket.

"Harry," Petunia repeated. "Dudley needs this room now. Your uncle and I have prepared another room for you downstairs. Come along now, and bring your things with you."

Harry merely looked at her as though he hadn't understood a word.

She produced a grocery sack and thrust it at him. "Here, put your things in this. Go on, now, hurry up."

Very slowly Harry got to his feet and took the sack from her outstretched hand. He padded in his bare feet over to the table of toys and laid each one carefully, one at a time, in the sack. He never put down the blanket, which was looking faded and none too clean. When every toy was in the sack he took the drawing in his hand and padded over to the door, dragging the sack behind him.

Petunia prodded him down the stairs, carrying two more sacks filled with his clothes and shoes. There were already some shelves in the large cupboard under the stairs, and Vernon had squeezed a camp bed in there as well. There was a light bulb with a chain to turn it on and off, and a crawl space under the stairs for extra room. All in all, for a small boy like Harry it would suit just fine.

"Go on," she said, giving him an extra prod, "put your things in." She left her two sacks on the camp bed and went off to draw Dudley's bath.

When she returned to check on Harry, she was exasperated to discover that he had emptied his clothes into the dusty crawl space under the lower stairs and carefully arranged his toys on the shelves. The crayon drawing was propped against the wall on one shelf.

She swallowed her annoyance - if the boy wanted dusty, wrinkled clothing what did she care? - and said, "Well Harry, isn't this cozy?"

Harry didn't say anything. He was sitting on the camp bed, holding his blanket.

Two years later, when she enrolled both boys in the local school, their new teacher expressed shock that the boys could possibly be related. As this was the best compliment she could imagine, Petunia was very pleased.

The teacher looked sympathetically at Harry's oversized clothes (a pair of khaki pants Dudley had worn when he was four and a baggy grey jumper Dudley refused to wear because of the puppy on the front) and commented, "It's so hard to remember what size they are, isn't it? Especially when you have two to buy for."

The teacher wasn't smiling anymore when Petunia was called to the school to meet with her and the school nurse. They asked a lot of questions about what Harry ate at home, what games he and Dudley played together (Petunia was hard pressed to think of any), how often he played outside, and whether he had been ill as a small baby.

The nurse explained that Harry was much too small for a boy of five, but that wasn't his only problem. Harry hardly ever spoke to the other children and needed great encouragement to play with them. He couldn't learn to ride a tricycle even though his cousin had arrived at school already able to pedal one. He picked at his lunch, although he always drank two milks. Sometimes he just sat very quietly, clearly not listening to the story or the lesson or anything else, and running his fingertips over the odd scar on his forehead.

In short, the nurse said, there was something wrong with Harry. He had developmental problems. He was quite possibly mentally challenged. He might be autistic.

They wondered how Petunia had never noticed that there was something very wrong with her nephew.

Petunia explained that Harry's father had been very disturbed, and not very bright, and that probably the child had inherited his mental defects.

The next year she enrolled Harry and Dudley in the nearest public school. It would cost more, but the staff were less enraptured with newfangled methods of child psychology.

Harry's teachers were baffled by him. After six months she was being told again that he obviously had some sort of serious problem. But these teachers had more the right idea - they said Harry had a behavior problem, an attitude problem. He lied. He refused to answer questions.

"I just don't understand him, Mrs. Dursley!" the second-form teacher wailed. "I try to involve him in the lessons, in the class discussions - I ask him what he got for last Christmas. He says he doesn't remember. I ask what's his favorite animal in the zoo? He doesn't know. What's his favorite game? He doesn't know. His cousin loves Hamburger Garden, but Harry says he's never been there. Dudley likes computer games; Harry says he doesn't know any. I just don't know what to do with him!"

At home, fortunately, Harry was causing his least amount of trouble ever. He sat most evenings very quietly in his cupboard. When Petunia looked through the grate to check on him, he was generally either squeezed into the crawl space playing some silent game or lying on his bed with the faded, torn remnant of his blanket over his face and the other blanket wrapped tightly around him.

It didn't last forever. Harry learned to stand up for himself when the other children picked on him - which they would inevitably do because he was so different - and even learned to argue with his aunt and uncle and get punished for it. But even when that mess happened with the letter and Harry's being whisked off by a giant and returning with a cauldron and a pet owl and who knew what else, she noticed that Harry packed his worn-out blanket in with his clothes in his school trunk.

*************************

A very small boy was sobbing relentlessly on a bed in a darkened room. The same boy was sitting in a bright kitchen, a fat blond boy throwing food at him. He was lying on a small cot in what appeared to be a closet, clutching a worn blanket and a stuffed cat. He was in a schoolroom drawing a picture covered with a lot of green crayon scribbles, ignoring the children who teased him and threw crayons at him. He was in the closet again, lying on his stomach and saying something quietly to a small plastic horse. He was in a hallway, and a tall man was leaning over him and asking, "What do you mean by these lies, Potter? I don't understand why you find it necessary to lie about such a little thing as what you ate for dinner! Your cousin says you went to a pizza restaurant . . ."

Harry opened his eyes and looked up rather calmly at the ceiling of the Potions classroom.

"That was pitiful," a cold voice drawled from across the room.

Harry swallowed about ten smart answers and said only, "I'm tired."

"Who was the man?"

He sat up slowly. "My second-form teacher. He hated me."

"I can't imagine why."

Harry ignored the sarcasm. "He always thought I was lying. I don't know why I never just said 'Dudley did go to a pizza restaurant but they didn't take me.' I guess I didn't think he'd really care."

"Why were you in a closet?" Snape had taken a seat on the edge of his desk. He sounded, and looked, careless, and Harry wondered (not for the first time) why he bothered asking these questions. He probably enjoyed hearing about someone else's misery.

"It was my room," Harry said shortly, getting slowly to his feet. "Until I got my Hogwarts letter and my uncle got scared that the school knew where I slept."

"Your bedroom was a closet?"

Harry shrugged. "They hated my parents, they hate magic, so they hate me. They thought you could squash magic out of a person. Can we go again now, please?"

"What did they tell you about your parents?" Snape's voice was cool, but his eyes were glittering with - hatred? He was obviously remembering last year, still comparing Harry to his father.

*So am I,* Harry wanted to say, but instead he said, "That they died in a car crash. Nothing else, until I got my letter. Then they said my parents were freaks and deserved what they got." He wanted to stop there, but more poured out. "When I got here Hagrid gave me pictures of them. I'd never seen any before. He was the one who told me how they died. I never knew anything about them - no one told me anything, until Professor Lupin and -"

Snape's stare narrowed, and Harry felt sure he could see straight through to the tears that were pricking behind Harry's eyes. Then he said calmly, "I am certain that the werewolf has a great many things he could tell you. A great many. But now is not the time to *want* information - not when you are still pathetically open to anything the Dark Lord might send your way. Do you understand?"

"Yes, sir." Harry's voice was like steel.

************************

The attic of Number 12, Grimmauld Place was crammed tight with family heirlooms no one found attractive anymore ("not enough jewels or Dark Magic," Remus muttered), boxes upon boxes of old papers, and, interestingly, some childhood things of Sirius's and probably Regulus's that Sirius had dragged up there when he first returned to the family house. Because Sirius had divided the estate between them in his will (probably as a result of influence from families like the Blacks and the Malfoys, being convicted of a crime did not strip legal rights or property from a wizard), Remus and Tonks found themselves in the unenviable position of ridding the house of all remaining traces of the Black family. Sirius had specifically asked that, in the event of his death, they do what he would have done - completely overhaul the house and make it a normal home.

While Remus poked through boxes containing old legal records, attempting to identify those stolen from the Ministry and to place a date to them, Tonks handled the delicate job of sorting through Sirius's belongings. He paid as little attention to the process as possible until she called, "This is interesting - any idea what it is?"

It was a box big enough for a large pair of shoes, and the yellowing label on it read, "For Harry, on his first day at Hogwarts." "Yes, I know what it is," Remus said. He ran one fingertip over the box, drawing a line in the dust. "It was sealed when Harry was born - the day after, if I remember correctly. Sirius was the one who kept it."

"Is it safe?"

"Of course."

"Then we'll let Harry open it - five years too late," Tonks decided, setting the box aside. With difficulty she lifted a larger carton and dropped it at his feet. "This was with it in Sirius's vault - look familiar?"

Remus knelt and examined the carton carefully. It had once held butterbeer - a lot of butterbeer - and was made of nailed together wooden boards. One corner was stained black as if from a fire. Someone had hastily burned the name "Harry" on one side, but there were no other markings. "I've never seen it before," he said honestly.

"Reckon we should open it, then?" Tonks said, watching him watch the box. "Just to make sure it's not dangerous . . ."

"Yes," he agreed. He ran his hands over the seam at the edges of the lid. "It's nailed on."

With both their wands working at once, they had the nails out in moments. Remus tentatively lifted the lid while Tonks kept her wand trained on it, but nothing happened other than a cloud of dust rising. The box seemed to contain a pile of black cloth, with a brittle, yellowed piece of torn parchment sitting on top. Remus unfolded the parchment and read aloud, "Andromeda - No time to explain. If something happens to me, give this to Harry. It's safe, I promise. Love to Dora. Sirius."

"Hang on," Tonks said. "There's a bit of parchment stuck here between two of the slats - ow - OW, splinter -" She put the end of her injured thumb in her mouth and read around it, "Sirius Black, Vault 711."

"He put it in his Gringotts vault?" Remus said.

Tonks shrugged, still sucking her thumb. "I guess he figured if he died, my mum would get his stuff. I can't imagine him leaving it to anyone else in the family."

"But he left it to you - us."

She frowned at the note Remus still held. "Well, he hasn't called me Dora since we, er, re-met. And that note looks pretty old. It must have been before he went to Azkaban. I was only eight."

"You mean he wrote this before . . ."

"Must've been before he went after Pettigrew, yeah." She pointed to the note. "Sounds in a hurry. He must have sent this to his vault, figuring if the Death Eaters got him, Mum would give it to Harry when she found it . . ."

"Because he would have assumed Harry would be - where? - somewhere in the wizarding world, I suppose. Perhaps with me. Or, more likely, some other wizarding family."

"Why does he say it's safe?" she asked.

"Because he knew he would be blamed," Remus said after a moment. "Think about it - if he's dead, no one knows he didn't betray James and Lily. Then he asks Andromeda to give this strange package to the baby . . ."

"Right. Good point."

"So he must have packed this box for Harry . . ." Remus trailed off and pulled the black cloth out of the box. In the thin sunlight that filtered through the attic window, they could both now see that the cloth was a heavy set of robes.

"James's dress robes," Remus said quietly. "Sirius must have taken whatever he could salvage from the house, and kept it for Harry." He buried his nose in the robes and inhaled. "Dust and soot," he said, coughing.

"Why did he never give it to Harry then, once he escaped?" Tonks asked softly, watching Remus fold James Potter's robes.

"Perhaps he was waiting for his sixteenth birthday," Remus said.

**********************

His father's robes were long - James must have been much taller than Harry. They also smelled of smoke and fire, although one of Mrs. Weasley's cleaning spells would likely take care of that.

He'd popped into the newly-deregulated fire to speak to Remus at Grimmauld Place, and found both Remus and Tonks sitting somberly at the kitchen table with an enormous dirty box between them. "Can you come all the way through?" Remus had asked. "It's late, you won't get in trouble."

"What's happened?" Harry had asked immediately.

"Nothing," Tonks said quickly. "We just found some things that belong to you."

They handed him a small box first and told him to open that one. As he unsealed the lid, Remus said, "We made this for you when you were born. You were supposed to have it when you went to Hogwarts - I forgot all about it, and Sirius must have, too."

Somehow, Harry was able to laugh at the contents of the box: an odd collection of Zonko's jokes, a pile of Chocolate Frog cards, a deactivated Snitch that sat quietly in his palm . . . a sampling of the school treasures and havoc-wreaking equipment of his father's best friends.

The bigger box was different. The first thing he pulled out was the robe, which Remus quietly identified for him. Next came a very soft blue jumper, well-worn and fraying at the sleeves, which was obviously much too small for the wearer of the dress robes and must therefore have been his mother's. He set it reverently on top of the robes.

The next thing his searching hand touched was a small vial of pinkish liquid. Tonks said softly, "That's Madam Lyonne's perfume - they still make it. Those bottles are enchanted to keep the perfume good until it runs out."

Harry carefully uncapped the vial and breathed in the scent of a field of honeysuckle. "My mum wore this?" he asked Remus, but he already knew the answer. Hermione had told him once that people remember smells much better than they remember anything else, and he knew this scent. The memory that went with it was fuzzy at best, but he knew that at some point in his very early life this scent had meant *Mummy*.

The next item Sirius had grabbed from the Potter house sent tingles up Harry's spine. He felt both awed and morbid as he picked up what must have been his mother's hairbrush. This would have been an entirely silly artifact, were it not for the fact that strands of the auburn hair he hadn't seen in fifteen years were still twined in it. It hadn't been long enough for the hair to look dead; it looked as though Lily might have used the hairbrush yesterday. It was the closest he'd come to touching his parents since he was a year old.

The next thing was a framed photograph. The people in it still waved happily at Harry, even though the glass over their faces was broken and scorched black in one place. Harry's eyes quickly found his parents in the center, resplendent in a combination of Muggle and wizarding wedding gear. Sirius stood to James's right; on Lily's left were Remus and an ugly burnt-out black spot. It gave Harry chills to think that Sirius, while packing this box for him before seeking out Peter Pettigrew, had taken the time to first burn Pettigrew out of the already-scorched wedding photograph. "Who are these others?" he asked Remus, to avoid looking at the black spot any longer.

Remus took the frame from him and looked closely at it, a sad smile playing over his face. "These are a few of your aunts and uncles and cousins, Harry."

"Are they -" Harry started to ask, but then he saw the look on Remus's face and said, "Oh. All of them?"

"Most," Remus replied. "For one reason or another. A few are probably alive still, but I haven't had any contact with them. Possibly no one has." He cleared his throat and said, pointing, "This person you know."

Harry peered at the frantically waving little girl, aged about six or seven, in the corner of the picture. At first glance she looked a bit like Draco Malfoy, except for her open and friendly expression and the fact that she wasn't so pale. Her hair was long, straight, and light brown, and she wore a crown of flowers twined in it. She turned sideways in the photograph to whisper to a woman next to her, and the woman turned with a smile to adjust the little girl's flowers. Turned toward each other like this Harry could guess that they were mother and daughter, and he could see in sharp relief a profile, a nose that he recognized. It was sharper on the woman, but equally recognizable on her daughter. For a horrified moment he wondered why Bellatrix Lestrange would have been invited to his parents' wedding, but almost immediately he realized that the smiling woman in the photo must be Bellatrix's sister, Andromeda.

"This is you!" he said in amazement to Tonks, handing her the photograph.

"Oh!" she said when she saw. "Wow. Yes. They wouldn't let me morph at all that day, I remember, I was so annoyed."

"You were in the wedding party," Remus remembered.

"No one else knew any little girls." Tonks handed the photo back to Harry. "Well, you have excellent blackmail material there, if you ever care to use it. I'd recommend you don't," she added, winking at him.

"You don't look like this anymore," Harry said in a manner that was almost an accusation.

"No," she admitted. "When I went to school - well, the Death Eaters were still being rounded up and tried, and their photographs were on the cover of all the papers every day. I looked - well, you see. I was in Ravenclaw, I had a nice Muggle surname and a collection of disco albums . . . but some of the other kids, the older Slytherins, recognized me in the train station on the first day, and, you know," she shrugged, "I decided not to look like a Black anymore. It's fairly easy to keep one appearance once you get used to it."

Harry wanted to say somehow that he was sorry, or that he wished he could have altered his infamous appearance as easily as Tonks had altered hers. Instead he asked, "Can I see?"

She understood immediately. "I don't do it often," she said. "Only when I go to see my mum or something. But just for you two, eh?" A moment's concentration, and then her features melted subtly into different ones. Seeing the transformation like this, Harry could see how very slight and quite methodical the difference was. Tonks's heart-shaped face lengthened only slightly to take on the sharp look of her mother and her aunt. Her nose grew fractionally longer but more pointed, and developed the tiniest crookedness in the middle. The shape of her wide eyes grew more almond than round, and their color changed to a bright green. The shape of her bones became more apparent beneath the skin of her forehead, and her eyebrows arched. Light freckles appeared on her nose - probably the legacy of her Muggle-born father - and her hair lightened to the brown-blond in the photograph. Had Harry never seen Bellatrix, he would have thought Tonks looked like a perfectly ordinary English girl, if perhaps a bit more angular and aristocratic than the average Cockney. Because he had seen her aunt, he saw the hard Black features softened only slightly by Tonks's rather mousy coloring.

"Good heavens," Remus said quietly. "I had actually forgotten what you should look like as an adult."

"Most people have," she said, blending her features back to their accustomed appearance and turning her hair pitch-black. "Another relic of the past, eh, Harry?"

This brought them back to the box. Apparently not much of the house had been left intact other than the nursery, because everything else in the box had obviously belonged to him when he was a baby. The copy of 'Pat the Puffskein' was a bit grey around the edges, but the little boy and his puffskein still waved merrily from the front cover. There were a handful of impossibly tiny baby outfits, most with bunnies or ducks embroidered on them, but one with a pattern of Snitches, Bludgers, and Quaffles. There was an odd-looking rattle ("You loved that; you used to hit people over the head with it," Remus commented), an empty bottle with a dried-out rubber nipple, a pair of tiny mittens, a pointed wizard's hat that would have fit on a kitten. When he picked up the hat, a small packet fell out of it. The packet appeared to be filled with tiny soft toys, each no bigger than a baby's thumbnail. "What on earth?" he wondered, laying the packet on the table.

Tonks leaned in close and squinted at the little animals. "I wonder," she said thoughtfully. She pointed her wand and performed a simple restoration charm. Immediately the animals grew to the size of normal soft toys, bursting the packet as they did. "He shrank them," she said unnecessarily. "Must have wanted to fit everything in your crib into this box."

Indeed he must have. There were about twelve stuffed animals on the table now, a mixture of magical and non-magical critters. The largest was an enormous teddy bear that must have been twice the size of Harry when he was a year old; the smallest was a toy puffskein the size of a grapefruit. In between there was a stuffed dog (a terrier, not a large black dog), a penguin, a whale, a duck, a rabbit, a unicorn, a dragon, an owl, a slightly odd-looking cat that might have been meant to be a kneazle, and, to Harry's great amusement, the exact same stuffed ordinary cat he'd had as a child - the one Aunt Marge had given to Dudley. Someone - clearly not Aunt Marge - had bought him the identical toy when he was a baby, and it had been waiting in Sirius's vault for him while he played with Dudley's rejected toy.

He excused himself soon after that to slip back into the fire. Tonks hugged him hard before he left, and then handed him the two boxes which she had carefully repacked and shrunk to carrying size.

Back in his dormitory, with all the other boys asleep, Harry quietly levitated his school trunk onto his bed and closed the curtains around him. Kneeling, he removed the miscellaneous objects in the trunk and, pointing his wand, made the bottom of the trunk disappear. Underneath was the secret compartment, not visible from the outside but bigger than the "real" inside of the trunk, which Remus had taught him to make. It was similar to the compartment in which Mad-Eye Moody had spent a year imprisoned, except that it would respond only to Harry and would not open for anyone else.

Inside the secret compartment was a carefully arranged assortment of things no one else would ever have been allowed to see. There was a plastic toy horse standing guard over a car with one wheel missing and a film canister lid pressed into its place. There was a small conclave of toys having a chat in the corner: a pink mouse that was meant to be a cat toy (a Christmas present one year), a plastic man that had fallen out of one of Dudley's toy fighter planes, a bright blue feather bound to a stick with a bit of string (a homemade figure Harry had created when he was six and unwilling to throw away the beautiful feather; he called it, creatively, Featherman). Near the toys, reverently folded, was a small and ragged cotton blanket printed with faded ducks. In a nest created by the blanket lay two marbles and a small rubber ball. The stuffed cat, its nose worn shiny by years of tight hugging, lay on its back covered with the blanket that had once wrapped Harry. The sides of the compartment were lined with childish drawings: something that he remembered rather than recognized was an owl, and several drawings of Mrs. Figg's cats all generically labelled "Kitty" in large crayon printing.

There was much more room in the compartment than his childhood belongings occupied. By shifting things around he was able to create the arrangement he liked. His baby clothes, neatly folded, went under his ragged crib blanket with its nest of marbles. When he moved the horse and its friend the broken car to another corner, there was room for his parents' wedding photo to be propped against the wall of the trunk with his mother's perfume and her hairbrush sitting in front of it. Before he placed the perfume bottle in the trunk, he put a drop of it on the collar of his pajamas to smell as he fell asleep.

The copy of 'Pat the Puffskein' leaned against another wall, under a drawing of a brown "Kitty." In front of that he arranged his rattle, the baby bottle, the little mittens, and the tiny wizard's hat. Then he very carefully filled the rest of the open space with the stuffed toys - regrown to their normal size - from his parents' house. The cat was tucked under the blanket with its more worn twin. With a small extension of the compartment spell he was able to fit the large teddy bear in with everything else.

When he was finished he sat back on his heels and surveyed his work. His father's robe and his mother's jumper he would put in the bottom of the regular compartment of his trunk; tomorrow he would ask Ginny to help him clean away the sooty smell. He put his trunk back together for now and replaced it on the floor, then climbed back into bed and pulled the covers over his shoulders. He wondered what it would have been like if Sirius's box had somehow found its way to him when he was still a child living with the Dursleys. There was nothing in the box that Dudley would have wanted, so nothing would have been stolen by his cousin. Aunt Petunia would no doubt have incinerated the little wizard's hat, and the tiny shrunken toys unseen with it. Her sister's hairbrush - a much too personal artifact - and the wizard's robes and moving photograph would have met the same fate. Harry knew full well that he never would have seen most of these things had they been delivered to him before his arrival at Hogwarts.

Still, as he drifted off to sleep, he allowed himself to imagine an impossibility. He pictured having everything in the box, including his stuffed toys grown to their real size, at the Dursleys'. Perhaps Remus had come to bring him the box, and had discovered the toys and secretly re-grown them. He imagined lying in his cupboard on the camp bed covered with the blanket that had carried him from his parents' house. His toy shelf now included his parents' wedding photograph, with the strange black spot - perhaps Remus would have protected him by freezing the people in place so that Petunia wouldn't take it away. He would also have placed his baby clothes, the mittens, the hat, the rattle, and his old bottle on the shelf with his toys.

In his mind, he had hung his parents' clothes - scented by his mother's perfume - from the nail on the wall to make curtains of his old life. He lay on his bed with Dudley's stuffed cat in one arm and his own in the other. His baby blanket lay over his chest. Arrayed around him in a friendly circle were the other stuffed toys, and his head rested on the enormous embracing body of the teddy bear. In his mind, his cupboard was not only the refuge it had been throughout his youth - even when he was imprisoned in there against his will - but also the hideout where he could be his parents' child again, and not feel as though that child was only a relic like everything else.