Warning: Allusions to SA and depictions of trauma & depression
Thank you to my new Patrons who keep me warm at night: Bluejay32, Billy Fauve, HaZ, didi195555
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A day after Christmas, Harry was sitting on the couch in the living room, fiddling with a letter.
It was the letter that Snape had given him back at the Christmas party, but it wasn't only that. It was also a portkey which he'd analysed thoroughly before actively touching the thing overly much.
Remembering watching the fourth Harry Potter movie with the portkey and the ritual had traumatised him a bit when he'd been younger.
But, this portkey was not something which would bring him any issues. Firstly, there was no more thread of magic connecting it to anything else, so it couldn't be remotely activated.
The letter said the timer had been set to 20h on New Year's Eve, with another self-activation to bring the user back to where they'd come from. It was a relatively complex piece of magic, but not as complex as the vanishing cabinet. Harry had been able to decipher with the help of his magic sense and arithmancy skills that the time mentioned in the letter was true.
Additionally, he'd been able to confirm that the location mentioned within it, Munich, somewhat matched the locational signature of the portkey itself. He'd been able to narrow down the intended destination to either south Germany or North-West Austria, so it was about correct. The fault lay with his arithmancy skills, not the portkey.
As for the reason, well.
Harry had been slightly suspicious of the necklace that he'd glimpsed on Snape's neck for that one-second time window. His occlumency had helped him capture that moment in all its stunning clarity.
But just because he'd seen the necklace didn't mean that Snape was a follower of Grindelwald. The symbol of the deathly hallows was also worn by those on the path who wanted to communicate to others that they were seeking.
If that was the case, if Snape was a seeker rather than a radical ideologist, then it was sort of ironic that the man had talked to perhaps one of two people who knew the location of all the three hallows.
Dumbledore knew the location of the wand and in fact, had it alongside the resurrection stone. Presumably he knew where the cloak was.
Harry paused.
There hadn't really been any particular effect when Harry Potter combined the artefacts in the book, so perhaps the tale of the master of death was more metaphorical. After all, with the cloak, you could escape death, with the wand, you could inflict it, and with the resurrection stone, you could grasp beyond its veil to talk to those it had taken.
Other than Dumbledore, the only other person that knew of the location of all three artefacts was Harry himself.
And well, Harry had gotten no indication that this was an evil Dumbledore AU, so it wasn't like the world would implode if the old man got some extra power by borrowing the cloak from James.
Regardless, the invitation from Snape likely wasn't to some sort of Grindelwald appreciation society like he'd feared, but rather to a social gathering of the more successful half-blood witches and wizards on the European continent.
A networking opportunity, basically. It would not be a bad thing if Harry wanted to leave Britain after Hogwarts and go work at some sort of research institute that wouldn't require absolute secrecy like the Unspeakables would.
Also, to be honest, he hadn't been to a proper party in a while, usually celebrating with his family, eating some special food, staying up until midnight and going to watch the fireworks in London. Seeing new people, maybe sneaking some champagne, wouldn't be that bad.
To have that sort of party that he was craving, however, well, he would have to wait for Cedric and Penny to turn 17, invite Tonks for good measure, and then buy a few bottles of Whiskey and go for a crawl in the still flourishing techno-scene in perhaps… Berlin.
The city wasn't yet the world's clubbing capital, so it would be possible to get into some good parties without having to be part of the scene for several months already.
The good venues hadn't moved completely underground yet…
Harry paused as the enchanted broom he'd gifted his aunt swept past him at dizzying speeds, making its best impression of a homicidal roomba.
Thinking about it, was there anything that would be better in the future? The climate would be more fucked, and people would be dumber when they received their new smartphones and spent most of their time on screens. Food would be worse as ingredients became even more processed, the economy would go to shit, and vacation locations would become overpacked with influencers and stupid foreigners.
Ljubljana would be full of Italians, Milano full of the Swiss, Monaco too full of rich assholes and Berlin too full of posers.
"Cursed timeline," Harry muttered to himself. "At least we'll have Skibidi Toilet, Milf Manor and Covid." He consoled himself, then looked outside the window, through a slit of the tightly shut blinds, to see Dudley crash to the ground trying to do the trick on his new BMX. He winced, but his cousin simply picked himself up and kept going.
"Harry," a voice said from the entrance to the living room, causing him to turn his head just in time to see his aunt frantically jump out of the way of the speeding broom, which was obliterating the dirt in the house with facts and logic, but mostly with its inbuilt scourgify. He'd finally managed to make the animation and cleaning enchantments coexist. Now, he just had to find a way to make them coexist a bit less enthusiastically.
"Thanks again for the gift," his aunt said kindly, a bit stiltedly.
"I can improve it by next summer, I swear," Harry promised, "make it less hyper."
"Well, it's not about that," his aunt said before pausing and sighing. "There was another thing I recently found which I thought might have been a good Christmas present, but I didn't want to ruin it in case it wasn't."
The redhead tilted his head. He'd gotten a collection of rare stamps from his uncle, a rare David Bowie record from his aunt, and a few sketches from Dudley, which the boy promised would be worth a lot when he made it big as a painter in a few years. Considering that Dudley had already abandoned that dream in lieu of becoming a professional BMX rider, Harry wasn't necessarily holding his breath.
"What is it? I don't think there's much that could ruin Christmas," he joked.
His aunt sighed. "I was cleaning out the attic recently, you know when I got the Christmas decorations. I found something from," she paused, "Lily, a box. I don't know how I could have missed it this whole time. It's like it suddenly appeared there."
Harry froze as he let the words tumble through his head like a tumbleweed through the desert.
He didn't have a lot of things from his mother. She'd died when she'd been 16. Not really the time by which most people had amassed a vast inheritance to leave for their next of kin. All he had were a bunch of family albums, which were too painful to look at, everyone but Petunia in them dead and buried, and a few mementoes that only had forgotten sentimental value to the person who'd owned them.
"Maybe it would have been the wrong time," he eventually agreed with his aunt's assessment, not knowing how he would have reacted to getting a box of his mother's things for Christmas.
"It's a time for family, and well, she was your mother, even if for a little bit," Petunia said awkwardly.
"She was also your sister," Harry replied before suddenly remembering something. "Out of curiosity, who delivered me to you after I was born?" he asked. It would have been weird for Snape to lie about this, considering how easy it was to verify, but it was still better to check.
Petunia pulled a face. "A… friend of your mother's, not a good or useful one. Brooding teenager by the name of Severus Snape. Some other people helped us arrange the funeral after. I never saw him again."
"Severus," Harry rolled off his tongue. "His parents must have been fans of the classics," he commented as he got up from the yellow sofa.
"Horrible people, poor boy, now that I think about it," Petunia muttered before bidding him to follow and taking him upstairs to where she'd rolled down the ladder leading to the attic space of their little suburban house.
"Go on your own, I already laid it all out for you," his aunt said and stepped back. Harry was feeling that she wasn't doing so because she didn't want to see him, but rather, because she didn't want to see the objects.
Unlike him, she'd actually known Lily, so she'd definitely suffered more from her death. Going by their relationship in the books, well, the last thing she'd said to her had probably been something nasty. Although, he didn't know how much his aunt had been involved with her sister's life after the assault.
It was understandably enough not a time anyone spoke of particularly fondly, or at all for that matter.
Harry breathed in deeply, braced himself and then slowly went up the ladder, one rung at a time, to avoid getting there too quickly.
Once up he immediately noticed the rather large ratty moving box set in the middle of the otherwise neatly organised attic.
A clang and a crash resounded from downstairs, sounding like it was coming from the garage. His uncle was at work then.
Nobody would disturb him.
Harry decided to take this time to be alone and closed the door after him, telekinetically locking it behind him and enclosing him in darkness. A flicker and a ball of light appeared over his right shoulder, illuminating the space.
A hand went up to Harry's face and clawed its way down as he breathed in shakily.
"Not Harry, not Harry, please not Harry," the boy whispered to himself as he put a hand on the box and gently opened it.
His relationship with his mother was nonexistent, he hadn't known her after all. But it wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that his entire life was a flower that had blossomed in the dung of her personal tragedy.
He'd thought himself stronger, but the fact he'd never met her and didn't know who his father was… so that he could kill him with his own two hands rankled him and emotionally impacted him way more than he would have ever thought.
In the end Harry was an adult, but adults could still get traumatised by personal tragedies, and in fact, often did.
The open box lay before him and the first thing he pulled out was a set of female Hogwarts uniforms.
"Why did you keep it," Harry muttered darkly as he put it to the side and analysed the contents that were revealed underneath.
There were a few books, non-magical to his senses and his eyes. "The Magic Mountain" by Thomas Mann, "The Process" by Kafka and "Siddharta" by Herman Hesse.
"German authors, no sense of national pride, I see," Harry muttered as he pulled them out and hefted them in his hand before putting them to his side. They were translations, and he'd already read the originals. It was a bit ironic however that his mother had been reading "Siddharta" before her death and his birth. Good book, better band.
Next, he pulled out some writing supplies, the parchment empty and the inkwell's dried up. The quills were broken, and the sharpening knife dull and rusted.
Harry blushed as he pulled out the next object, several pairs of women's underwear.
"Mooommmm," he whined. "Grossss…" He sniffled.
There wasn't much more. Some bijoux and one real piece of jewellery. He held up the silver necklace to his eyes and looked at the small emerald rotating on the round pendant.
He hesitated for a moment before putting it on. For some reason, the necklace calmed his beating heart somewhat.
It wasn't an effect that lasted long, and he was disappointed immediately when he saw the last thing in the box.
A little notebook, one of the muggle one's you could buy with a quid with a splattering of colours on the front and which likely didn't even have lines on its paper.
Harry knew what this was.
He sat there for minutes, just staring at it, before eventually succumbing to the inevitability of the situation. A trembling hand went to pick up the notebook before the other one opened it to the first page.
-/-
Who am I? The first entry started in a disorganised but somewhat flowery cursive.
I woke up a few days ago, and people keep calling me Lily, or Evans, or both. It doesn't ring a bell. The hospital wing was horrible. A sense of fear clung to my skin every second I spent there. It was only after I left the castle, Hogwarts, that I felt safe again.
My sister cried when I came home and asked her who she was. The memories came back, but this isn't the Petunia I know. Petunia used to call me names and be jealous. Now she's just broken. She looks how I feel.
But I don't even know how I feel. Somedays, I just wake up in a fetal position, clutching my stomach and vomiting out of sheer disgust. I lay there for hours if it happened at night, lying on my own… Breathing in the smell of puke, staying awake and not blinking until my eyes burn in the darkness. Isn't it sad that this has happened often enough that I have to write it down as a non-singular?
But the worst thing is that every day, every second, more than just who I am and where and how there's one question that keeps spinning around in my mind so much I get dizzy and fall.
I smashed my head on the kitchen counter yesterday, but even the pain didn't distract me from the one thing seemingly intent on occupying my mind.
WHY ME
-/-
AN: Hope liked this cheerful christmas chapter and I hope you're ready for a page of Lily's diary to accompany us every few chapters for the next… months. Finish this dreary tale on patreon (37 (100k words) chapters ahead!) or subscribe for just the love of the game. Also, yes I know there are some minor mistakes in Lily's diary, those are intentional