Chapter Text
Harry Evans is perfectly normal thank you very much. He knows that the people around him would tend to disagree.
The teachers at school would probably say that only getting 5 GCSEs isn’t the textbook definition of normal (then they’d probably make some cutting remark that maybe he would’ve passed his exams if he’d so much as bothered to open a textbook), but it’s not his fault that his brain’s the wrong shape for school. The kids down at the skate park would say that the way he flies up and down the ramps, staying airborne for longer than he technically should, never seems to slip or scuff or fall, isn’t quite right, doesn’t quite make sense. His ‘friends’ (the few that still stick around) would contemplate the way he makes and breaks things, graffiti can in hand, sparks at his fingertip, would secretly ask themselves who (or what) Harry Evans really is, (but they don’t even know the half of it). The staff at the latest group home would shrug, secretly wondering if anyone else notices how every time Harry enters the room, the air tastes of static. How he has that glint of wrongness in his bright green eyes. They talk behind their hands about the strange incidences that surround him, the way he’s bounced around for years, never quite seeming to stick. But at the end of the day, they brush it off, because for all his quirks, Harry is a good kid, one who mostly sticks to curfew, who’s only been arrested once (or twice), and who’s technically completed secondary school (in that he showed up to exams).
They pity him. He knows they do. After all, it isn’t his fault that soon he’ll age out of the system, and be laid bare to the world, find out that he isn’t enough. A poor, underqualified, non-white kid from inner city London? It isn’t his fault that soon enough the world is going to eat him alive.
So Harry Evans would like to believe that he’s perfectly normal thank you very much. He really would. Maybe if everyone else thinks it, then he’ll wake up some day and it’ll be true. He tries (and fails) to be less jagged, to fit in better. He doesn’t like to think about it for longer than a few minutes, just like he doesn’t like to think about the future, about how he’s destined for nothing in particular, how he’s not really headed anywhere, how he’s sleepwalking through life (and he doesn’t know how to wake up). He doesn’t like to think about how he’s a freak who is able to do distinctly freakish things, and that his life, his whole identity, is about as far from normal as it gets. Thoughts like that can get dark (something he knows all too well). And besides, pretending is much easier. It’s got him this far.
»»»
When Albus suggested leaving the child with his living family, his muggle family, McGonagall wanted to scream, wanted to strike that man where he stood. So much grief, so much loss had occurred that night, and then Albus wanted to yank any hope, any chance of redemption, from her, from everyone. He made points about blood magic, about protection, and protection was what the boy needed. She made points about leaving a biracial baby with his estranged, emotionally distant family (who were more than a little racist). Albus didn’t care to hear it.
‘All that matters is that Harry is safe’ he said.
She wondered, even then, if he truly knew what that word meant. But she could feel the weariness, deep in her bones, and all she could think of was how it wasn’t right, it wasn’t fair. The teacher wasn’t supposed to outlive the student. She let him leave Harry on that doorstep, because it made sense. It may not have been the right thing to do, but it made sense.
On Harry Potter’s 11th birthday, the letter was returned, unopened. It wasn’t abnormal, especially for muggleborn students, for more than one letter to have to be sent before the message got through. She wished she’d had that prickling feeling of wrongness, she wished she’d known something wasn’t quite right. In fact, it wasn’t until she penned the 75th letter that Albus finally agreed to let them pay the Dursley’s a visit.
‘It’s probably nothing’ he said, ‘there’s probably a perfectly normal explanation’.
As Petunia closed the door in their faces, no apology in her eyes, no feeling at all for the bombshell she’d just dropped on them, McGonagall felt herself seething.
A perfectly normal explanation. If the fact that Harry Potter had not lived with them since he was four years old could be classed as normal. If the fact that they spent weeks, which became months, which became years, trying to track Harry down, only to have to face up to the fact that he was lost. No beacon of hope in the darkness. No boy who lived. They lost him. He was out there somewhere (or he was dead), and they had no way of knowing where.
And as the wizarding world descended further into the dark, into the chaos, McGonagall wondered if leaving him on that step that day may have lost them the war.
»»»
Harry keeps dreaming of fire. He’s not quite sure what it means, and he’s not about to start contemplating it (it’s not as if he’s writing a dream journal, or anything else equally as wet, and it’s not as if he thinks everything has a meaning, or an outward connection). It’s just… strange.
He dreams of flames, he dreams that he’s not only in the flames, he is the flames. He can feel them and smell them and taste them, dancing around him, swallowing him down then spitting him back up. It burns him and numbs him until he feels like his insides are melted and he can’t quite see straight. Then there’s this falling feeling and suddenly everything is green. The green fills his body and it’s blindingly bright, bursting out of every pore in his body, leaving his raw and open, battered and bruised. And somewhere, far away and simultaneously right behind him, a woman screams.
He always wakes up at that point, his face wet with tears (that’s another reason he doesn’t like to think about it or talk about it. Harry Evans is not a crier, and some random dream lady wailing does not change that).
The third reason he doesn’t want to dwell on his increasingly unsettling recurring dream (nightmare), is Aman. What Aman will say, what Aman will think. He’s already freakish enough without having weird nightmare hell dreams to go with it.
“God Evans, what’s gotten into you? What’re you acting so droopy for?” Aman has this oddly insulting way of showing he cares.
“I keep having this weird dream” (he shouldn’t have brought it up. If he wasn’t so high right now he probably wouldn’t have).
Aman is instantly interested (of course he is, he believes in the universe and it’s interconnectedness and all of that shit), “What’s the dream about? Set it up for me!”
“Nevermind.” Harry goes to sit up, to shift his head from Aman’s chest, to untangle their limbs.
“Don’t be such a tease!” Aman flips them over so he’s on top of Harry, pinning him down. “Tell me! Tell me! Tell me!” he begins to chant.
Harry rolls his eyes but he has this half smirk on his face. “Okay fine. It’s where I’m smoking with my boyfriend and he’s being really annoying, like really, really annoying, he keeps sitting on top of me and nagging me, so I punch him right in the nose and he dies of blood-loss”
Aman sighs dramatically, “Sounds like your subconscious is trying to say that you’re a prick and your classically handsome, incredibly charismatic boyfriend isn’t going to let you have any of his mum’s baklava anymore.”
Then it’s Harry’s turn to gasp affrontedly. “You wouldn’t” he breathes, injecting as much upset into his tone as possible. “Fine! Stop holding the baklava hostage and I’ll tell you about my stupid dream.”
“Works for me!”
“Okay, so like, it’s like, I’m on fire, but I also am the fire, then it’s green and this woman shouts.”
“That’s it?”
“Yes that’s it.” Harry’s tone comes off a lot more bitter and resentful than he intended.
Aman’s face scrunches up, as he searches for the deeper meaning, (the deep universal truth that Harry’s subconscious is so clearly trying to convey, the truth which obviously only Aman can decipher)
“Oh my God! I’ve got it!” his eyes are so wide and bright, and he looks so delighted that Harry almost forgets that he doesn’t want to talk about this stupid dream, doesn’t want to make this not thing into a thing. Delighted is a good look on Aman.
“It’s your origin story!”
Harry groans, instantly deflating and wishing more than anything that Aman would quit with the whole “Harry Evans is a secret superhero” crap.
“Come on Evans, use your head for a minute! Where were you left when you were four years old?”
Harry glares at him, silently wishing he hadn’t shared that tale of childhood abandonment. “Outside a fire station” he grumbles
“A fire station, flames, how are you not making this connection? I mean, getting left outside a fire station?! That’s like the kind of shit that would happen to bloody superman”
“Aman you have not idea how much willpower it is taking me not to thump you right now.”
Aman continues with his tirade as if Harry never spoke. “Come on! Origin story plus superpowers? If you ask me” (he didn’t), “You’re a hero in the making! That’s what this dream is trying to tell you.”
Harry really wants to thump Aman right now. Aman who knows how much Harry hates the H-word, hates when his ‘abilities’ get called superpowers, and yet he does it anyway.
But then Aman gives him that lopsided smile, and attempts to smooth his birdsnest of hair. “Plus, you’d look really fit in a cape.”
“Aman, come on now. Everyone looks fit in capes.”
“Yeah, but you’d look really fit.”
“Right. And if I’m a superhero, then would that make you my hot one dimensional love interest who I save from mortal peril?” Harry teases.
Aman throws back his head and laughs, despite the fact that it wasn’t that funny.
“Do I take that as a yes… or?”
“Take it however you want.” Aman smirks, “Come on then superman, show me what you’re made of.”
Harry complies.
With a flick of his fingers, Aman’s body weight is no longer resting on him. Slowly, slowly Harry lifts him up in the air, until the top of his head is almost scraping the ceiling. Then Harry spins him around, sending him floating to each corner of the room, changing his direction at last minute. Aman whoops and cheers, breathlessly exclaiming that it ‘feels like he’s flying’. And Harry rolls his eyes, regretting that Aman’s room isn’t a little bigger, that they can’t do this outside because of the whole living in a densely populated city and Aman is fucking flying (well, it’s more like as if he’s a puppet being jerked around by invisible strings) thing. For the grand finale he leaves Aman suspended above him, and then focuses hard. The light flickers slightly as Harry uses his superpowers (the word still makes him uncomfortable), to make the contents of Aman’s overflowing rubbish bin, and the off-colour stain in the middle of his carpet vanish.
“Ta-da!”
“Why when I ask you to show off your powers do you always use them to clean my room?” Aman wonders aloud.
“I’m so glad you asked! For my next trick, I’m going to transform you into someone who isn’t a slob!”
“Oh yeah?”
“There’s no way I’m shagging a guy who doesn’t even know how to empty a bin”
Aman rolls his eyes, then leans down and kisses him. The second Aman’s lips are on his, everything from weird dreams, to freakish superpowers melts away, and it’s just the two of them. Just the two of them left in the world, and in that exact moment, Harry is normal.