August, 1991

Harry has been back for just over a year and a half when the payoff finally occurs. He knows it's been coming for weeks now; Mrs. Figg's bin-out-back has been an invaluable way to keep track of the Wizarding news, never mind the results of his subtle and discreet temporal machinations courtesy of her hidden back-door key and floo... Bit of an inconvenient homebody, yes, but with all those Kneazles to breed and feed, she has to go out for supplies sometimes, and it's for the Greater Good in any case. After a long, long lifetime of living for others, Harry's more than willing to adopt the cliché on his own behalf this time around, and Notice-Me-Not charms are, in his opinion, the most underestimated and greatest invention since treacle tart.

He sits on the curb off the corner of the tiny petrol station and convenience market at the corner of Wisteria Walk, scuffing old butts and dusty gravel into weary little piles with the toe of one trainer as he nervously shreds a scrap of napkin. The bus – Muggle, not Knight - wheezes to a halt, and a single passenger disembarks. It is a man, gaunt and scraggly, but clean for all that, and carrying a simple leather satchel. He has the face of a beaten and debased angel, and hungry, wild eyes. When he spots Harry opposite, he halts in his tracks and stares. Harry stares back, the can of Coke beside him forgotten. In the breathless, dry moment, his fractured universe slams back together, spinning behind the smeared lens of his glasses, and he lets out a small, pained sound, almost a whimper. Harry stumbles to his feet as the man approaches, his thin child's hands clutching at his thighs. The man crosses the street in three great loping strides, but slams on the brakes for the last, approaching him almost gingerly. He stands before Harry, looking down at him, and his own hands, pale and thin as Harry's own, whiten to near translucent as he clenches them against his emotion.

"Hello, Harry," Sirius Black whispers. "My God. Oh my..." He brings his free hand up to cover his bitten, scarred lips: the grey dry stubble, those hungry, wild eyes. Eleven-year-old Harry reaches up and touches the hand wonderingly.

"Padfoot," he whispers. The hand drops. So does the satchel, and then Sirius is lifting him in his arms, and Harry is wrapping his legs around his waist and burying his face in the thin, rough neck as he frantically inhales the scents of stale cigarettes and hospital linens, and they stand there for a long time as the broken pieces of their mutual worlds spin and reform like the broken shards in a kaleidoscope, creating something both old and new and brilliant and beautiful, and finally, finally, right.

Harry Potter had died at the ripe old age of a hundred thirty seven, his wife Ginevra heading the bright army of their spawned generations at his deteriorating and celebrated side. He'd woken, as he had once before, in the train station at King's Cross. The Old Guard was there, waiting with banners and the loaded trolley cart. The Next Great Adventure, the pamphlet someone shoved in his hand said, and oh God, he wanted them to just go away, because he'd had enough adventure for any hundred lifetimes, and if the reward was just more of the same...

He'd stood there stubbornly till they all drifted away, confused and hurt and bewildered. Mist and shade, shall this too fade? he'd thought, surprised; he hadn't actually thought it would work; he was just pitching a bit of a last hurrah of a tantrum on principle; he'd been Voldemort's horcrux, after all, and something of the man's antipathy towards his own end had been bound to show at the last moment - but then the train had faded to white, and the white to pale, and bloody buggering hell, he'd panicked momentarily. I don't want to be a ghost, that wasn't the plan, I don't want...

Maybe I should have thought this through. Aren't House affiliations and associated tendencies supposed to die when you do?

Then he'd faded too, and when he'd solidified again, it was to the stuff of nightmares, or at least of annoying and near-excessively never quite forgotten, bad dreams. Bloody buggering hell, he'd said out loud as he'd found himself on his back under a ragged sheet, in a small boot cupboard that in the worst, most humid days of summer, could pass for the Gateway to Mordor. Less than two inches from his nose, a smaller, but no less intimidating version of Shelob greeted him cordially. Harry batted her away, and sat up, sweating and grimy in the dark. Do not tell me. Do not...

A quick peek down his tattered drawers had confirmed it, and he'd flopped back, half-moaning half laughing, pressing the heels of his hands to his eyes.

I've died and gone to hell, he'd thought despairingly, but after perhaps another moment of wallowing, he'd sat up again, blinking in realization as the kaleidoscope spun behind his eyes. Seconds later he was scrambling out of the cupboard into the moonlit kitchen, and was staring at the calendar on the wall, each day neatly and compulsively checked off in blue ink.

Nineteen eighty nine, he'd whispered aloud. December twentieth, nineteen eighty nine, and he glanced out the window at the snow-swollen full moon, and sat down hard, right there in the middle of the pristine scrubbed floor of the late and unlamented 4 Privet Drive. Solstice night, what dark and mirthful magic is this, bloody buggering bollocky hell.

A timeless while later, Harry Potter pushed himself to his feet, nicked a frosted Christmas tree from the cookie jar on the counter beside the microwave – say what you would about Aunt Petunia, but her pistachio shortbread was to literally die for - and retreated back to his cupboard. Moments later it opened again, and he padded out, went to the fridge, hauled out every fixing he could find, and made himself a sandwich that would have had Ron weeping in admiration and/or lust. That wandless Notice-Me-Not, courtesy of Auror 101, worked just as well in the pursuit of ham, beef, chicken and cheese as it had in the pursuit of Dark Wizards.

Harry considered his options as he sat at the table in his drawers, skinny bare legs swinging freely as he demolished the sandwich and guzzled a full two pints of full-cream milk straight from the bottle (heavily laced with chocolate squeeze from the other bottle alongside; Dudders had always shrieked as if poisoned if anyone ever dared to suggest that he should drink the stuff plain). His options and his priorities.

December 20th, he said aloud. His voice was as thin and small and boyish as befitted a nine year old. Five days till Christmas.

He polished off the last of the sandwich, glugged the last of the milk, rinsed his dishes neatly and wiped the counter out of habit (that old saying on how if you wanted to know how a witch would turn out you should look at her mother had, at his end, proved dismayingly accurate; he'd loved Ginny, but bloody buggering bollocks, she'd turned into a harridan over crumbs and smears in her old age), and ran a hand through his hair as he stretched mightily and contentedly... He was about to head back to his cupboard when he heard a noise from the other room. Curious, he slipped down the hall and peered in. Dudley was there, poking and prodding at piles of presents, a glinting razor blade in hand as he carefully sliced bits of paper and squinted to see what lay underneath. Harry rolled his eyes as he leaned against the door in the moonlight and watched. The hiss of disappointment was almost as predictable as the gigantic cloud of gas that escaped as the pudgy boy bent over too far.

Nostalgia was one thing, Harry reflected as he beat a hasty retreat, gagging. Some memories, more than others, were better left dead and buried. Dead and buried and rotted, and the walls rattled again, and he shut himself in the musty dark gratefully. Shelob winked at him from all eight of the shimmering full moons of her eyes.

Full moon, he thought. Right. Priorities. Let's see how this does you for a Yuletide present, Moony old man.

Harry scrabbled in the far corner of the closet, retrieved a crumpled piece of paper and a broken crayon, and began to scribble in concentration. He wasn't the best potioneer ever to come out of Hogwarts by a long shot, nor even one of the most mediocre, but Luna's boy, Lorcan, had been bitten when he was twenty, and after the first transformation had emerged, not broken, but furious and indignant.

"Bugger this shit " he'd said roundly as he'd mauled his way through twice-wolf high stacks of research on the subject from every available resource. "I'm not going through that every month for the next hundred years," and when the stacks had proved useless, he'd hauled out his cauldron and the remains of his seventh year potions kit, and, with the kind of single-minded focus that had, on the part of Tom Riddle (though coupled with a great deal more sanity) made Harry's first childhood less than ideal, had proceeded to hammer out a liquid cure for lycanthropy in six months flat.

It even tasted good – a bit like spiced plum cake, with a wicked whiskied kick. As a really added bonus it was made of entirely, perfectly normal Muggle ingredients (the secret, apparently, was in the Mr. Smiley enviro-cleaning fluid) and had a brewing time of precisely fifteen minutes and six seconds. All happy coincidences for a nine year old wizard-in-temporary-exile, and the finished product not only solved the proverbial furry little problem, but also mixed well with Christmas pudding and soothed the stomach besides.. . Aunt Petunia was as predictable as she was nasty, and tomorrow, December 21st, Harry would be put to work mixing the icing for the fruit cakes she made for St. Andrew's Tinsel Fair on the 23rd. It wouldn't be hard at all to sneak a tailored tin into the mail – he was in charge of walking the finished results over to the church too, after all, and after that...

Harry Potter tucked the remembered recipe under his pillow and fell promptly and soundly asleep.