"Are you sure you wouldn't rather do this the other way, Pet?" Vernon asked, as Petunia left the house to pick up her nephew from school– Dudley was going to be spending the night at Pier's house, and she was certain that– if she was careful– he would never have any idea that anything unusual had gone on with the boy. "We could always just tell the that some friends of his parents are coming to pick him up and then go for a trip into London for a few nights."

"We've already discussed this, Vernon." Petunia looked pointedly at the clock, to remind her husband that she was going to be late if she didn't leave soon. "There's too many risks. I can hardly pull Dudley out of school on such short notice, and Grunnings is unlikely to believe you were sick for so long without evidence." She left out the question of what the freaks might do if they realized the boy had been abandoned and decided they didn't like it.

Vernon grumbled something incomprehensible, but did not make any further complaint. Not even when Petunia stepped back through the front door with the boy following behind her, which was something Petunia was very grateful for. She could not have the boy doubting anything they told him simply because she and her husband had been less than perfectly in tune.

Petunia led the way into the living room, and waited until the boy had perched himself on the edge of the couch before saying another word. "We need to talk about your parents."

The boy looked worried rather than excited, and Petunia was sure that was a good thing. It would be easier to convince him that something very bad was about to happen if he wasn't to ecstatic about learning about his parents to be frightened.

The boy nodded, and Petunia took that as a sign that she could safely launch into the story. "When she was only a little older than you, my sister was approached by–" Petunia paused for a second, the carefully prepared speech that she had spent nearly an hour on having slipped from her mind. "–a cult. They told her that she could do things, things that ordinary people couldn't, and then they took her away."

Petunia paused for longer this time, both in hopes that she would remember her speech and to give Harry some time to process what she had just said.

"She came back for Christmas and summer hols, of course, but she was different." It was only a little noticeable the first year, but it had become more and more obvious as the years went by. "Cold and cruel, like the rest of them. And that boy–" Petunia shuddered at the memory of him, and how glad she had been to learn that Lily had had a falling out with Snape and never wanted to see him again. She had thought that might be the end of her sister's obsession with the freaks, but she had still gone back to them at the end of the summer. "We hoped that if you weren't exposed to any of their kind, then you would turn out normal, but there's not much hope of that now."

The boy looked confused, and more than a little worried. Which was all for the best, since Petunia intended for him to end up afraid of the freaks and she knew from experience that the boy was too canny to take everything she said at face value.

"Why not?" he asked, and Petunia decided to let him get away with the question this time.

"Because you've already started to show signs of freakishness," Petunia said. She and Vernon had briefly discussed lying about that, in hopes that telling the boy he was perfectly normal would make him less likely to take to the freaks, but had decided against it in the end. The risk that he would slip up around the freaks and that they would announce that he was one of them was too high. "That whole mess with turning Ms. Wallace's wig blue, for example. Classic freakishness, destroying someone's possessions just to get a rise out of them."

"I didn't do it on purpose!" the boy protested. Petunia was inclined to believe that, as the boy had shown no sign of directing any of his outbursts in the past, but she also had no doubt that the ruined wig was the result of a freakish sort of temper tantrum and felt punishment was the best way to discourage those. "I didn't even know I was doing it!"

"That's how it started for Lily too." Out of the corner of her eye, Petunia could see her husband nod, and she felt a flash of gratitude for his support, even if the boy might be smart enough to realize that Vernon and Lily had never met. "Little things, not really on purpose. Until she came back from the freak school so eager to show off her new knowledge."

Petunia looked over at the boy to make sure that he was still paying attention, and he nodded. His eyes were wide and he was gripping one of the couch cushions more forcefully than Petunia was comfortable with (what if the little freak broke it?), but she forced herself to take solace in how rattled the boy looked rather than barking at him to put it down.

"And then she brought home a boyfriend." Petunia had met James Potter only once, and that had been more than enough for her. Especially with the way that he had looked at her, not as though she were scum, the way that filthy Snape boy had, but as though she were of no consequence whatsoever. "Mum and Dad were so pleased to be getting another freak in the family."

"They missed your wedding shower too, didn't they, Pet?" Vernon asked tentatively, as though he had not heard the story dozens of times over. "And after they went to all that trouble setting it up."

"Yes." And it was quite a bit of trouble, since Mum had insisted on making roughly a hundred little tarts by herself. And doing most of the decorating. Of course, when her appendix had ruptured and she had been forced to go to the hospital, she had insisted that the shower go on without her. All those tarts would go bad soon enough.

The boy frowned, chewing on his lower lip in a pensive way that was likely to draw blood if he didn't stop soon.

"All that trouble, and they spent the entire time fawning over precious Lily and her freakish boyfriend." Petunia was only mostly sure of that, since she had refused to stay at the hospital and listen to the freak ramble on about how freakishness could solve this problem in an instant, without ever offering to help. " Never mind that he had turned my teacup into a rat– while I was drinking out of it. It was the good china too, the set that we inherited from my Grandmother Evans."

The very memory of it was enough to make Petunia shudder. There she had been, with her teacup halfway to her lips when the smooth texture of china had been replaced by a horrid fur and the thing had begun to move. Lily had scolded her boyfriend, for being so frightfully rude to Petunia, but she had been laughing so hard that she could barely manage it and Petunia suspected that if her mother had not been watching, Lily would not have cared what harm had befallen her sister as long as it amused James Potter.

"He didn't change it back, did he?" the boy asked. He cowered down a little, as though he thought making himself smaller would prevent him from being told off.

"Of course not." The rat had been caught and changed back by Lily, who had then explained the entire disgusting process to Mum and Dad, complete with a few more unfortunate changes to the poor teacup for good measure. It had emerged from this looking entirely unscathed, but Petunia had not been fooled. She had marked that teacup with a dot of permanent ink on the bottom, and when her parents had died and the tea set left to her, she had taken the foul thing into the back garden and smashed it. "Freakishness isn't good for fixing things, only breaking them."

The boy winced noticeably.

"As well as people," Petunia added. The doctors might say otherwise, but she was sure that either Lily or the Potter boy were responsible for her mother's illness, driven by jealousy to do something to keep the attention on them and away from Petunia. "And the freaks don't seem to be too hesitant to deal out injury even to their own kind, much less normal people, if what happened to your parents is any indication."

"You said they died in a car crash," the boy said. He had jumped rather quickly to the conclusion that Petunia was talking about their deaths rather than some other injury he had never been told of, but Petunia did not much mind. It saved her the bother of telling him flat out.

"Of course. A car crash is a perfectly normal way to die. No one would bother asking much about it. A murder on the other hand..." The very idea of needing to think up a way to explain how and why Lily was killed and keep it straight no matter how many times the neighbors asked about it made Petunia shudder.

Petunia had expected the boy to pry further, to demand to know who had killed his parents and why, but he did not. Despite the fact that she had been the one who insisted, all those years ago, that the boy should be strongly discouraged from asking questions, she wished he'd say some, so that she could brush off his questions rather than being forced to admit that she had never bothered to learn how her sister had died.

"One of their lot blew them up," Vernon announced. "Saw it on the telly." Petunia could almost remember it. A gas explosion, that was how it had been reported to regular people, those not 'good enough' to know about the freak's world. "Don't worry, we're almost sure it's not the one who wants to see you."

The boy trembled, and Petunia shot her husband a sharp look. The boy might not be truly smart, the way her Dudders was, but he had a kind of base cunning that was sure to tip him off if they were too heavy handed. "There's no almost about it," she said. "The freak that killed them is dead. The freaks that dumped you here said so in the note they left."

"The note also said that the freak still had followers who might come looking for the boy." The pointed look Vernon was giving the boy told Petunia that his words were not intended to serve as a reminder for her. "Not that they would come here, of course. Freaks don't bother much with normal people, since they think they're so much better than us."

"They left a note?" The boy's voice was trembling, full of some emotion that Petunia could not pin down. "They didn't talk to you at all?"

Petunia laughed. "Why should they? Freaks don't care about anyone except themselves, much less normal people. They didn't want you until they knew you were a freak like them, and I doubt it mattered very much to them what happened to you until then. We could have dumped you on orphanage for all they cared." If it hadn't been for Albus Dumbledore's insistence that living with relatives would protect him from his enemies, Petunia would almost thought it would be safer for him at an orphanage. Whatever aversion that lot had to normal people, it was always possible that one of them would remember that Lily Potter had had a sister once and decide to look her up.

As one of them evidently had. Petunia had never met Sirius Black, but she could only imagine the kind of person her sister would have named her son's godfather. Why he had never bothered to visit his godson before was anyone's guess, since there was still over a year before the boy would be old enough for freak school, but perhaps he thought that he needed a year to make sure the boy was properly freakish. Lily had whined enough about being disadvantaged by her normal background for Petunia to believe it.

The boy made an awkward sort of sniffing sound, and Petunia felt an odd sort of guilt at the idea of having driven him to tears, even if it was for the best. He had to know what those people were really like, before they showed up with their freakish tricks and enchanted him the way they had Lily.

That way, he'd be able to see through all their lies.

Sirius would have been happier apparating to Privet Drive, but as it was considered unwise to attempt to apparate solely off of a street address, and Sirius had an overly nosy babysitter both to remind him of the fact and to invite himself along so as to prevent Sirius from doing anything too dangerous (in retrospect, suggesting that the brooms in the shed only had only suffered a little from woodworms and were still perfectly usable was a bad idea) he found himself corralled into taking the Knight Bus.

Although, Sirius thought sourly as the Knight Bus skidded to a stop and he was forced to cling to the bedpost to keep himself from going flying through the air, if the idea was to avoid injury the Knight Bus was probably the last transportation method one should be using.

"Little Whinging," the Knight Bus Conductor announced.

Sirius jumped to his feet immediately and hustled out the door, but Arcturus, being old and slow, lingered behind.

"Come on, come on, we haven't got all day." The Knight Bus Conductor made a motion as though to grab Arcturus's arm and help him off, but a withering glare from the old man changed his mind.

"Please tell me that we can apparate back home," Sirius whispered, before he caught sight of the little boy shivering on the doorstep of Number Four.

Sirius's first thought was that there was no way it was cold enough for anyone to be shivering while wearing a sweater, even one that was almost big enough to fall off his shoulders. Then he noticed the round glasses and messy hair and remembered the way that James had almost seemed to vibrate when he was really excited.

"Harry!" Sirius shouted. The boy winced and a couple of heads craned over nearby fences to look at him. "Sorry," Sirius mumbled, resisting the urge to shout at the neighbors to mind their own business. "You are Harry, aren't you?"

The boy nodded silently.

Arcturus put a hand on Sirius's shoulder. "Perhaps we should take this inside. I think we would all feel more comfortable without an audience," he said, the words reproachful and pitched to carry across the street.

The heads vanished.

"Aunt Petunia doesn't want you in the house," Harry said, his eyes still pointed at his shoes. "She's got guests coming over for dinner and doesn't want us bothering them. She said we could use the backyard or go somewhere else."

Sirius thought that it was a little strange of Lily's sister to avoid them so, but he brushed it off with the thought that she probably hadn't known how to send an owl to let them know she had other plans for this evening.

"I think I'd like to have your Aunt verify that for herself, young man," Arcturus said. "I don't much fancy being the recipient of her wrath should she decide that she wants you and not be able to find you."

Harry looked slightly terrified by the idea of bothering his Aunt when she had specifically told him to leave her alone. Sirius couldn't blame him. Lily had been downright terrifying when she was furious (and not being able to find her child was one of the few things that made her truly angry) and it wouldn't be too surprising if Lily's sister had a bit of her fire. "Why don't we just stay in the backyard instead," he suggested. "That way we won't bother your Aunt's dinner guests and she can find us if she needs to."

"And have an audience?" Arcturus looked pointedly at one of the neighboring hedgerows, which had a pair of eyes poking out from over the top of it.

"Right," Sirius said. The last thing he wanted to do was slip up in front of a bunch of muggles. More than likely they wouldn't think much about anything weird he mentioned, but there was always the possibility of the Ministry being called in for a breach of the International Statute of Secrecy and that would be downright awkward. "And where are we going to go where we won't have an audience?" Even back at Arcturus's house they were likely to have the house elf spying on them.

"We'll think of something," Arcturus said. Sirius did not think it a good sign that he had declined to say what that something was, but before he could demand specifics, the old man added, "After we talk to your Aunt."

Harry nodded, and opened the door. "Aunt Petunia," he called. "They want to talk to you."

The horse-faced woman who came to the door, scowling like she'd just found doxy droppings in her cake batter, did not resemble Lily Evans in the slightest. If it hadn't been for the flower name, Sirius would have wondered if the actual sister had died and it was Lily's sister's husband's second wife standing in front of him. "Harry," she said. "I told you not to bother me while I'm getting ready for the Smiths."

"I'm sorry, Aunt Petunia, but they wanted to talk to you." Harry shuffled his feet, anxiously looking from Arcturus to his aunt as though he were unsure which he should be more concerned with keeping happy. It was a look that reminded Sirius too much of Regulus, that first summer after Sirius had started Hogwarts.

Arcturus nodded. "He said that you had given him permission to leave with us, but I thought it prudent to check with you before we went anywhere. You know how children sometimes say things that aren't entirely true when they're excited."

"Oh, no. Harry's a good boy, he would never lie." There was something in the emphasis on that last word and the way that Petunia looked at her nephew, that suggested to Sirius that Harry had indeed been caught, if not outright lying then certainly stretching the truth several times before.

"Of course not," Arcturus said, and Sirius could not quite tell if he believed her or not. "Shall we be off, then?"

"Yes," Sirius said, but Arcturus had looked down Harry for an answer.

The boy only nodded. Sirius offered a hand to him and after a couple of second's hesitation, Harry took it and the three of them started off down the street. "Do you know anywhere we could go where we aren't going to be surrounded by curious neighbors?" he asked Harry.

"There's a park down this way," Harry said. "But there are probably still people at it."

"The house would probably be better," Arcturus said. "Mimsy can make us tea and there definitely won't be any eavesdroppers."

"You want to take Harry to the house?" Sirius could sort of see the logic in that, but he also knew that most children were raised in environments far less dangerous than the Black family residences and even if Harry seemed docile now, that was no guarantee that he wouldn't stick his nose into something he shouldn't. "With all the death traps that Lycoris left lying around?"

"They aren't death traps." Arcturus spat out the final two words as though they offended him, and the expression on his face was definitely worth getting into a little trouble to see. "The most they would do is put Harry in St. Mungo's for a few days. And they won't go off if I'm the one to take him to the house."

"I wasn't thinking about them going off when we went home," Sirius admitted, although now that Arcturus had mentioned it he was slightly worried that they might. "I was concerned that he might stumble into them while he was wandering around."

"I thought you arranged this meeting because you wanted to see Harry?" There was something dangerous in Arcuturus's voice, and Sirius glanced down at Harry to make sure he wasn't too frightened.

"I did."

"Then when's he going to be wandering about unsupervised?"

Sirius had any number of answers to that question, but because he did not want to spoil his very first meeting with Harry (that Harry would remember) by getting into a row with his grandfather over something that wasn't really all that important, he kept his trap shut.

"I'd rather go to the park," Harry said. His shoulders hitched up as he spoke, in a defensive posture that suggested he was more nervous about speaking up than he sounded. Which was fair, as Sirius would probably not have dared to get between two arguing adults when he was Harry's age.

"Park it is." Sirius clapped Harry on the back. "Hear that, Gramps. You're outvoted."

"So be it." Arcturus's voice was completely serious, in fact, if Sirius hadn't known the context he might have thought that his grandfather had just been sentenced to a decade in Azkaban, but the corners of his mouth had twisted up into a smile, so he couldn't have been too disappointed.

"So, Harry, what do you do for fun around here?"Sirius asked before they had gone more than a few steps along the road that he hoped would take them to the park. "Do you play any sports?"

Harry shook his head. There went one avenue of conversation. Sirius might not know much (anything) about muggle sports, but he thought he was up to listening to someone else explain them, at least. And if Harry had been much like Sirius had been at nine, he could have easily filed up the entire visit with a diatribe about whatever sport muggles played. "What do you do for fun, then?"

Harry blinked at Sirius as though this question was entirely unprecedented. It reminded Sirius unpleasantly of how he had felt when he had first started Hogwarts, and met children other than his brother and cousins for the first time. He had handled the new and exciting world of strangers by making sure that everyone already knew who he was by the end of September, with the added bonus that conversation could be easily sidetracked onto the relatively safe topic of how he'd managed to smuggle a niffler into the school, which everyone agreed was far more interesting than his mother's howlers.

"I'm good at running," Harry said. Which was not at all the same as 'I like running', but Sirius thought it wiser not to press his godson. If Harry would rather talk about what he was good at than what he liked, Sirius was perfectly content to go along with it.

"You must be good at racing, then." Sirius was tempted to challenge Harry to a race to the park, which would both preclude any further conversation and hopefully coax Harry to open up a little bit, but he was not entirely sure that his time in Azkaban had left him the strength for even that little exertion. A fine godfather he would be, if he collapsed ten minutes after meeting his godson and had to be carried back home by Arcturus.

Harry shrugged.

"Do they have competitions at school?" Sirius asked. There were broom racing competitions in the wizarding world, nothing to equal the size of Quidditch matches, of course, but a witch or wizard who was skilled, determined, and a bit of a skinflint could probably make a living off of winner's purses and Sirius wondered if muggle sports had anything that was the equivalent of that.

"Sometimes."

Sirius waited for a moment, hoping that Harry would elaborate without any need for prodding. "What kinds of times?" he finally asked, when he was starting to worry that the silence would drive him properly mad the way Azkaban hadn't been able to.

"Whenever we do races in P.E.." That did not really answer Sirius's question, as he had no idea what P.E. was, but he decided to let the matter slide. There was nothing quite like being continually pestered about a subject to make a child clam up about it.

"Are you looking forward to Hogwarts?" Sirius asked. He remembered that had been almost all he could talk about from the time he hit eight until he turned eleven and realized that going to Hogwarts meant being away from home– and Regulus– for months on end.

Harry froze, like a deer suddenly caught in the headlights of a car. And that was something that Sirius would have to tell him about, should tell him about, that Harry ought to know, but how could he just tell some child that he had only just met, 'Your Dad was an animagus, could turn himself into a stag. Only he did it illegally, so maybe don't tell anyone please,' even leaving aside that fact that he was currently being supervised by Arcturus, who definitely did not need to know anything about animagi.

"I was terrified of going to Hogwarts," Arcturus said diplomatically. "I was the oldest in my family and hated the idea of leaving my little brother and sister and cousins just to go off someplace and be taught things I could just as easily learn from a book."

"Did you really think that you could teach yourself everything you would have learned at Hogwarts?" Sirius asked. He shot a brief glace at Harry, worried that boy would unhappy about being left out of the conversation, but Harry only looked relieved.

"I was eight years old and had succeeded in teaching myself some very basic algebra. At the time I was sure that nothing could be any more difficult than that, and so I was confident that I could teach myself everything there was to know about everything without ever needing to leave the family library."

Sirius elbowed Harry softly in the ribs, as a sort of cue that he should join in the conversation. "I wasn't ever that presumptuous. Of course I was also tutored by batty Aunt Cassie, who only knew what she was talking about half the time and would make things up if she didn't know the answer to any of our questions, so I was really more concerned that I would show up for my first day of classes and have to be sent home because I didn't know anything."

Harry's face turned even paler than it had before, taking on a greenish tint that Sirius usually associated with someone about to be sick. Sirius patted him on the shoulder in what he hoped would be a comforting gesture. "Don't worry, they won't expect you to show up at Hogwarts with any knowledge of magic. If you can write a solid essay and know your fractions, you're set."

Harry nodded, but did not look entirely reassured.

"So, what are you most excited for about Hogwarts?" Sirius asked, hoping that this would get more than a sentence's worth of answer out of the boy. "You've got to be excited about something, even if it's only Quidditch." That had been the thing Sirius had been most excited about, a chance to play real Quidditch with real teams and none of the nonsense about needing to go easy on Regulus because he was little.

"I'm most excited about not living with Dudley," Harry said. He shot a hard look at Sirius as though daring him to disapprove.

"He's your cousin?" Sirius asked, and when Harry didn't contradict him he assumed that he had guessed right. "Cousins can be awful. I know I would have hated living with Bellatrix. Assuming I survived it of course– sometimes I'm not sure how Narcissa and Andromeda managed."

"Andromeda and Narcissa are both older than you," Arcturus said. "Bellatrix was milder as a child."

"Andromeda said she kicked her cat off the top of the stairs because it had been overly affectionate." The cat had been fine, Andromeda had said, had landed on its feet, stretched, and then slowly sauntered away as though it had intended to go hurtling down three flights of stairs all along, but when Sirius had first heard the story Regulus had been a little toddler not much larger than a cat, and all he could still picture when he thought of it was a tiny Regulus tumbling down the stairs.

"I said milder, not mild." Arcturus turned to look around with a nonchalance that Sirius thought was probably feigned. "Is that the park?" He pointed in the direction of an open plot of grass that could not really be anything but a park, especially with the number of children running around the place.

"Yeah."

"What's that thing?" Sirius pointed at a contraption on the far end of the park, a conglomeration of platforms and slides and climbing things that he would have thought truly fantastic at Harry's age.

The look Harry gave Sirius was one of pure bewilderment.

"I don't go to muggle parks very much," Sirius said. "And it would be sort of weird for a grown man to ask some random stranger about them, don't you think?"

To Sirius's disappointment, Harry showed no signs of amusement at the idea. "It's a playground," Harry said. "For kids to play on."

"Right." There were a lot of kids playing on it right then, but Harry showed no inclination to join them. Sirius supposed it was only to be expected, since Harry was here to visit Sirius and not play with the other kids in the neighborhood. Sirius briefly considered running out onto the playground to join them, before deciding that Harry was more likely to pretend he didn't know him than to play along. "What are those kids doing?"

"Playing football."

"So they kick the ball around and try to get it in one of the nets, right?" Sirius asked, even though Harry's words had already brought back a memory of Lily, freshly graduated from Hogwarts and trying to explain what the big deal about the game was to James. "How do they know when the game's over?"

"They time it," Harry said. "The game ends when the time runs out."

"I suppose that would spare the trouble of having a game that never ends," Arcturus said. Sirius looked over at him and was surprised to see that the old man was looking at the football players with undisguised curiosity. "There was a Quidditch match that went on for nearly fifteen hours when I was at Hogwarts. Hufflepuff vs Gryffindor. Neither team had any reserve players, so the match was forfeited when the Gyffindor seeker fell off of his broom from exhaustion. Though I don't suppose you know much about Quidditch, Harry?"

"No, sir." Harry looked very uncomfortable as the sole focus of Arcturus's gaze and so Sirius decided to rescue the poor boy.

"That's only because you've never had a chance to learn," Sirius said loudly enough to get the attention of both Harry and Arcturus. "I can teach you about it, if you want."

Harry nodded eagerly

And that was enough to launch Sirius into an explanation of the game– complete with highlights from his career as a Gryffindor beater.

"I suppose that didn't go too poorly," Arcturus said, when Harry had been dropped back off at his Aunt's.

"Too poorly," Sirius repeated without agreement. "Harry hasn't even touched a broomstick yet and I've already ruined his chances of becoming a Quidditch player."

"There are far more important things in life than-"

"I know!" But Sirius couldn't shake the nagging feeling that he had horribly messed up. His first visit with Harry, and he hadn't noticed that Harry was terrified by all the dangerous stunts that Sirius had loved playing Quidditch for until Arcturus had pointed it out.

"I shouldn't have come along," Arcturus said.

A nasty part of Sirius's mind rather wanted to point out that Sirius had told him so several times, egged on by the part of him that was jealous that Harry seemed to have gotten on better with Arcturus that was his godfather, but the rest of him was too certain that the entire mess had been his own fault to care. "If you hadn't, Harry would still be sitting at the park being terrified into silence by tales of knocking people off their brooms fifty feet in the air."

"If I hadn't come along, Harry might have been more willing to tell you that he disliked your Quidditch stories himself. Next time-"

"What makes you think there's going to be a next time?" Sirius demanded. "If Harry's Aunt has any sense, she won't let me anywhere near him ever again!"

"You're being overly dramatic about all of this." The expression of vague curiosity on Arcturus's face, showing a kind of disinterest that had probably worked wonders in politics, made Sirius feel like he was being analyzed for some sort of lingering trauma from Azakaban. "Harry is bound to have questions about the wizarding world, and you're the logical one for him to ask."

Sirius privately thought that Harry was much more likely to ask his Aunt to explain things to him- Lily's sister might have been a muggle, but she had no doubt picked up enough to go on from her sister- but he was too exhausted to argue his point.

Sirius wasn't quite sure if it was the aftereffects of Azkaban or approaching middle age, but he seemed to have a lot less stamina than he was used to.