Title: Dirty Harry
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairings: Harry/Severus, background Lily/James and Neville/OFC.
Content Notes: Fairy tale AU (Beauty and the Beast/Cinderella), angst, omniscient point of view
Rating: PG-13
Wordcount: This part 4600
Summary: Harry was cursed to die at birth. His parents managed to hold back part of the spell, but it means that Harry is now cursed to be seen by everyone around him as a dirty servant. Only true love's kiss can break the curse, but how can that ever happen when Harry disgusts everyone he meets?
Author's Notes: This story has elements from both "Beauty and the Beast" and "Cinderella," but is not exactly like either. This is one of my "From Samhain to the Solstice" fics for this year. It will have two parts.

Dirty Harry

In a time when mountains could still walk, in the tiny city of Gryffindor which had once been part of the great Hogwarts Kingdom, there lived a man called Lord James Potter. He had married a woman named Lily Evans whose father had actually been a bandit, making their wedding one of the surprises of the century. But everyone who knew Lord Potter also knew that it was like him to fall in love with the bandit's beautiful green-eyed daughter when he was overpowered and taken to her father's campsite one evening.

Lord Potter was also silver-tongued. By the end of the evening, he had managed to talk the bandit into releasing him and into allowing his daughter to visit Gryffindor.

It didn't take long after that until Lord Potter and Lady Lily were married, and their wedding day was full of laughter and rejoicing, especially since both Lady Lily and Lord Potter's boon companion Lord Sirius Black were magical, and they turned all the goblets into black cavorting dogs at a certain point in the evening. Lord Potter was obligated to make them stop when his deep-drinking guests complained. But also, no one laughed louder than Lord Potter at the prank.

Someone must have been offended by the prank beyond apologizing, however. Or perhaps he was offended that someone non-magical had married a witch. That evening, a handwritten note blew on wings of magics through the bedroom window where Lady Lily stood gazing out over the trees of the thick forest, marveling at her good fortune.

The note said only, Your firstborn will die at birth.

Lady Lily swallowed and crumpled the note in her fist. She nearly threw it away, thinking it the product of maliciousness, perhaps from one of the several young women who had been prone to sigh over her husband when Lord Potter was unmarried.

But she was magical. She knew the power and the wrath curses could cause. In the end, she retained the note and showed it to James the next morning.

Lord Potter read it over gravely. Then he looked up and said, "We will see what we can do."

The curse manifested when Lady Lily was in labor. It was a crackling, green thing, exactly the color of the poison that had taken the life of Lord Potter's father when he was young. But Lord Potter was waiting outside the room where Lady Lily was in labor with the iron shield she had told him would be needed.

Lord Potter lifted the shield with a tireless arm, as brave as the legendary Godric Gryffindor. "Be gone from this place!" he commanded.

The curse darted towards him and earthed part of itself against the shield. That proved it was based on fairy magic, which cannot stand the touch of cold iron—an excellent reason for never allowing your children to go around without cold iron on their persons if you can help it.

But that left part of the curse unaffected, so it was not all fairy magic. It tried to pass through the slightly open door of Lady Lily's room.

There, Lady Lily reared herself up on her bed, her newborn son in her arms, and met it with an upraised hand and a surge of motherly love. The curse, a force of sheer hatred, shrieked through the air in mindless attack, and met the shield of love Lady Lily had raised.

Around the bed she had laid a circle of rowan leaves and salt, protection from evil and purification. Lady Lily had woven the spell with her own harsh breaths as she worked through the contractions, and the last addition to the circle had been the blood of her afterbirth.

From the depths of the earth, from the depths of her love, from the depths of her disgust for the wizard who had sent the curse, Lady Lily cried, "Avaunt!"

The curse flared like a falling star and went out. But a tendril of green still snaked through the circle and the blood and all the protections, and wrapped greedily around the body of Lady Lily's son.

Lady Lily bowed her head in resignation. She had accepted that her son would be touched, tainted in some way. But as long as it was not death, she thought, they could live with the consequences and perhaps overcome them someday.

As she watched, all the dirt in the room seemed to fly to her son and adhere to his body. His brilliant green eyes grew dull, his hair was tangled and messy, and his face seemed more squashed than those of other babies.

At the same moment, a great voice spoke through the air, perhaps once a human voice, but distorted by the darkness of the curse. "He will turn all others away, and the curse will be broken only by true love's kiss."

Lady Lily bowed her head as that great condemnation faded, and wept for the fate of her son.

Harry Potter grew up as a kind of servant, despised by everyone in the castle except his parents.

He knew his mother and father loved him. Because his father had held the shield when he was born and his mother had woven the protection that saved him, they loved him with all their hearts. His mother would comb out his hair and sing to him, and his father would brook no insult to his son, shouting when the taunting words were brought to him.

But all that happened, of course, was that the taunts were spoken out of Lord Potter's hearing, and Harry's siblings—Rosemary and Charles and Arabella and Kevin—shoved him down in the dirt and refused to play with him, and the people in the castle forgot he was their lord's son and put him to labor in the garden and the stable.

The summer came when Harry was sixteen and he told his parents to stop intervening for him. It only made matters worse for him, as did the fact that those stolen moments made his siblings more jealous.

Lady Lily reached out and laid a hand on Harry's cheek, studying him where he stood in front of her great mirror. "Are you sure this is what you want, Harry?"

"I'm sure." Harry swallowed and looked into the mirror. To himself, his own face always looked shining and clean, but he knew that wasn't what others saw. Their lips curled when they looked at him. "I—have to find the answer to this on my own."

"But you're our son." Lord Potter frowned at Harry from the doorway of his mother's bedroom.

"I know," Harry said, and he smiled with the love at his father that few people ever saw. To them, even his sister Rosemary, closest in age to him, it looked like a twisted sneer. "But I can't just be that. I can't ever be a ruler like you are, or a witch like you, Mum."

"You're magical." Lady Lily spoke the words like a prayer, and ran her hands over Harry's forehead. The sign of the curse was there, a long, lightning-like scar that seemed to extend much further when other people saw Harry.

"I can't show it," Harry said quietly. Every wand that had tried to bond with him had exploded. "But when I work with plants…there's something there. I think that's where I'm going to find the answer, if it's anywhere."

"A tincture of rosewater isn't going to defeat a curse like this, son," said the low rumble of Lord Potter's voice.

Harry smiled at him. "Then I'm going to find more powerful plants."

Harry worked in the gardens.

There was a procession of visitors to Gryffindor in those days, because Harry's sisters were coming of age to be betrothed, and there were people who were interested in taking his brothers, both magical, as apprentices. Harry ignored them when they sneered at him, those people on their prancing horses or flying carpets or blue camels. (The blue camels were the result of wizards and witches practicing with spells that frankly seemed useless to most people).

He instead worked with the plants.

They twined around his hands and snagged his ankles with sharp little tendrils and sighed when he left them, unless that was the wind. For plants have a singing and powerful magic of their own, and they remember those who treat them kindly. Harry learned how to predict when the roses would open, and when the birch leaves would return to the trees, and which plants would live through the winter, and when the first frost would come, and even how to give the plants a portion of his own magic that would let them live through such dangers.

But he found no cure for the curse. Indeed, he earned more sneers—from everyone except Lord Neville Longbottom, the betrothed of his sister Rosemary, although even Neville was cautious around him—because now he was covered with dirt in truth, and his hands were callused, and he slept in potting sheds more often than he did in the castle.

Lord Neville understood plants and the gifts of them, and sometimes he would work companionably with Harry in the garden, side-by-side. Those were the most peaceful moments Harry knew.

But now he was nineteen, and there was no cure in sight. Harry had begun to wonder if he should disappear and live in the woods, a recluse, where at least he would not be sneered at, and where the trees could care for him.

The man came walking up the path, not riding. Harry ignored him, however, as he bent down and grubbed in the dirt around one particularly stubborn weed that seemed to have magical roots. It could be someone coming to petition Lord Potter for justice.

The man stopped in front of him. Harry looked up without stopping his work. He found that he preferred the way his face frightened people lately. The forest sounded better and better every day.

However, the man stared at him instead of turning away. He wasn't as ugly as Harry was, Harry thought, although his skin held the color of lichen and his nose looked as if it had started short and then been tugged out from his face. His eyes resembled a raven's, cold and watching for the main chance.

"Who are you?" the man demanded.

"The gardener, sir." Harry wondered if the man had come for some rare plants. Lord Neville had spread the words around that Harry was good with plants and could even make them grow in the way that only magical gardeners could, and so Gryffindor made some money selling herbs and the simples Harry could make. Not much money, and those people despised him as much as the others did, but at least it was a small way to help his parents.

It was one thing that had kept Harry from running into the forest, although he hadn't acknowledged that to himself yet. They would have to hire another gardener, and the plants might not want to work with the one they found.

The man tilted his head, like a raven waiting for a wolf to rip open a carcass. "You have eyes like a woman I once knew."

"Lady Lily, sir?"

"Yes. The lady of the castle. Yes." The man's hands clenched and wriggled against one another for a second like a bucket of worms. "Is she here?"

Harry nodded. "Yes, sir. If you go straight up the path and to the door, you can tell them who you are." He didn't know if his father's guards would want to let this ragged man in, but his mother was kind to everyone, and if the man had known her, then perhaps he was a bandit who had risen to nobility. There were some like that.

The man glanced down at the weed Harry was pulling, and let his lip curl. Harry was relieved. That was more usual to deal with than the man's kind of intense scrutiny. Easier. "When dealing with magical plants, you must use magic."

"I am, sir. But the parts of the weed that are buried under the earth are far enough away from me that they haven't received the infection I gave the weed yet. It grew these enormous roots that must reach for a league. I'm pulling it up slowly as they die."

"You are magical?"

"Yes, sir."

"But you are a servant!"

Harry shrugged, a bit amused. The man was probably magical himself, and despite how he looked, Harry was thinking that he was born nobility, now. "Not every magical talent can support someone on their own, sir. And look at how dirty I am. I was lucky to find a respectable house that would take me on."

The man gave him a long, searing look, and then walked on up the path. Harry shook his head and turned back to his weed.

"What happened to the weed?"

"Fancy you asking about that, sir, after a month," Harry said, a little amused. He nodded to the compost pile in the corners of the gardens, which was big enough that it looked like a baby dragon. "Part of the corpse is there."

"Only part?" The man drifted towards Harry and then stopped and watched him like a raven again. Harry assumed that that was the way he watched most everything. If he had only known, this level of interest for someone who had proclaimed himself a mere gardener was unusual, but Harry didn't know that.

"Yes. The rest of it came back to life and attacked me, and I had to burn it."

"It should not have come back to life if you infected it with a proper disease."

"My magic isn't perfect, sir," Harry said without offense. Lords and nobles could say all sorts of things to him. Unlike the rest of his siblings, he'd never been allowed to grow up with the notion that he was special. The curse made people sneer at him even when visitors to the castle knew that he was firstborn son of Lord Potter and Lady Lily. "That spell was the first one I invented, and it was meant to deal with smaller plants."

The man was silent, but he didn't go. Harry turned back to his irises, considering them. It was probably time to cut them back. He'd fed them magic to encourage them to grow, and now they were spreading like the forces of Slytherin marching on Hogwarts centuries ago.

"I wish to find some plants," the man said suddenly. "Rare ones. Moonborn lilies. Have you heard of them?"

Harry turned around and stared at him, thoughtful. At least the man didn't have one trait that was common to nobles: he didn't resent Harry staring at him. He regarded him back until Harry nodded. "My sister's betrothed talked about them. He said they only grow where magical blood has been spilled."

"Yes, but I find murder distasteful. I only want to find some already growing and harvest them."

Harry didn't laugh. Something about the dark tone of the man's voice made him sure that the lord would resort to murder if he thought he had to. "Well, all right, sir. As it happens, I know a place in the forest where some might grow. But I've never been there on the night of the full moon because of the werewolves around here."

The man shivered almost imperceptibly, but nodded. "Would someone with a wand be enough protection?"

"Sure. Do you want to send a guard with me, and—"

"I was speaking of myself."

Harry raised his eyebrows and stared at the man hard. Outside of his parents, he'd never heard of anyone rich and powerful who would brave danger at the side of a dirty gardener like him.

"Not all of us disdain hard work," the man said, with a sneer that oddly seemed directed at the people he was talking about instead of at Harry.

After thinking about it for a moment more, Harry nodded. "Then yes, we can go this evening, sir. Do you want me to meet you outside the gates?"

"Why there?"

Harry didn't take offense. This man was the sort who would suspect that people were trying to murder him, probably. "So that no one will have to see you meeting with me and your dignity won't be offended, sir."

The man looked hard at him for a while. Harry just returned the gaze. Really, other than cutting back the irises and then tending to the chores of watering and weeding that always went on, he had little to do this afternoon. And working with flowers had taught him (as it teaches everyone who does it properly) patience.

"My name is Lord Prince," the man finally said. "Does that mean anything to you?"

"Only that you're a noble," Harry said. He had heard something about the Prince family, but he had never thought about memorizing it. He didn't have the proper lessons because of his curse, anyway, what with all his tutors breaking off at some point to complain about the nauseating smell coming from him, or chastise him for being so stupid.

Lord Prince nodded. "Then I shall come into the forest with you."

It seemed an odd means of making the decision to Harry, but then, he had accepted, from the behavior of his parents' visitors and his siblings' betrothed, that nobles behaved oddly. He nodded back and turned to get the implements he would need.

By the time he glanced over his shoulder again, Lord Prince had vanished.

"How did you become so conversant with the forest?"

"My mother used to live here," Harry said. He thought that was safe enough. After all, lots of low-class people lived in the forest at that time (and some perhaps still do, which is why well-educated children should stay out of them).

But it got him a sharp stare from Lord Prince, for some reason. "And she still lives here?" he asked. They were walking through a deep clearing where Harry's magic was easing the way so that the leaves didn't crackle under their feet with every step. "She taught you the kind of magic you wield?"

"No," Harry said. He halted under a tree to peer ahead. The light of the full moon was falling into another clearing that looked empty at the moment, but Harry had once found wolf tracks here. He didn't see anything right now, though. "I mostly taught that to myself. She was born here, though."

"I see. What is your name?"

It occurred to Harry that it was odd the noble hadn't asked him that before now, but he dismissed the notion a second later as they carefully wended their way around the clearing. It was probably weirder that he would ask the name of a dirty old gardener now. "Harry."

"And your last name?"

"I have no last name." That was true for the most part (although Lord Prince might have found it less true if he had been able to think about it). "I'm not noble, my lord." He paused when a dark shape moved off to the side.

"That was a werewolf." Lord Prince's voice was low, and his hand gripped and pulled out a crystal. Harry felt his eyebrows rise. There were few magical people around Gryffindor who used crystals. Some found better focuses for their magic, such as wands, and others simply didn't use the kind of power that would work with one.

"Yes." Harry straightened up and flexed his fingers. He waited for a moment as the dark shape slid past, and then nodded. "I think it's one of the werewolves who's able to retain his human mind, my lord."

"And why do you say that, Harry Gardener?"

Harry accepted the name with a slight roll of his shoulders. It wasn't as though it was really that different from the one his curse had denied him. "Most werewolves would simply attack like the ravening beasts they are. This one is holding back, as if it doesn't really know what we are."

"You may be right." Lord Prince's voice was low with displeasure, and he was turning in a ring, his crystal aimed everywhere but the right places. Harry frowned. The lord must be less used to the forest than he thought, or he would have been aiming in the right direction more often.

"I think so, sir." Harry spun and lifted his hand as the dark shape abruptly leaped at them past a huge oak tree.

The werewolf was soaring, slavering, for a second, and then the oak swept around and grabbed at the soaring creature with its branches. Harry closed his hand into a fist, and the oak clenched its boughs tight, with a creaking sound. The werewolf shrieked and flailed, golden eyes flaring. Harry kept his hand clenched tight, and breathed a little more easily. He hadn't known for sure that that magic would work before he tried it.

(That is a practice much adhered to by magical researchers, and which should not be).

"Come on, my lord," he whispered. "We should be able to go a little further. Werewolves don't share territories, so no others will come to see what this one is squealing about."

Lord Prince's face was motionless as he tucked the crystal back into what looked like a pouch in his sleeve and followed Harry. "How did you perform that magic? Did you cast a spell on the tree?"

"No, sir. I really can't use spells. But I've talked to the tree, and I've established a communion between us." Harry was proud of himself for remembering that word. It was one that he had heard his mother refer to only a few times.

"A communion?" Abruptly, Lord Prince was beside him, and spinning him around with a hand on his shoulder. Harry just barely managed to keep his hand in a fist, but the werewolf would have sprung out and started following them if he didn't. Harry was a young man who could keep his mind on his work. "Do you know how rare that is? Are you a nobleman's bastard?"

"No," Harry said, with perfect truth. He was sort of a nobleman's son, but trying to say so would just make things strange. He held up his clenched fist. "Is there something else you can do so that I don't have to keep my hand like this?"

"What does that do?"

"It tells the tree to hold the werewolf. I let it go, and so does it, my lord."

Lord Prince raised his eyebrows, which seemed to be somewhat of a pastime for him (and was more common among noble circles than Harry knew about), but nodded and took out something from a pocket. It looked like it was a piece of nail. Harry sighed to see that it gleamed silver in the moonlight, and Lord Prince glanced at him with a slight curl of his lip. "Feeling sorry for the beast?"

"No, sir. Just grateful that someone other than me can handle it."

Lord Prince's face smoothed out, and he nodded. Then he lifted the nail. "Be ready to let the werewolf go."

Harry nodded, and opened his fist. There was a long, crashing fall, and then a startled howl that rapidly rose several octaves as the werewolf raced towards them. Harry took a step back, although he was careful not to shelter behind Lord Prince. He knew how some nobles hated someone getting that close to him, at least someone who was dirty and not dressed in proper clothes.

Lord Prince glanced at him, face and eyes opaque now, and then tossed the silver nail into the air. It gleamed and spun for a moment. Then it sped in the direction of the werewolf.

"It won't kill him?"

"No. Although how you can discern it is a him under all that hair is more than I can know."

Harry shrugged. "They're humans like us when they're not transformed," he said quietly. "The curse that he's under isn't really his fault, unless he's one of those rare idiots who seeks out wolfsbane and drinks it and bathes in the light of the full moon."

Lord Prince took a step back as if he was distancing himself after all. Harry was glad that he hadn't pressed too close. But he got one of those strange questions, mingled with the scream of the werewolf being struck by the silver. "How do you know that? You must be a nobleman's brat, after all, to have the education."

"Just because my mother was magical, sir. This way."

Lord Prince followed him looking curious, but he didn't say anything, which made it easier for Harry, in turn, to ignore his presence.

"Here, my lord. Moonborn lilies."

Harry moved gratefully out of the way as Lord Prince took several long, eager steps into the clearing. He would keep a watch out while the man harvested them. This wasn't the sort of work Harry was good at. He neither brewed potions nor wanted to pick living plants unless they were weeds.

"I would not have found these if not for you."

Harry, peering into the forest and keeping his ears open as far as he could for the sound of other werewolf howls, said, "Yes, my lord."

"I am talking about a reward, you absurd idiot."

Harry shrugged. "I don't really see what you could give me, sir. I don't have much to spend money on. All my food and clothes are given to me by my employer. And I can't think of what potion using moonborn lilies I would actually drink."

There was silence for a time, except for Lord Prince chopping and harvesting the thick roots of the lilies, and then he said, "You mean that."

Harry had gone far into listening for other sounds among the rustle of leaves, and it took him long seconds to wrench his mind back to the conversation. "Yes, my lord."

"Why?"

"I'm not a noble, sir." Harry smiled a little at the darkness. He knew what posh frustration sounded like, from hearing the various ways that the Potter children complained about the young lords and ladies brought to marry him. "I don't have the manners or the magic that you do, of course. Or the money. But I don't have some of the problems, either."

"Problems?"

"Problems like the kind that can only be solved by drinking a potion made of moonborn lilies to make you invincible."

This time, the silence lasted until Lord Prince came out of the clearing with his hands and a bag of leather over his shoulder stuffed with lilies. He glared at Harry and began to walk back the way they had come. Harry walked next to him, asking trees to stop werewolves twice before they made it back to the Potter estate.

Harry nodded to Lord Prince and turned towards the small shed where he slept. A spell spat past him and widened the doors, as well as added a thicker, softer mattress on the floor. Harry glanced over his shoulder, but Lord Prince had already disappeared.

"Thank you, my lord," Harry called out, just in case. As far as he was concerned, a few nights spent on a softer pallet were reward enough. He expected the pallet to revert to its original form then, because magical transformations were so often temporary.