2/2

I can therefore see why Vernon's in a state of quiet rebellion, expressed in the fiddling of expenses and creating a toxic work environment by snapping at people. (He used to shout, but Personnel came and had a quiet word about what that was likely to cost them in Employment Tribunal settlements, which they would report on in full to the parent company board.) He only gets involved in actual sales when the deal is more-or-less done by one of his subordinates' subordinates, and doesn't even have the consolation of a seat on the board any more.

His lack of front-line role is good: I'm pants at sales, and while I've got Vernon's knowledge base on the subject of drills, having it at second hand like that wouldn't help. Fortunately, what Vernon does all day is management, which I'm accustomed to treating like a part-time job - even the biggest law firms are run by people who spend most of their time actually being lawyers. I mean, if management were actually hard most managers wouldn't be able to do it.

Which is a slight exaggeration for comic effect, but it's not difficult to do better than Vernon's slow, not-terribly-subtle self-sabotage. Just turning up to the office with a polite demeanour and ordinary civility clears the low bar Vernon has been setting recently.

The one bit of my day where perhaps some shouting might be called for - chap in the Aberdeen office has got one of the oil rigs we supply sending complaints to head office, and the fault is quite clearly on our end - I don't stop to think about it and handle him the way I would a junior lawyer who fucked up. Which is to say with icy, professional, more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger contempt. If you do it right, you can actually convey a sneer down a telephone line. Compared to Vernon's usual bluster and bellowing, this is apparently terrifying enough to generate, within the hour, a faxed letter of formal apology and extravagant promises as to how quickly it's going to be fixed.

I mine Vernon's memories for the appropriate back-channel contact in the Aberdeen office - another Smeltings Old Boy - and call him to mention it. I learn that the man was expecting the usual Vernon Dursley bollocking, which is ten minutes of intemperate hot air. He was shocked to find himself dealing with, and I quote, "Darth Bloody Vader with toothache." It seems I've got the poor blighter convinced I won't be satisfied with just firing him if he doesn't get his mistake fixed fast enough. Not actually the first time my had-it-with-your-nonsense telephone manner has been likened to a Dark Lord of the Sith, so I put down the phone with a smile. Yeah, still got it.

The rest of the day flies by in a flurry of reports to be read, letters and memos to be dictated and occasional chats on the telephone, most of which Vernon was expecting so I can handle them out of his memories. I'm briefly amazed at how much I'm getting done until I realise: email on everyone's desktop is still ten years away. My work habits have all been based around getting through as much as possible before the next irritation pings into my inbox.

I get a funny look or two at the announcement that I'm out of the office cake-shop kitty at least until I'm below fifteen stone and that sugar in my tea is now a hanging offence. I'm not sure whether it's because they're stunned at the thought of Vernon on a diet or just that I'm not pissing and moaning about it. I mean, sure, I'm hungry as hell but that's nobody's problem but my own, an attitude Vernon doesn't adhere to. If he's upset, he's sharing with everyone. A surprisingly communist sentiment for a lifelong tory voter.

-oOo-

When I get home, it's to find both boys on the naughty step. Wide-eyed and clearly on the verge of tears. No blood in evidence so whatever they've done can't be that bad. "Wait right there, you two, while I hear what you've been up to."

It's all I can do to keep a straight face as I go into the kitchen - closed door, naturally - "They look like they're sharing a Condemned Cell, Petunia. What did they do?"

"I sent them out in the back garden while I was getting dinner ready. Told them to have a bit of a run about, get some fresh air, maybe play with that swingball thing Dudley insisted on having. It seems that Sir Harry and Sir Dudley wanted some sword-fighting practise and used my garden canes. Which was all very well, they were having fun and I was pleased to see it, until they swashbuckled over by the greenhouse and broke a pane."

"Neither of them hurt?"

"Thankfully no, although my heart was in my mouth when I heard the glass break. They were both sorrying their little heads off when I ran out, and Dudley admitted it was him that did the damage." That's a good sign, I think, but then Petunia tells me "I told them to go and sit on the naughty step until you came home."

I winced. "How long?" The rule of thumb is a minute per year of age: enough to make the point, not enough to be cruel.

"About twenty minutes. I know you said five minutes, but they're in it together so I thought I'd let them stew in it together. I've been hearing Harry tell Dudley to stay where he is or they'll get done worse." Okay, that's not so bad.

"Well, they've learned a bit of solidarity out of it, I suppose," I say. "It was all I could do to keep my face straight when I saw them, they were trying so hard to be brave. A brief bollocking should finish them off nicely and then it's hugs and forgiveness all round. And, I think, a rule about telling a grown up what game they want to play and listening to any safety rules we set. If they're actually playing together - which as you say is good to see - that more than doubles the potential for not thinking about the consequences. Actually, I'll just check the damage first."

Out in the back garden the greenhouse is pristine. As in, like it was put up yesterday.

"It was that pane there," Petunia says in a confused tone, pointing to one at just about sword-fighting height for a little boy. "And all the metalwork is cleaner than it was, and the moss is cleaned off."

"Well, there is magic for repairing broken things, it's one of the first spells they learn. I suspect this is accidental magic at work, Harry doesn't want Dudley to get in trouble, so his magic fixed it for us. Probably best not to say anything, though. I'll tell them I had a spare piece of glass to fix it with, I shudder to think what they'll be like if they get the idea Harry can just fix any damage they do."

"It wasn't like this with Lily, she did things with flowers and making the swing go without pushing. And that Snape boy once made a branch fall off a tree and hit me."

"It's different for every kid, I think. Strong emotion is supposed to be the key, and the character of the kid will shape it too. The Snape boy, was he a bit of a shit to you generally?"

"To everyone but Lily, and he only started being nice to her after he knew she was a witch. His family were a bad lot, I recall."

"Figures, lot of that attitude among wizards. Anyway, with Harry, if we get them both keen to be good boys and happy most of the time we shouldn't have any trouble. Or, at least, only this kind of trouble, which isn't even that bad by little boy standards, we haven't had to take anyone to cCasualty and no police were called. We didn't even have to buy a new pane of glass. You carry on and I'll go and visit the prisoners in their cell."

I grab a kitchen chair and sit down in front of them and spend ten minutes or so taking them through where they went wrong and how to not do that again. My own boys, as adults, told me that with hindsight they'd rather have had a walloping than this sort of solemn rubbing-in-how-much-of-an-idiot-you-were talking-to. (Daddy's little princess was always perfectly behaved, of course, and how dare you suggest I might have ever had to tell her off.) Much sniffling, more apologies delivered formally to Petunia and it's hugs and forgiveness and promises to do better and remember the new rule. By which time dinner is served.

After dinner, the boys are allowed some television before bath time and bed. I learn that The Great Humberto is Paul Daniels' stage persona in this universe, doing a variety show with a sort of ringmaster-and-his-circus motif, showcasing up-and-coming music and comedy acts and the occasional variety turn. It's actually a much better show than anything I ever saw him do (the only worse illusionist I ever saw on the telly was Tommy Cooper, and he was being terrible deliberately for laughs) and I suspect if I watched I'd see some faces I'd recognise. Harry Enfield, Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, Ben Elton and Paul Whitehouse were all getting their starts about now, as I recall.

I leave the boys to it. While they're engrossed, Petunia shows me over the file she's assembled for Harry. She'd got a birth certificate for him - Lily had registered him as born at what Tom recognises as the street address of St. Mungo's, and after that nothing until Petunia registered him at the Dursleys' GP in January of '82. She informs me she got him his vaccinations, telling the doctor she had no idea where her sister had been or what medical care Harry had had. After that, nothing - being shut away most of the time meant Harry didn't even get the childhood illnesses that vaccines don't cover. The various bumps and bruises he picked up from all the housework or the rough handling she and Vernon gave him don't show up in the records, of course.

Petunia handled the form for Harry's Child Benefit and stated honestly that he was her nephew, included the birth certificate and gave Harry's previous address as the one for St. Mungos - she tells me that she had no idea that that wasn't the Potters' home, and assumed from the reputedly run-down neighbourhood it was in that James Potter was poor. The application should have prompted at least some sort of follow-up, but didn't, but then Child Benefit isn't so much administered as processed. So long as there's no more than one claim per child, nobody much gives a hoot.

Harry's primary school file starts at the same time as Dudley's and there's an exchange of correspondence about Harry not starting until later; the school won't guarantee there's a place for him which was an awful risk on Petunia's part to take out of sheer pettiness. Which it was, I've seen it in her mind. Deliberately not letting him start until all the other kids had made friendships, I ask you. There should have been something from the local Education Authority about it, but either Harry slipped through the cracks or we're in an area that doesn't have a policy of all kids starting in the September of the school year that contains their fifth birthday. Most do. Fortunately, closer to the present day, the school write to say they still have a place - the baby-boom bow wave was my age bracket, not Harry's, so there's a lot of slack in the system at the moment and rounds of school closures and mergers are still a few years away.

Dumbledore's letter is sufficiently obliquely worded - as you'd expect from someone who was taught his correspondence skills in the 19th century - that it only counts as a breach of the Statute of Secrecy if you're in on the joke. The only truly unusual thing about it is that it's written on parchment (or maybe vellum, I've handled old legal parchments but that's the limit of my knowledge) and it's not like that's wholly unknown in the non-magical world, just wildly expensive compared to paper and not used for anything but ceremonial stuff or government documents that need to survive centuries of archiving. Using it for correspondence says 'eccentric and more money than sense' long before it says 'wizard'.

We've got no parental responsibility order or guardianship order, which would have been fairly standard back in 2005 (forward in 2005 from the current date: time travel plays absolute hob with tenses) when I last had a nodding acquaintance with family law. I really ought to look up the current law, since the Children Act 1989 is four years in the future. I'm pretty sure it was mostly just a re-enactment of existing provisions so I shouldn't be totally at sea, but assumption is the mother of all cock-ups, after all. It's not urgent, though, as this really needs to be dealt with by someone with a current practising certificate. Mine isn't just lapsed, it hasn't been issued yet.

I tell Petunia I'll find someone local, or possibly in Woking or Guildford, with an appropriate practising specialty. I vaguely recall a register of solicitors certified to do guardian ad litem work in Children Act cases, but that might not be a thing yet. Most libraries will have a recent copy of Chambers & Partners, and failing that I can just telephone the Law Society. Not that I ever had a referral through them, but I'm pretty sure they do it.

The rest of the boys' evening is spent in reading lessons, immersing ourselves in the adventures of Peter, Jane, and Pat the dog and having find-the-letter-on-the-page competitions. Dudley should definitely be doing better than he is - get him tested for dyslexia? Try and remember the adaptive things they gave my daughter to help her past it? - and Harry's intensity on the task wouldn't shame a kid a couple of years older. I suspect if he'd had a bit more attention and access to printed material, he'd've been reading well before now, large print at least. Maybe not as precocious as I was - I was reading at three and up to Enid Blyton novels and anything with sharks or dinosaurs in it by five - but certainly functionally literate.

After we've got them to bed, I tell Petunia to make sure they watch Sesame Street for the educational content, however american it might be it does actually work. (For adults too: the foreign editions are a great help if you're learning a language.) Thinking that having a few episodes taped would be a good thing, I wrestle with the manual for the Betamax machine to set up a schedule of recordings, only to discover that it won't bloody do that. I distinctly recall owning VHS players that would record at several different times. This outsize monstrosity - you could kennel a medium-sized dog in the bastard - has all the versatility of a wind-up alarm clock. It has tiny dials you turn to set the recording time, it's that little removed from being actually steam-powered.

Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced, damn it!

Petunia finds my sarcasm on the subject - she knows I've seen the future, but this is the first time she's seen me get frustrated about it not being here yet - highly amusing. I settle down with the paper to read a full report of England's Test Cricket win, on the basis that I may as well have something positive before lights-out.

Behind the paper, I'm curling my right hand into a particular shape from Tom's memories. Under my breath, I'm repeating a short line of praise, in Coptic, to the god Re, while willing my magic to produce light. I'm not expecting results quickly: while the magic they teach at Ouagadou is nearly all wandless, the memoir-writer insisted it demonstrated the superiority of wanded magic by reason of it taking much longer to get students actually casting spells. Wands, apparently, flatten the learning curve a lot in addition to their general utility and ability to substitute for a whole arsenal of magical tools.

-oOo-

We've set the pattern for the next few weeks, at any rate. Me covering Vernon's job during the day, helping the boys with their reading in the evenings, and getting them out of the house for adventures on Sundays. We get inexpensive flat-pack furniture for Harry's room and get him moved in, talk Dudley down from a meltdown or two over the issue of sharing his toys (the big one is over the Atari, which I move down to the living room so's he can share it with me, I'm not passing up a slice of gaming nostalgia like that) and generally get the boys settled in a routine of treating others, and being treated, like civilised human beings. My hopes for Dudley rise.

Harry's spectacles - your classic NHS contraceptive gogs, such as I wore when I was his age, it's a rite of passage - are with us by the end of the first week and Harry spends the entire weekend just going around and looking at stuff with them. I keep having to step out of the room with my fist in my mouth, and even Petunia is starting to unclench on the subject of her nephew. Dudley's fascinated too - he had his eyes checked and found to be fine - because the glasses that allow Harry to see "make it all wonky" for him. They both get mornings at Mrs. Whinney's four days a week - all day Thursdays when Petunia plays bridge - and reports are that with Harry along, Dudley is a lot better behaved. Harry's ability to recognise letters takes a leap forward, and both boys master the alphabet song.

Petunia is somewhat grumpy about this last thing. Apparently it got in her head and won't get out. My exhortation to look on the bright side, that she'll never forget alphabetical order again, gets me a Hard Stare. I decide to hold off on teaching them "The Cat's Got No Hair On" - my own sister actually threatened to kill me for teaching that to my nephews.

Vernon's weight comes down by nearly ten pounds, getting him below the 19 stone mark. Brisk walks morning and evening are the limit of the exercise he's capable of still, but he's getting better. Petunia squashes the idea of getting a dog to take on those walks, even when I suggest getting a big one that can frighten Marge's mutant beast into submission. I don't push it: while I am very much in charge here it's not actually my home.

Those walks are also the occasion of me figuring out how to 'hear magic' when I'm possessing someone. It's really just a minor trick of attention: I was doing it all the while, but focussed so hard on hearing what my host was hearing - possession is a skill, unlike piloting one's own native body, and it's possible to make mistakes. This was a small one that cost me almost nothing, fortunately.

Dudley, since he now has a regular playmate and coming with me when I go out to walk the Vernon, is looking a lot healthier. He's always going to be a little chunk, but he's putting on muscle under the fat. Harry, for his part, is growing in all directions like a weed, the kind of weed you have to call in the Men With Serious Herbicides for: the gap between his shorts and socks is visibly bigger in only a month. Petunia notes this when getting his school uniform, and buys him enough growing room to last until he's about forty. First day of school in a uniform you can barely see out of: another rite of passage. We're still early enough in history that primary school uniforms include a shirt and tie, rather than the eminently more practical polo shirts that my kids wore. Practicality be damned, the photo Petunia snaps of the two of them on Harry's first day is weapons-grade adorable.

It's the first picture of Harry she's taken, and the first to make it on to the wall of the hallway. I keep my own counsel on the other artwork hung there: Petunia picked it all and I don't need the friction.

It takes me four weeks of surreptitious practise in the office, in the evenings and while out walking, but I get the light spell working. Score! It's that that makes Vernon wake up at last.

Am I a freak now?

No, Vernon, you are not a wizard. I have magic, which I can use while I'm guiding you. Don't worry, this is going to make things better faster for you and your family. The stronger I am the more independence I can give you.

It's unnatural!

So's everything but living in a tree and eating all your food raw. Did you think that before Petunia told you about her sister?

Yes. Well, a bit. She told me they were full of airs and most of it was useless.

They're full of airs all right, and Petunia knew about the stuff her sister was learning. Which was beginner's stuff, which is useless in every field, no?

I suppose. Dudley's happy?

Yes, Dudley's happy. I just have a lot more experience than you with raising children, and wasn't quite as handicapped by my upbringing as you are by yours. As long as you're paying attention in there, you'll learn for yourself.

Don't like the hocus-pocus.

You don't have to like it. But, like it or not, I'm using it to help your family, so pipe down with the complaining.

Why's Petunia, you know, with the freak?

I reminded her that Harry is all she has left of her sister. Her whole family. She's remembered he's just a child who wasn't even born when all the things that upset her happened.

He's not hurting Dudley?

He's not. Dudley's learning better, playing nicer and behaving more like the young gentleman he ought to be. He's got someone to play with while he's at home, and I think he likes that.

Vernon keeps on like that for a while, rambling and repeating himself. He might be awake in there, but he's not a hundred percent awake. Just enough to be a bit more coherent than talking in his sleep. His repeated concern for Dudley makes me think marginally better of him, at any rate.

The boys go to school on the 3rd of September, by which time I'm well on the way to mastering the spell to cool water. I tell the people at Grunnings - who are flinching a lot less when I pilot Vernon to his desk of a morning - that I've been advised of the benefits of proper hydration and take to keeping a jug of water on my desk to practise on. By the end of the boys' first week at school I've got that one down too. Apparently I learn faster than 11-year-olds away from home for the first time. And, to my amusement, Tom when he tried this at fourteen.

Over the weeks, Tom gets less and less coherent, less able to make himself known unprompted and more unable to answer questions. I've been going through everything from his Hogwarts years and looking for learning experiences that build on them. And then eating them. I guess, and turn out to be right, that when Tom was hitting the books he wasn't generally committing atrocities, so the memories are somewhat safe. Not entirely safe, because some of the practical exercises would be grounds for summary execution in a sane world. This is why I only do this when I'm out and roaming at night, and outside the presumably-protective spells on Number Four. If it all goes pear-shaped on me, there'll be a line of defence between Tom and Harry. Plus there's no chance of any part of Tom spilling over into Vernon: even without magic, Tom is inventively malevolent.

I suppress any thought of frustration at the slowing of my progress as I exhaust all the learning experiences that build on Hogwarts classes. The things Tom did changed him without him noticing, and my fear of too rapid assimilation has changed from my personality being swamped to the possibility of the same thing happening to me. I don't even rightly know if the mere memory of those magics is enough to do the trick, but the thought of waking up one day and not noticing that I've become a grandiose lunatic with the self-restraint of Caligula gives me the piss shivers. Taking it slow and indulging in a lot of self-examination is the safest I know how to be when I have to get this knowledge on board.

Come the first weekend after the boys are back at school, I can't put it off any longer. I need at the very least to go forage in Flourish and Blotts. Remembering the reading and the classes is all very well, but doing the reading in my own right will cement the learning in my own mind and memories. Diagon Alley will be quiet with all the magical kids packed off to Scotland, and I've picked up enough from Tom to navigate the place. Particularly his later years with his job at Borgin and Burke, which started the summer after the orphanage kicked him out at fourteen. Not for cause, he hardly interacted with the other kids over the summers, but because that was the age you were supposed to get out and get a job in those days.

Caractacus Burke took advantage of the desperate orphan to get him to sign a magically-binding indenture of apprenticeship, the working conditions of which were why Tom was so desperate to stay at Hogwarts over the summers. Burke had wanted an educated dogsbody, so permitted him to go to school, but worked him like a rented donkey during the holidays. And then was surprised when Tom ghosted on him when the contract was up: Tom had figured out that there wasn't a set date but a standard of skill to be reached and a regrettable lack of clarity on whose opinion of Tom's skills counted. Burke didn't realise Tom was cheeky enough to certify himself and get out of the contract that way.

So on a rainy September Saturday, I leave the boys with Petunia and a stack of cartoons from the video library, and get on the 9:17 train to Waterloo, whence I can take the tube to Leicester Square, the nearest Underground Station to the Leaky Cauldron.

I'm a tiny bit nervous: while I've got legilimency and Tom's repertoire of tricks with which to scare the hoi polloi, against anyone that can resist I've got a whopping repertoire of two whole spells. Part of the problem is that while a reliable defence against anyone giving me shit is a firm manner and a confident stride, Vernon's still in too poor shape to adopt the right demeanour. He waddles, which is only good for intimidating ducks. And, inside, the prospect of going among magicals has him bricking himself so loudly that I probably come off a bit distracted what with keeping him calm.

I've decided to crack on that I'm a foreigner to explain away the lingering ignorance. I've not eaten any of Tom's memories of the alley from much after 1960, so I'm probably out of date and I'm not fool enough to think what I've got is complete anyway. The Ouagadou spells I know and the fact that I can do the accent and know some of the slang means I've settled on South African. And, as a fat, small-minded racist, Vernon even fits the national stereotype as seen by outsiders.

It turns out that the Leaky Cauldron does a perfectly acceptable - it's a solid seven, a good drink but nowt to write home about - pint of mild, which steadies Vernon down because, well, anyone who brews good beer can't be all bad no matter how much weird foreign writing there is on the pewter tankard. Amused at how undemanding my host's taste in beer is and his dismissal of anglo-saxon futhorc ale-runes as foreign when they're more English than he is, I steer us out into the alley and push some magic through Vernon's fingers to open the archway.

"Welcome to Diagon Alley," I whisper to myself.

AUTHOR NOTES:

It may seem like this is all going too easily. There's a reason for that, but Mal won't find out for a while.

Box Hill is a real country park. Which I've never been to, but I can read a map and I've assumed that it's like the dozens of country parks up and down the country that I have been to.

Songs of Praise: the flagship of the BBC's religious programming. Stick TV cameras in a church somewhere and film the congregation - generally ten times the regular turnout - belting out hymns. I don't know how many episodes of Buck Rogers and Battlestar Galactica I missed because Nana wanted that rubbish on. Too many, certainly. I ever get my hands on the schedulers who put ITV's sci-fi slot directly opposite the BBC's god-bothering hour, I shan't be responsible for my actions.

I'm definitely being unfair to Betamax in this chapter. Back then, all video recorders were that crap. And huge: the first one I ever saw (VHS, I think, but this was '81 or '82 so I may misremember) was three feet wide, two feet deep and stood eight inches high. And was worked by throwing small levers in slots on the top.

The speculation about the nature of horcruxes may well be just that. We'll see how it pans out in the rest of the story. I'm also fairly certain that Herpo, like all educated Greeks of his period, would have studied in Egypt, and their conception of the soul and what can be done with it is very different from the classical greek/christian ideas through which Horcruxes are presented by JKR.

I've been very unkind to South Africans in this, but we're talking about the 80s, when it was entirely possible to have a hit song whose b-side was the rather catchy "I've never met a nice South African" (It's on youtube, go look it up.) because the Apartheid regime was that unpopular. For the record, I have met several nice South Africans. Which doesn't make the stereotype any less a real thing in people's minds. Stereotypes are quite useful in selling an imposture.

Ale-runes are a real thing from the archaeological record, found inscribed on drinking vessels everywhere that runes were used. In the potterverse, they proof the drink you just bought against refilling charms and similar, and are also your guarantee that you're paying for actual ale, not transfigured slop, because the runes prevent that too.

Finally, "The Cat's got no hair on" is to the tune of the Keel Row and the lyrics can be found on the usual-suspect folk-song sites. Teach it to small children whose parents you want to annoy.

Finally, a few weeks after I posted this a helpful reviewer - signed in as a guest, so I can't give easy credit - pointed out that in '85 Employment Tribunals were still called Industrial Tribunals. Which I should have known, as I was actually in practise when the name changed in '98. In my defence, however, my answer to all employment law questions has always been 'walk down the hallway and ask an actual employment lawyer'. Not least because they have the best stories about Stupid Shit Clients Do. I'm not editing the text, since I reckon if I forgot, so did Mal.

Fic recommendation: since we're at a bit of a transition point in the story, let's take a break for some comedy. Minor Incident, 1982 by Right What is Wrong as your appetiser, Oh God Not Again by Sarah1281 for a main course, and The Girl Nobody Knows A Soliloquy by Technomad for your dessert. All on FFN to my certain knowledge, I haven't checked AO3 for them.