Forty-Two Months Later: Things You Already Know (2/2)

[kanedax]

Title: Forty-Two Months Later: Things You Already Know (2/2)
Author: kanedax
Spoilers: Deathly Hallows & Previous Chapters
Rating: PG13 for language
Characters: Harry, Dudley, Petunia, Susan
Summary: Harry Potter tells his story
Notes: I expected this to be an easy chapter. Boy, was I wrong. I really, really hope I get it right. Trying to pull seven books together into one long chapter is difficult. It’s even tougher when you’re afraid of misinterpreting some of the more metaphysical aspects of the Potterverse, such as his time at King’s Cross with Dumbledore and his connection to Voldemort. But I did my best.
I don’t own these characters. Or this story. They belong to JK Rowling.

Things You Already Know (1/2) / Previous Chapters / Four Years Later: Purple Plastic Ninjas

Harry looked back down at his papers and, realizing that he still had a ways to go, looked back up again. “Do we need to take a break?” he asked. “I have dessert, if anyone wants some.”

“That would be lovely,” said Petunia, standing and stretching. “But right now I need to powder my nose.”

“Upstairs,” said Harry, standing and stretching himself. “First landing.” As Petunia nodded and left the kitchen, he turned to Dudley. “Do you want me to show you where you’re staying? Bring your luggage up?”

Dudley shrugged. “Sure, why not? You want to come with?” he asked Susan.

“Sure,” she replied, and the three left the kitchen. Harry pulled out his wand and cast Wingardium Leviosa on Dudley’s suitcases, Susan doing the same with Petunia’s. Dudley watched with still some level of awe as the suitcases floated effortlessly up the stairs.

“Sorry that you have to be listening to all of this,” Harry said to Susan Bones as they followed behind the suitcases. “I know you already know a lot of the story, plus… you know… the whole Cedric thing.”

“No, it’s fine,” she said. “I was never really close to Cedric. His death was tough, but it was still a long time ago. I’ve gotten past it.”

“Good,” said Harry. The three passed the bedrooms on the first landing. One, Molly and Arthur’s former bedroom, was now made up as a bedroom for Teddy Lupin on the nights that he stayed with Harry and Ginny. It was the largest of all of the bedrooms (at least those that hadn’t housed hippogryphs, thought Harry of Mrs. Black’s former bedroom), but Harry and Ginny both felt a little off about having sex in the room where her parents had probably done the same thing, so they had converted the room across the hall, where she and Hermione had stayed, into their own.

And one of these days I’ll stop thinking about these rooms in terms of where we all slept in the one year that we had actually lived here, thought Harry, and start thinking of them in terms of my rooms. Our rooms.

But, as they continued up to the second landing, he realized that as long as he didn’t have the guts to empty the former bedrooms of Regulus and Sirius Black of their possessions, it wouldn’t truly be his home.

“And you don’t have to apologize for the rest of the story,” said Susan. “It’s fascinating. And, really, it’s not like everything that happened is public knowledge. I don’t even think I had heard… Voldemort’s real name.” She paused when she said the name, which seemed to be a habit for a lot of people that Harry knew. “Besides, it’s nice to hear it from you. Feels like I’m part of the club, you know?”

“The club?” said Harry, shocked to hear the words. “I didn’t know there was a club.”

“Sure there was,” said Susan, somewhat embarrassed. “Every year we were at school, you, Hermione, and Ron were involved in some scheme or another. You were always the ones who ended up the targets, or ended up saving the day, and always gave Gryffindor the House Cup. Your group got larger when Ginny, Luna, and Neville fought with you at the Ministry, but it was always you three in the end. Are you surprised that the rest of the school saw you all as some elite regime?”

Harry stared at her blankly. “God,” he said. “I honestly never thought of it that way. I’m sorry that we were seen like that. Seriously, I am.”

“I know,” said Susan quickly. “You don’t have to apologize. I mean, it’s not like you chose for these things to happen.”

Except for when we chose to go after the Stone, thought Harry. Or when we chose to go after Sirius, or chose to go the Ministry. But he decided to keep his mouth shut.

“I know a lot of people resented it,” said Susan. “Resented you and the others for hogging the spotlight, especially after your name came out of the Goblet of Fire, and you had full page articles in the Prophet while Cedric only had a paragraph. But I guess I always knew the stakes, even if I didn’t know the details. I was proud to know that I was in the same classes as you, even if I wasn’t in the same House.”

Harry felt his face heat as they heard a toilet flush down the hall. “Thanks,” he said quietly.

Dudley looked back and forth at Harry and Susan, a surprised look on his face. “I knew you were the hero type,” he said. “But bloody hell...”

“Aunt Petunia,” Harry said as Petunia Evans walked out of the bathroom and up the stairs. “This is where you’re going to be staying.” He motioned to the room where he and Ron had once slept. “Dudley’s up one floor in Fred and… in a room on the third floor,” he corrected quickly, trying hard to keep the rooms in their new context.

Petunia stepped into the room, which still had two beds and was otherwise sparse. “Lovely,” she said with a slight hint of distaste.

“Sorry,” said Harry, “But it’s a guest bedroom, and we still haven’t had time to dress it up. Could be worse, though. At least we moved Phineas downstairs, so you won’t have to worry about him poking his nose in at night.”

“Who’s Phineas?”

“Phineas Nigellus Black,” Harry explained as he lowered the suitcases to the floor. “One of the former Hogwarts headmasters. He has a painting that used to hang here, but we took him down in our seventh year. He’s on the first floor now, but Ginny and I are talking about hanging him in the hall where Sirius’s Mum used to be. He’s a lot less chatty than she was, and he did help the three of us quite a bit in the past few years. He deserves a little more of a central location, I think.”

“Then why haven’t you moved him?” asked Susan.

Harry shrugged. “He likes to watch over Teddy, “ he said as they left the room and continued to the third floor. “The name of Black is dead, and his grandmother was disowned for marrying a Muggle-born, but I think Phineas recognizes that Teddy still has the blood of the Black family flowing through him. Kreacher’s the same way, treats him better than anyone whenever he comes around. Once Teddy gets older and decides that he doesn’t want Nigellus around anymore, then we’ll move him into the main hall.”

They entered the bedroom on the third floor. “Here’s your room, Dudley,” Harry said. “And please, please don’t touch anything in those boxes over there.” He pointed to a few in the corner.

“Why not?” asked Dudley, his eyes showing temptation even after his cousin’s warning.

“They’re leftovers from Fred and George’s joke shop,” said Harry. “Early attempts. Umm, failed attempts. I don’t even think George wants to touch them anymore. We’ve been trying to talk him into picking them up, but he keeps finding excuses to forget. And, unfortunately, since Ginny and I don’t know what’s in them, we’re too scared to throw them out or put them in the attic.”

“So you’re putting me in a bedroom with potentially dangerous magic tricks,” said Dudley, throwing the de-charmed suitcase onto one of the beds. “You’re instilling me with a lot of confidence in my safety. You know that, right?”

“If it was the old you, then I wouldn’t trust you with those boxes,” said Harry. “Hell, if it was the old you, you wouldn’t be here at all. Or, if worse came to worse, I’d put you in Buckbeak’s old room. Barely smells like dead ferret anymore, and I think Kreacher cleaned out most of the blood stains.”

“Charming,” said Dudley, his sneer not all that serious. “So you were saying something about dessert?”

Dessert had been eaten (Treacle tart; Ginny always had some other type of sweets when it was her turn to choose, but, in Harry’s mind, there wasn’t anything better), tea had been poured, and the conversation remained comfortable among the four.

“So when are you going to come visit?” Susan asked Dudley. “I know you’ve only been in town a day or two, but I’m getting antsy already. I want you to see our flat.”

“Whenever you want me over, I suppose,” he replied. “Hannah and Ernie going to be there? We could do a double dinner tomorrow night, maybe catch a film?”

Christ, and they only talked for one night? Harry thought to himself. This was only the second time that Dudley and Susan had seen each other, and they had already started looking at each other and acting like they were boyfriend and girlfriend.

Takes all types, I suppose, thought Harry, whose previous relationships all involved months, if not years, of agonized internal debate.

“So, Harry,” said Petunia, and Harry wasn’t sure how much she was reading between her son and this girl, “Where did you leave off? In your story?”

“Oh, right!” said Harry, pulling himself away from thoughts about the couple and picking up his notes. “Umm, okay. So Voldemort was back. But he didn’t expect me to survive his reappearance, so he didn’t expect us to be able to react so quickly. The Ministry was in full denial of his return, but Dumbledore reacted by recreating the Order of the Phoenix. A lot of the old guard, like Hagrid, Lupin, and Moody came back, and there were some new additions this time. Most of the Weasleys joined up, as did Kingsley Shacklebolt, the current Minister of Magic, and Nymphadora Tonks, who eventually became Teddy’s mother. Oh, and Hestia and Dedalus joined up for this round, as well, you both know them.”

Dudley and Petunia both nodded in response to the names of their former protectors.

“But, like I said, the Ministry really didn’t want to believe that Voldemort had returned. One member of the Minister’s office in particular, Dolores Umbridge, did everything she could to keep us quiet. That day that the Dementors attacked Dudley and I, that wasn’t Voldemort’s doing. That was Umbridge’s work. She sent them in secret, trying to get me out of the way at most, or, at the least, trying to discredit me and get me expelled from Hogwarts.

“You two know how it happened,” he said, nodding to the Dursleys. “The Ministry recorded my use of underage magic when I cast the Patronus. There was a huge political battle that raged that night after Dumbledore threw enough law at them to grant me an appeal. And I explained to you three what happened, and you,” he nodded to Petunia, “went against Vernon’s wishes and kept me around.”

“What happened to you after that, though?” asked Petunia. “We had gotten a letter for some award ceremony.”

“Oh, come on, Mum,” said Dudley jokingly. “Some awards ceremony. You probably still have the title of that thing memorized. You were so giddy when you got it. The look on your faces when we got to that McDonald’s was priceless.”

“They just gave us the wrong address,” said Petunia, her cheeks flushing.

“Yeah, that was a pack of lies,” said Harry slowly. “Tonks actually sent it to you. When you were out of the house, a big group of Order members came to get me. Tonks, Kingsley, Lupin, Mad-Eye, Hestia, Dedalus, and a few others you wouldn’t know. Broke me out of my room, and we flew here. This was the new headquarters for the Order at the time. It was also where the Weasleys were living, as well as Sirius. That’s why if you hear me tell you that you’re staying in Fred and George’s room, or me and Ron’s room, or something like that, that’s why. We stayed here the rest of that summer, and the holiday afterwards, as well.

“The Ministry cleared me of all charges, no matter how much the Minister at the time wanted to string me up. Your aunt helped out a lot with that, Susan,” he added. “I wish I could thank her.”

“I know,” said Susan. “She was just doing what was right.”

“But even after I was cleared, things didn’t get any better,” he continued. “The Ministry found other ways to discredit us. The Prophet, which is the mainstream wizard newspaper in England, did everything they could to make us into a joke, me and Dumbledore both. And, more importantly, they sent Umbridge to Hogwarts as the new Defense Against the Dark Arts professor.”

“Is that some kind of yearly gig, or something?” asked Dudley. “Seems like you have a new professor every year, and it’s always for that one job.”

“Yeah, it was cursed for decades,” said Harry. “Literally. Voldemort actually came back to get the job before he really took power and, when he was refused, he jinxed it. No one had held it for more than a year since then. Umbridge was just one in a long line, but she was the worst of all of them up to that point. She did everything she could to discredit the Hogwarts administration. The Ministry kept putting out more and more laws that gave her more and more power within the school. She started sacking professors who didn’t follow strict Ministry protocol, banned any club that didn’t suit her tastes, and punished people who didn’t follow her way of thinking. And her punishments were about as bad as we had seen at the time.”

At this, Harry raised his right hand, showing them the scars that would never disappear. Dudley whistled softly under his breath. “Ouch,” he breathed.

“Like I said,” Harry continued, lowering his hand, “it’s nothing compared to what came a few years later. But at the time she was as bad as it got. At the same time, it was our O.W.L. year. That’s a series of tests that fifth-years take in order to get into the higher-level classes. Umbridge refused to teach us practical magic, which we would need in the tests. She, along with the rest of the Ministry, was afraid that Dumbledore was forming an army to overthrow the government.

“At the same time, many of us knew that Voldemort had returned. So we did what we needed to do, both from a scholastic standpoint as well as for personal safety. We formed a defensive magic club under Umbridge’s nose. Dumbledore’s Army, we called it, although he had nothing to do with its foundation. I taught the members how to use practical magic, how to defend and how to attack. Susan was one of our initial recruits.”

“It was bloody brilliant, too,” said Susan, her smile full of nostalgia. “Most fun I ever had at Hogwarts, even after we were caught.”

“Yeah, Umbridge found out about us eventually,” he said. “But after she brought us to the attention of Dumbledore, he took full responsibility and vanished before he was arrested, leaving Umbridge as the Headmistress.”

“She tried, God bless her little heart,” said Susan with sarcastic sweetness. “But we just had too much fun at her expense.”

“Around this time I was having strange dreams,” said Harry. “It turned out that I was able to see Voldemort’s thoughts, and I was led to believe that he was putting Sirius in danger.”

“You could see his thoughts?” asked Petunia. “How did that happen?”

Harry sighed. “Okay, this is probably going to sound even stranger than the protection stuff,” he said. “But I’ll do my best. When Voldemort cast the Killing Curse on me, he… broke off a piece of his soul, which attached to me.”

Dudley stared at him. “What.”

“I don’t really get it very much, either,” said Harry. “But it happened. And it gave me powers that others didn’t have. I was able to see his thoughts. I was able to see what he was seeing, feel what he was feeling. I was able to talk to snakes like he could.”

“Oh! Oh!” Dudley was practically bouncing in his seat, pointing at Harry. “The zoo! Piers said that you were talking to that snake at the zoo!”

“Yeah, I was,” said Harry. “I didn’t know it at the time. I just thought he understood English. But, um, yeah, I can talk to snakes.”

“Which is why a lot of people thought that he opened the Chamber of Secrets our second year,” said Susan. “Everyone knew that Slytherin was a Parselmouth, and when they found out that Harry could do the same, he became suspect number one.”

“What does snake sound like, anyway?” asked Dudley.

“Something like this,” Harry said in Parseltongue. Petunia stared at him with wide eyes, and Harry could see a shiver pass through Susan. Dudley appeared unimpressed.

“See, now you’re just making shit up,” he said.

“Language, Dudley!”

“Sorry, Mum.”

“So, yeah, I could see what Voldemort was thinking,” said Harry. “And I had a particularly strong vision about him torturing Sirius in a room in the Ministry of Magic. So I was able to slip out of Hogwarts…”

“…After Umbridge was taken care of,” said Susan with some bit of joy.

“Ron and Hermione came with me,” he said, “As did Ginny, Neville, and Luna. The six of us entered the Ministry, only to find out that we had been tricked into coming. It turns out that there’s a room in the Ministry’s basement that stores prophecies. They can only be touched by those for whom the prophecy was made, and since Voldemort couldn’t enter the building, he convinced me to go there by sending me the false vision about Sirius. He then sent some Death Eaters after us to collect the prophecy after I took it off the shelf.

“We fought them as well as we could, and then some members of the Order arrived to fight back. That’s when Sirius died, trying to protect us. The prophecy was destroyed, as well, but after the battle Dumbledore told it to me. The one that Trelawney had made about me and Voldemort all of those years ago. That’s when I learned about why Voldemort had killed my parents and tried to kill me. And that he marked me as his equal by giving me a part of his soul, and that one of us had to kill the other.”

“Wow,” said Dudley. “That had to be kick in the teeth.”

“It was a bit,” said Harry. “But not very much. I mean, Dumbledore put it the right way later. The prophecy doesn’t mean anything by itself. As soon as someone finds out about a prophecy it means that they can change it. Voldemort put too much stock into it and, because he did, he earned himself a mortal enemy. Even if I hadn’t heard about the prophecy, I knew that I wanted to kill him because he killed my parents, and because his lackeys killed Cedric and Sirius.”

“So you knew you had to fight him,” said Dudley.

“I knew I had to fight him, but I didn’t know how,” said Harry. “Since he was, you know, pretty much immortal. But Dumbledore taught me how to do it. My sixth year I learned about horcruxes, the darkest, most dangerous magic that can be performed. When someone kills someone else, their soul tears. If someone has the right spells, the right conditions, they would capture that piece of soul in an object. As long as that object remains intact, the person can never die.”

“So it could be an object, or a person?” asked Petunia. “Like you?”

“Like me,” said Harry. “But I didn’t know it at the time. Didn’t know it till almost the end, because Dumbledore didn’t want to tell me just then. But, anyway, when the soul is captured, a horcrux is created. The darkest wizards in history who created horcruxes only made one. Two at the very most. Voldemort created seven, tearing his soul into eight pieces.”

“Bloody hell,” muttered Dudley.

“He made the first one when he killed his father,” said Harry. “Put it into Morfin Gaunt’s ring, the last heirloom of Cadmus Peverell. The second was the diary that had possessed Ginny.  He used the death of Myrtle for that one.

“He loved symbolism, and went for items that were connected to Hogwarts. The third was Slytherin’s locket, which he discovered had been purchased by the shop he worked for in Knockturn Alley and sold to a rich woman named Hepzibah Smith. He took the locket from her, along with a cup that had once belonged to Helga Hufflepuff. He killed Hepzibah and used her murder to turn the cup into a horcrux, and murdered some drifter to do the same with the locket. The fifth was the Diadem of Ravenclaw, which was a kind of tiara. He found it in Albania and killed a peasant there.

“The sixth one was Nagini, a giant snake that followed him everywhere and did a lot of his dirty work. He killed the caretaker of his family’s old house to put a piece of his soul into her. And then there was me, the one he didn’t know about.”

“I’m surprised you didn’t even have to look at your notes for that,” said Petunia.

“I had it memorized pretty early,” said Harry. “And I drilled it into my head after Snape killed Dumbledore.”

“Sev…” Petunia gasped. “Sev killed Dumbledore?”

“I thought he was a good guy,” said Dudley. “Turned a new leaf after your Mum died.”

“He… he did, to a point,” said Harry. “After my Mum died, Snape came to Dumbledore to blame him for her death, that he hadn’t done everything that he could to protect her. Dumbledore said that Voldemort did as he chose, and that my dad had put his trust in the wrong man. But that I had survived. He asked Snape to protect me in lieu of my mother. Snape came on as the Potions professor at Hogwarts. When I showed up, he loathed me from the beginning. I reminded him too much of my father. But he had made a vow to Dumbledore, and he did what he could to make sure that I survived and that Voldemort would pay for murdering my mother.

“After Voldemort came back, Snape played both sides. He was sent by Dumbledore to Voldemort to pretend that he was always on his side, and that he would stay on at Hogwarts and in the Order as a spy for the Death Eaters. He did a lot of dirty work for them, all the while receiving orders from Dumbledore that not even the other members of the Order knew about.

“The biggest one came in that sixth year. Voldemort had charged the son of one of his servants with the duty to kill Dumbledore.”

“Malfoy…” said Susan.

“Malfoy,” Harry nodded. “Draco Malfoy, the son of Lucius, who had given Ginny the diary and who had also led the Death Eaters that had fought us at Ministry.”

“Too many names,” drawled Dudley, looking a bit lost again.

“Sorry,” said Harry. “At the same time that Draco was doing this, Dumbledore had become infected by a really nasty curse. He had found one of the horcruxes, the ring that had come from Voldemort’s uncle, and it infected him a curse that would kill him within a year. So, since he wanted to protect Draco from having to kill, and because he wanted Snape to remain in the good graces of Voldemort, Dumbledore ordered Snape to kill him before Draco could. So he did, in the full view of Draco and some other Death Eaters. And then he ran off, leaving the rest of us to believe that he had turned traitor.”

“Something which we all thought was confirmed when Voldemort and one of his puppet government lackeys overthrew the Ministry and Hogwarts that summer and installed Snape as the new Headmaster.” Susan said all of this with a shake of the head. “That was a rough year.”

“But we didn’t know about it,” said Harry. “Ron, Hermione, and myself, that is. After Dumbledore died, I decided to skip my seventh year and search for the remaining horcruxes. And they came along, whether I wanted them to or not.”

“I always thought you were too independent for your own good,” said Susan. “You should have seen Ginny after you had left. She put up a good front, pretending that she was happy you broke up with her, that she thought you were an ass, so that the Death Eaters couldn’t pry her for information. But you knew that it was all smoke and mirrors.”

“So you two were dating by that point?” asked Petunia.

“We had dated for a few weeks at the end of my sixth year,” Harry explained. “But I ended things with her before I left to hunt horcruxes. She wasn’t of age, and I didn’t want to make her a target. I’m actually glad that she did what you said, Susan. Pretended that she hated me, and all.”

“I don’t think it was all pretend,” said Susan carefully.

“It kept her safe,” said Harry, nodding. “That’s all that mattered.”

“And Ron and Hermione?” asked Petunia.

“Didn’t start dating till after the horcruxes were all found,” said Harry. “Although it almost happened, I don’t know, a dozen times before that? They were just too stubborn, I guess.”

“Are we done playing Mystery Date?” asked Dudley, who Harry was pleased to see was really getting into the story. “So you all went off to find the horcruxes.”

“Yeah,” said Harry. “Some had already been destroyed. The diary was gone; I had destroyed it in my second year. Dumbledore destroyed the ring soon after he was cursed by it. That left the locket, the cup, the diadem, the snake, and me. I won’t bore you with the details about how we found them…”

“Ah, come on!” said Dudley. “You’re going to skip all the action film crap?”

“It pretty much is action film crap,” said Harry. “Not anything that I could really describe in detail. Like I said, read Hermione’s notes. She gets almost too detailed at some points, but it’s in there between all of the notes about her arguments with Ron.”

Dudley gazed at Harry with puppy-dog eyes, and Harry shook his head.

“Alright, fine,” he said shortly. “We escaped from Privet Drive after you three left. As soon as we took off, and as soon as you Apparated to Heathrow, breaking your protection on me, we were attacked by Death Eaters.”

“The Minister had mentioned that someone died that night,” said Petunia.

“Two, actually,” said Harry. “Mad-Eye Moody died. So did Hedwig, my owl.”

Dudley glanced over at the owl in the corner, studying it more closely. “Yeah,” he said. “I guess that is a different one, isn’t it?”

“That’s Maximillian,” said Harry. “Max for short. It was tough for me to replace Hedwig, but owls are pretty much a necessity in any family in the wizarding world.

“Anyway, after that summer we left to search for the horcruxes. We found the locket in the Ministry of Magic. It had been taken from Voldemort by Regulus Black, Sirius’ brother, and hidden here by Kreacher at Grimmauld Place until it was stolen and given to Dolores Umbridge. The three of us used Polyjuice Potion, which makes the drinker look like someone else, to break into the Ministry and take the locket from her, and we used a magic sword to destroy it.”

Harry decided that, despite wanting to tell a good tale, he didn’t want to get into the situation with Ron and the locket. There were just some things that a promise keeper couldn’t break. If Hermione mentioned it her notes, that might be one thing, but Harry was good on his word.

“The cup was hidden in Gringott’s, a goblin-run bank in Diagon Alley,” he said instead. “Again, we broke in. We found the cup, rode a giant dragon out of the bank, and destroyed the cup.”

“Woah,” Dudley breathed.

“The diadem was at Hogwarts,” he said, realizing he was nearing the end, and some of the tough parts. “As was the final battle. Voldemort hadn’t known that we were searching for the horcruxes until after we had found the cup. By then he had discovered that the ring and the locket had both been destroyed, so, in his mind, the last two horcruxes were the snake by his side and the diadem at the school. He sent his army to the school, and the school fought back while we searched for the horcrux.”

“A lot of people died that night,” said Susan. “After word came out that Voldemort was coming, the professors fought back against Snape and the other Death Eaters that had been in place in the school. The rest of Dumbledore’s Army returned, along with the Order and some of the townspeople in Hogsmeade and around the country. We lost fifty on our side, and I don’t know how many on theirs.”

“George’s twin brother died that night,” said Harry. “So did Teddy’s parents. And Snape was killed by Voldemort’s snake.”

“Why?” asked Petunia. “Did Voldemort find out that Sev was one of the good guys?”

“I wish it was like that,” said Harry. “But Voldemort…”

How do I describe this? Harry thought. Do I even describe this? He wanted to tell Petunia and Dudley what was important. But could he explain the Resurrection Stone, about how he walked to his death with the forms of his parents and family by his side? In the end, how much did they need to know about the Deathly Hallows?

“I hope this doesn’t get very complex,” he said, deciding that some information was better than none. “Before he died, Dumbledore was in the possession of a powerful wand called the Elder Wand. Only the person who mastered it could wield its full potential. And by mastered I mean that you have to defeat the person using it in order to gain its power. After Dumbledore died, he was entombed with the wand. Voldemort broke into the tomb and took it. But after he did, he discovered that having it wasn’t enough.

“In order to defeat me, he knew that he had to defeat the wand’s owner. He believed that Snape was that owner, because he had killed Dumbledore. So he killed Snape in order to gain full possession of the wand.”

Petunia shook her head sadly. “Poor Sev…”

“I found him before he died,” said Harry. “And that’s when showed me everything. That’s when I learned about his connection to you and my mother. About the oath that he made to Dumbledore. Why he killed Dumbledore. I learned that he had helped us all of those years, even though I thought he was no good.

“And I also learned from Snape about the horcrux that was inside me. And how I had to get rid of it.”

“How?” asked Dudley.

Harry shook his head. “I…  I don’t know if I want to talk about it,” he said, suddenly very uncomfortable. From his side, he saw that Susan had the same look in her face. She knew what had happened as much as anyone else at Hogwarts that night.

“He sacrificed himself for us,” said Susan, knowing that it had to be said. “He walked up to Voldemort and willingly died to protect us.”

“You died?” Dudley gasped. Harry nodded.

“I was tethered to this world because of the blood that was flowing through Voldemort’s body,” said Harry.  “And because of the soul that I shared with him. When he killed me, he destroyed the piece of his soul that was inside me. But I was able to come back.”

“We all thought that he was dead,” Susan explained quietly. “Hagrid brought him to the school, with Voldemort saying that it was all over, that Harry was dead, and that he was in charge. It was…” She shook her head. Harry was glad that she was able to find the words that he couldn’t find himself, even if they were both speechless about it.

Harry decided that it was best to press on instead. “After that, things went insane. Neville killed Nagini, destroying the last horcrux. I pulled myself back up and fought Voldemort for the last time. And I won.”

“But didn’t you say earlier that you didn’t kill him?” asked Petunia. “That he had killed himself?”

“He didn’t have control of the Elder Wand,” Harry explained. “He had been misled. He thought that, in order to control the wand, you had to kill the owner. But that wasn’t the truth. You only had to defeat the owner. And the night Dumbledore died, he was disarmed by Draco Malfoy. And later, I defeated Draco by disarming him. So, in truth, I was the owner of the Elder Wand. I still am. But Voldemort didn’t know that. He cast a Killing Curse at me, and, since the Wand wouldn’t kill its true owner, it deflected the curse back at him. Voldemort was hit by his own spell. And, because there were no more horcruxes, he was no longer immortal. He died, and he stayed dead.”

Harry looked around the table. Susan was nodding, but he could see that Dudley and Petunia were still completely enthralled by the story.

“And, um…” he said, flipping through his notes to see that he had talked about everything, “that’s… that’s it, I guess.”

Petunia shook her head in wonder, and Dudley took a deep breath. “I think I’m going to need Hermione’s notes after all,” he said, reaching for the huge pile. “I think I probably understood about half of that.”

“I never realized you went through so much,” said Petunia. “And at so young of an age, too. You were, what, seventeen when this all ended?”

“The Battle of Hogwarts was fought in the spring of 1998,” said Harry. “I was seventeen.”

“Amazing,” she breathed. “If Vernon had known half of what you just told us…”

“He’d still be a git,” said Dudley, absently flipping through Hermione’s papers. “And he still would have said everything that he had said at the reception, except that he probably would have hoped that Harry had died instead of Voldemort.”

Petunia Evans sighed sadly. “I suppose you’re right,” she said.

“You should write a book,” said Susan as she stood up, taking the dessert plates to the sink. “Have you ever thought about publishing your memoirs?”

“My memoirs?” said Harry. “I’m twenty-one. I don’t think I’m ready for my memoirs yet. Besides, I’m a lousy writer.”

“Well, you could get someone to write them for you. Hermione, maybe?”

“Hermione could write them, but I doubt they’d read well. The only time I’ve ever seen her with a book that wasn’t some sort of textbook or educational reading was when she was reading Beedle the Bard. And even then, I think she wouldn’t have touched it if it weren’t for the runic translations.”

“Well, I still think it’s something you should think about,” said Susan. “I think people would want to know your story.”

Harry sighed. “I suppose,” he said. “I just don’t know if I’m ready to tell it yet. I like my privacy.”

“There’s a fine line between privacy and mystery,” said Petunia. “Sometimes the public gets more interested in a person that they don’t know anything about. Once someone opens up to them, they become boring. Personally, I don’t think it’s an idea you should drop without giving it some thought first.”

“I will, Aunt Petunia,” Harry assured her. Maybe sometime down the line, he thought. If enough people want to read it. After I’m settled with Ginny. After we have kids, and after they’re grown up and out of any danger.

But who’d want to read about me?

Things You Already Know (1/2) / Previous Chapters /  Four Years Later: Purple Plastic Ninjas