Vernon Dursley was a huge walrus of a man, with a large moustache and hardly any neck. Although fundamentally a bully by nature, Vernon would never dream of crossing his wife, Petunia.1 It was not that she was physically intimidating. An almost anorexic woman, with a rather horsey face, you might have been excused for thinking her the victim and Vernon the aggressor. Instead, deep down (as much as he denied it even to himself), he secretly dreaded her shrewish temper. He did all he could to accommodate her obsessions, while fully sharing her small minded bigotry, and petty hatreds. Thus when they found their nephew on their doorstep one morning, the only real question was just how bad things would get.
The Dursleys were not monsters, nor was Dumbledore in sending Harry to them. The Dursleys did not take in their nephew and immediately start plotting all the ways they would keep his spirits down, or how they would keep him ignorant of his heritage. Dumbledore’s note included no spells to create animosity, no injunctions to be strict. Petunia may have been sincerely displeased to see Harry on her doorstep, but her initial reaction was to do reasonably decent by him.
The problem was that Harry’s world had been shattered. When he woke, he started crying for his parents. This was an unpleasant reminder of the sister Petunia wanted to forget. When he would wake in the middle of the night, her irritation gave Vernon license to take out some of his aggression on the toddler. And so, Harry moved from the smallest bedroom where he could be heard crying at night, to the cupboard under the stairs, where his cries were muffled.
Once he was in the cupboard, a slow but steady cascade effect started. At first Harry was fed and changed fairly regularly. However, for many children, the evening hours are something of a fussy time, as mum starts to look towards dinner preparations, and that afternoon nap was not really quite enough to produce a child ready to self-entertain. Dudley was not inclined to self-entertain ever. Left to his own devices while Petunia worked on dinner, Dudley immediately began fussing. When Petunia did not immediately give him the attention he wanted, he turned vengefully on Harry. If Dudley was not happy, no one could be happy. By the time Vernon would get home, both boys would inevitably be upset. Vernon might find this laudable in Dudley - “Little tyke knows how to stand up for himself,” but the same was not true of Harry. Vernon took to tossing the small boy into the cupboard. Harry quickly learned that if he wanted to be fed at all in the evenings, he needed to self-sooth and silence his tears, no matter how much he hurt.
It should have been a short, one sided victory, but for the well-intentioned meddling of an old fool with an over inflated ego. Lily was not expecting to have to fight at all. The ritual was supposed to have killed Voldemort. James death to allow her to remain on earth long enough to reflect one curse, and then Voldemort would descend to Hell, while she joined James to face Judgement, trusting in the words from Scripture - “No greater gift …”.2 Still, while the monster had stronger magic, her soul was undamaged. So it should have been an easy victory, once she recovered from the shock, and marshalled her strength to fight back at all. Before she could however, a second shock hit. It was is if a chain settled around her, pulling at her, sapping her magic, granting the monster something like parity against her. Dumbledore had set up protections, intending to use the relationship between Harry and Petunia, not knowing that Lily’s soul was present. Instead, the protections used Lily’s magic, but because she was dead, because she had no body to fuel that magic, instead of being a negligible drain, it cost her almost everything. Instead of being able to eject Voldemort, she was now hard pressed to merely keep his soul shard at bay.
Harry landed hard in the cupboard, and something snapped in his arm. His infant cries should have alerted his aunt and uncle that something was wrong, but Vernon had had a bad day, and Petunia was not feeling well and had gone to bed as soon as Vernon got home. Not really being alive, and doing her best to not only keep Voldemort from affecting Harry, but to keep her own presence from affecting him, Lily had trouble with concepts like time. Souls, being immaterial, have very little to do with time, it is our bodies that allow us to experience the passage of each second in a meaningful way. And so it was several hours later when Lily realised that Vernon and Petunia were not taking Harry to the hospital. Her son needed help, or he would face a night of pain, and probably worse in the morning.
She healed him, carefully using as little magic as possible - the chains created by the protective magic on the house left her so very little. As small as it was, it was almost too much. Voldemort sensed the shift, and struck. Lily parried his attack, but Harry suffered the first of many nightmares, forced to relive the night his parents had died.
Months passed. A pattern formed. Harry was missing at least one meal a day (sometimes more on weekends), and there would be an injury for Lily to heal any time Vernon had a bad day - on average once a week. Petunia would not let Vernon hurt Harry in front of her, but would turn a blind eye to any of Dudley’s misdeeds, and to the occasional rough handling and Harry was “sent” to the cupboard. Vernon picked up on this, and started to encourage Dudley’s misbehaviour. Every time Lily had to heal Harry, he suffered nightmares. Between continuing to miss his parents, the lack of attention, the lack of food, the pain, and the nightmares, Harry started to cycle into depression.
In very young children, depression commonly takes the form of an unnaturally silent and withdrawn child, and in delays in reaching milestones. Harry came to the Dursleys somewhat ahead for his age, and so, by the end of his first year with the Dursleys, he had turned into a quiet child, but otherwise rather average. Lily continued to suffer from an inability to realise how much time was passing, but she did realise that Harry was not getting the attention he needed in more than just needing healing. What can a disembodied soul with very little spare magic do though? Rather than fight a losing battle trying to heal Harry’s wounded psyche in the face of continual assault, Lily took a different approach.
The primary problem, as Lily saw it, was that every time she turned aside from battling Voldemort to heal Harry, it backfired because the diversion of power made him vulnerable to Voldemort. Worse, she realised that he was using legilimency in his attacks on Harry. Deceased, she saw clearly something that was only hinted at in books on the mind magics - anything beyond so-called “passive legilimency” where only the emotional state of the target was observed came with risks to both caster and target. She might be able to teach Harry to heal himself physically, but inevitably there would be a magical cost to the way legilimency repeatedly linked her son with his foe. What form that cost would take she did not know, but it could not be good.
Moreover, he really needed protection from the mental effects of his spiralling depression, something it was unrealistic to expect him to help himself with. Seeing her death over and over again in his dreams on top of the constant neglect was too much for any child to take. Thus he needed to be able to help her hold off Voldemort while she did any required healing. That way the more he grew, the more he could help, the more she could do, creating a positive feedback loop in place of the negative one she was currently fighting.
She started setting up shields, similar to the effects of occlumency, but in substance very different. True occlumency would have been as useless as it would be dangerous (emotions cannot be suppressed without risking one’s humanity) - Voldemort was already inside Harry’s head. Lily concluded that what was needed was to truly empty Harry’s mind, to separate that which made Harry himself from that which the soul shard could influence or even detect. She knew an empty mind was protected against legilimency, and did not know of any other way to thwart such an attack.3
To an observer, these shields created an effect that mimicked a child with a dissociative disorder: Harry became even more withdrawn, and seemed to not even notice the abuse Dudley (and sometimes Vernon) heaped upon him. It was as if each part of his physical brain was split in two, one that controlled his body and was vulnerable to the shard, one that remained in tune with her son’s soul and remained part of his mind and thoughts.
For Harry however, something very different was happening. Harry was becoming more and more aware of the spiritual world around him. Being a nephil, Harry was a hybrid of the purely spiritual angels and the humans who are themselves hybrids between the spiritual and the physical, but who are limited to mostly physical senses (some saints have had more abilities granted due to grace, but that’s the exception). As he became more aware of the spiritual, he also became more aware of the battle continuously fought between a warm light presence and a dark malevolent presence within him. Even as the external, physical world became, not less real (dissociated), but rather less important, the spiritual world was becoming more visible and thus more important. Harry could see that he was not alone, that something was fighting for him, helping and healing him when it could, and fighting, constantly fighting to keep him from something far scarier and far worse than anything that Dudley or Vernon could do.
This was not legilimency, it was too unformed, unfocused, and uncontrolled, but it most certainly was from the same branch or type of magic. Harry had no access to a person’s memories, and only the most superficial sense of their emotional state. And yet, Harry could see Lily and Voldemort-sliver battling; he now also saw the people around him, Aunt Petunia, Uncle Vernon, Dudley, and occasionally Mrs. Figg as souls attached to bodies, the difference being that they each only had one, where there seemed to be two extras constantly with him. One that loved him, and one that hated him. And so Harry knew that Aunt Petunia did not really hate him, he could see that her anger was very different than Uncle Vernon’s or the dark thing’s. And no matter now hard his life was, Harry also knew he was loved. The bright soul was there, and it loved him. Still, while it was comforting to know that he was loved, in some ways that just made the part of Harry that was still aware of his own physical body desire to find another soul, an embodied soul, that might also love him. He was too young to express it clearly, even to himself, but he wanted someone who could express love in terms of hugs, food, and physical safety. While Harry might not have been able to express or understand this, Lily understood it anyway. Harry ended unsure how he knew that such a soul was out there somewhere, but knowing that the “bright soul” (he did not know yet to call her either “mum’ or “Lily” either one) had made it clear, without words, that he would find it someday.
Per my Notes on this fanfiction, I am making Petunia a Squib. Vernon is purely non-magically, but nephil traits are sometimes remarkably persistent, so Dudley is, just barely, a nephil. See my notes on relative power levels.↩︎
The idea that James and Lily used a ritual sacrifice to save Harry comes from PetrificusSomewhatus’s Daphne Greengrass and the Importance Of Intent. While I’ve reused the concept, my idea of the ritual is probably very different from the one intended by that work. The idea that the ritual would be hidden in actions that Voldemort would not recognise as such comes from Clell65619’s A Mother’s Love. Here I’m using the concept fairly similarly to the way the original author did. The idea of Lily being embedded in Harry’s scar comes from kokopelli’s The Unexpected Horcrux where again I am mutating the idea from the original. The idea that Lily would help Harry to learn is also used in Lady FoxFire’s Justice Served With A Side Of Fries though I think I came up with my version before I read that story.↩︎
Being deceased does give Lily some insight into the “cosmological” (for lack of a better word) results of different types of magic, but she has not been granted greater knowledge than she had when she died in most respects. It is mostly the difference between knowledge (static) and understanding (increased). Being dead does change things for Lily; her free will is not curtailed per-se, but rather, some choices are simply not really choices at all because the rightness/wrongness of the alternatives (on a moral scale) is obvious to her (that whole understanding thing). She can however still make a mistake. Lily here is choosing between three perceived alternatives: doing nothing, teaching occlumency, or trying something else (not yet described) to empty his mind. She does not know of another option. Of those three options, her “something else” is least bad.↩︎