The summer after Year 1 of Primary School, when Harry turned 6, was particularly hard for Harry. Dudley’s school friends were starting to come over unsupervised, and Dudley invented a game he called “Harry Hunting.” Harry learned to run quickly, and to maintain what an adult would have called situational awareness. Harry did not know that phrase, he just knew that if he paid attention to the feel of the various minds around him, he got hurt less. To the Dursleys, it seemed like Harry had eyes in the back of his head. He was avoiding Dudley and his friends before he should have known they were there. This further proof of his “freaky” abilities fanned the flames of Petunia’s jealousy even as it enraged Vernon’s bigotry.
Lily was quickly realising that teaching Harry legilimency might not have been the best idea. While he had been in school, it had been one thing. The teachers mostly meant well, and you could feel the confusion that the spells on Harry caused in their emotions. Similarly, Harry was bright enough to realise, with only a little prompting, how much his classmates feared Dudley and his nascent gang of bullies. During the summer however, Harry was exposed to a very different set of people. Petunia occasionally hosted some of the other local ladies for tea, and Harry became all too aware of the undercurrent of satisfaction and even happiness that they felt beneath the false expressions of sympathy and dismay as they gossiped about the latest neighbourhood scandals. Harry correctly realised that these adults believed the worst of him not because of the confusion caused by any spell, but because it pleased them to believe the worst of anyone; their children, only a few of whom were in his class, were no better. Lily had hoped to show Harry that the Dursleys were the exception. He was instead learning that those with both the power and willingness to help him were few and far between.
That summer Vernon had made plans to take the family on a trip, leaving Harry with Mrs. Figg. Harry did not much care for Mrs. Figg’s house, it smelled of cats, and she made him sit and look at endless picture albums of cats she had raised. He had not however, really thought much either way about her. She fed him more than the Dursleys did, and he had a real bed, so if pressed, his opinion would have probably been vaguely positive. Less than a day after being dropped off with her however, Harry noticed that Mrs. Figg was different from most of the adults he met. With most adults, he had a fairly strong grasp on what they were feeling, but that was about it. With Mrs. Figg, Harry was getting flashes of memories as well. He had a strong sense of her hiding something whenever she was talking to him, even when it was just about her cats. What could she possibly have to hide about her cats‽ As always Harry never said much beyond “Yes Ma’am” or “No Ma’am;” he certainly never asked questions. Why would she lie to him?
And her memories, for one thing, why could he see them at all?1 If he could have known, the answer was Mrs. Figg was slightly more magical than either his aunt or cousin, making her mind more accessible to mental magic. On top of that, he was essentially bored, and thus exploring her mind much more thoroughly than he ever had his aunt’s or cousin’s. Habituated to the feel of their minds, burdened by the lack of food and the constant chores, he had simply never noticed that Petunia or Dudley’s memories were accessible. What he saw in Mrs. Figg’s memories drove the question of why he saw those memories out of his mind. There were such strange things in them. People dressed in odd clothing, waving wooden sticks. He would have thought he was watching scenes from movie - not that he had ever seen a whole movie, but occasionally he saw bits and pieces of whatever Dudley was watching. Most disturbing of all, some of the memories seemed to be about conversations she had had with these strange people about him.
She knew. Knew and remembered that he was too small, that he was almost always seen doing chores and never seen playing, that he sometimes had suspicious bruises.2 She knew, and yet she had done nothing. Harry hated her. He was used to the fact that his aunt and uncle disliked him, it was so old a pain that he almost forgot it hurt sometimes. This, however, was new, and it drove home how alone he was in a way he had never felt before. Sure, he could still see the two souls battling endlessly within him, the good soul he was learning had been his mum’s, and the evil soul that still regularly caused his nightmares. They were, however, so locked in their seemingly unending struggle that his mum rarely had time to do more than teach him the little bits of magic he used to spy on the minds around him and to heal himself.
Harry had not much liked sitting listening to stories about cats, but when Mrs. Figg fed him regularly, he thought it meant she cared something for him. He now knew that minding him was just a job, and one she resented at that. She was nearly as jealous of his ability to do magic as his aunt, and making sure he had to sit there bored stiff was her way of lashing out. Meanwhile she told stories to the strange old man with the beard (Dumbledore her memories told him) about how well the plans to keep him humble were going, and other stories, pure fiction, to another man with long hair like a girl’s and a mouth that showed too many teeth3 to make some extra money. People were going to believe all kinds of things about him because she simply did not care.
Fortunately none of this internal turmoil was visible on Harry’s face. The dissociated state his mum had induced in his infancy as a byproduct of her efforts to protect him from the soul shard’s influence let him keep his face blank while he raged about in a room created within his mind for the purpose. Harry was only six. The fact that it occurred to him to keep his display of temper internalised was remarkable. The fact that it did not occur to him to do anything actually productive should hardly be surprising.
If he had thought about what he had seen in those memories for even a moment more, then even as sheltered from fiction as he was he might have connected the wooden sticks with stories of wands. Legilimency might be stronger, more easily focused with a wand, but does not require it, and the self-healing he was learning was wandless as well. Lily was not going to bother teaching him about wands when she knew full well there was no way to get him one. We will not know, however, what might have come if Harry had made that connection, for Harry quickly lost interest in memories - it hurt too much. Thus, by the time his relatives returned from their trip, it never occurred to him to re-explore their minds to see if he could see their memories. Lily never noticed. Time meant little to either deceased soul or to soul shard. If she had noticed, she would have been torn between warning Harry away from using legilimency so actively, dismay over now knowing the identity of his other adversary, and disbelief that such a respected person could have betrayed all he claimed to stand for so fundamentally.
See my notes on relative power levels.↩︎
Here I’ve established a key point. Nephilim, even squibs, remember Harry, everyone else forgets him. Vernon not an exception here. He does in fact frequently forget about Harry, it is just that he is (when at home) much more continuously reminded of Harry’s existence. This has happened to the point that complaining about the half remembered boy (whose name he actually does have trouble remembering due to the spell) is now habitual.↩︎
The idea for the author of the Harry Potter stories that Ginny grows up reading comes from a fanfiction I read, but I can’t remember which right now. I do not want to give just who it is away here though if you can’t figure it out from the fairly obvious reference.↩︎