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kerravonsenHarry Potter and the Lore of Fiction
by Kathryn Andersen
Universe: Harry Potter
Summary: What if Harry had taken refuge in the library as a child, and read a lot of SF/F books? How would he interpret his accidental magic?
Spoilers: pretty much the whole series
Words: 2519
This is heavily inspired by "Harry Potter the Arch Magus" by DragonBard. I just wanted to put my own twist on it.
Chapter 1: In Which Harry Discovers The Benefits Of Reading
Harry Potter was a freak. His Aunt and Uncle said it so often that he almost believed it. Yet if they were the definition of what was normal, Harry wasn't entirely sure he wanted to be normal. What did it mean to be freakish, anyway? Aunt Petunia said the word as if it meant "worm" or "cockroach". Harry wondered about it, but he didn't ask, because the first rule of the Dursley household was "Don't ask questions."
That didn't stop Harry from thinking questions. Why were there so many spiders in his cupboard? Were they hiding from Aunt Petunia? How did the telly work? What kept aeroplanes falling from the sky? These and many other questions remained unanswered until the day he discovered The Library.
The library had always been there, but it was seldom frequented by anyone. Anyone "normal", that is. He doubted Uncle Vernon even knew it existed. The librarian, Mrs Hartigan, was a terror who demanded absolute silence. Rumour had it that she would hit you on the head with a book if you made a noise. A heavy hardback book.
But one day, Harry was running away from Dudley and his gang, and he saw the doors of the library beckoning to him. He had a stitch in his side, and he could hear the pounding of Dudley's elephantine feet on the pavement. Harry staggered up the wide steps, opened one of the heavy double doors and slipped inside. He couldn't appear as if he was hiding, or Mrs. Hartigan would chase him out again. Breathing slowly and carefully, though his heart was pounding, Harry walked over to the reference section, and pulled out a volume of an encyclopaedia at random. Then he sat down at one of the study tables, opened up the book somewhere in the middle, and pretended to read it. Turning a page, a heading caught his eye: Why is the sky blue? He began reading in earnest. Soon he forgot all about Dudley and his gang, as he read about all sorts of interesting things like rainbows and refraction, seasons and orbits, the difference between true north and magnetic north.... Science was really amazing.
After that, Harry went to the library as often as he could. At first he stuck to the encyclopaedia, even when it was hard to understand. Looking up long words in the dictionary helped, but not completely. He felt as if the dictionary had been written by people who expected you to already know what the words meant. But he persevered anyway.
Mrs. Hartigan noticed. Not that she said anything. She would quietly put books down on the table next to Harry; interesting books, fiction as well as non-fiction. Thus was Harry introduced to the adventures of Julian, Dick, Anne, George and Timmy the dog; he sailed through space with the trade ship Solar Queen; he learned about the power of Laran and wished he had red hair; he marched along with the Roman Eagles; and he shivered with the deep, deep cold of Between. He imagined exchanging riddles in the dark; he stepped with Lucy through a wardrobe door; he delighted with Charlie and his golden ticket; he foraged with Ayla and practised being still and silent. Dudley wasn't a lynx, but Harry certainly wanted to avoid his notice just as much.
Harry knew that golden rings couldn't make one invisible, that carpets couldn't fly, that one couldn't put nine lives in a book of matches; he knew that magic didn't exist. His Aunt and Uncle were very clear on that point. But they let Dudley watch Star Wars on the telly; Harry had even managed to watch most of it before he was caught and put back in his cupboard. The week Harry found and read "The Splinter of the Mind's Eye", he couldn't stop smiling: he knew more about the adventures of Luke Skywalker than Dudley did!
Harry didn't believe in magic, but science... science opened up a world of possibilities. Maybe some day someone would invent anti-gravity. Maybe hyperspace existed. Maybe there were such things as powers of the mind.
Life was good: it was the summer holidays. Life was not good: Aunt Marge was coming to visit. She wasn't exactly his aunt, being his Uncle Vernon's sister, but he had to call her "Aunt" anyway. Was there such a thing as an Aunt-in-law? Aunt Marge was loud and rude (especially to Harry) and her favourite bulldog Ripper lived up to his name - on Harry, and Harry's clothing. Harry wondered if he should "accidentally" spill pepper on his jeans so Ripper would have a sneezing fit the next time he tried something.
Harry nervously touched the piece of paper in his pocket as he walked home from the library. Mrs. Hartigan had given him a form for his guardians to fill out so he could have a library card, and borrow books to read whenever he wanted. And he wanted, oh yes, he wanted. Books gave him answers to many of the questions he didn't dare ask at home. And somehow, the more he found out, the more he wanted to know. But it wasn't just answers that books gave him, but people. The people he read about helped him be brave and stoic and quiet when things were particularly unfair. It didn't matter if they were real or fictional, they were still inspiring: to lose your legs and teach yourself to walk and then fly again; to burn to get into the space force despite your fragile bones; to hide in an attic from people who wanted to kill you because of your ancestors, and still be cheerful; to eat the last of your food on your quest to destroy a dark lord because you knew you weren't coming back, and going ahead anyway; to give your last currant bun to someone worse off than you because even though you were hungry, you were still Royalty inside, a Princess who gave largesse. These were people that Harry wanted to be like.
Harry took a deep breath and walked up to the front door. He could hear Ripper barking already. Harry sighed and opened the door.
"Well, boy, where have you been?"
"The library, Uncle Vernon."
"That's a likely story," Uncle Vernon growled.
Harry dragged the piece of paper out of his pocket and thrust it at his uncle.
"What's this?" He started reading the form. "You want a library card? What sort of namby-pamby nonsense is this?"
"Well, Vernon," Aunt Marge said, "it's not like the boy is ever going to be anything but a weakling; not a strapping young lad like my nevvy Dudley, is he?"
"So?"
"So if he's ever going to pay his way, he'll need to get the kind of work that weaklings do, and that means book-learning." Aunt Marge turned to Harry. "Boy! Who do you like best from history?"
"Douglas Bader, Aunt Marge," Harry said. Of course, that wasn't the only answer he could have given, but he doubted that Aunt Marge would have approved of some of the others.
"Tin-legs Bader, eh?" Aunt Marge said. "A fine British hero! See, the books are having a good influence on him already. Give him his library card, Vernon; it will keep him out of trouble."
Uncle Vernon muttered that the boy was always trouble, but he signed the form anyway. Harry had never thought he would be grateful to Aunt Marge for anything, but there it was.
Of course, Ripper then decided that Harry was his latest chew toy, and the gratitude dimmed somewhat. But it didn't entirely go away. He was going to get a library card!
Harry was careful in his choice of books to borrow from the library while Aunt Marge was still visiting them: books about dogs and World War 2. He thrilled with the cleverness and cunning of the prisoners of war who plotted a mass escape, but he struggled with the long-windedness of the novel by the same author which focused on the development of special bombs - Harry preferred something with more action in it. The dog books were a mixed blessing. Harry now understood why Ripper disliked him: Harry simply wasn't Aunt Marge. It was clear that Ripper worshipped the ground she walked on. But one book in particular, a slim hardback volume that looked as if it had been in the library for a hundred years, woke in Harry a longing he never dreamed of before: to have a dog of his own, an ever-faithful friend who would always be on his side. Even if it were a bulldog. The dog in that book had been a bulldog called Pelleas, "beautiful after the manner of a beautiful, natural monster that has complied strictly with the laws of its species." Even a bulldog could be beautiful in its bulldogness.
Ripper still growled whenever Harry came near. What Harry didn't know, and what Aunt Marge didn't bother to mention, was that Ripper had been rescued from a cruel family; the eldest child in particular had thought it good fun to pour undiluted bleach on the dog's off-white fur to "clean" him. Ever after, Ripper had associated the smell of cleaning chemicals with pain. As Harry was the one who did all the chores, including cleaning, the smell of it lingered around him; a formula for instant hatred on Ripper's part.
Marge had never paid much attention to the Boy; after all, he wasn't a dog, and he wasn't kin, not really. Of course she insisted on being called "Aunt" - that was a matter of respect. But she'd always assumed Vernon was right when he called the Boy a lazy, destructive, ungrateful liar. Even more than Vernon, she trusted Ripper's instincts, and Ripper didn't like the Boy.
But the way the Boy had smiled and thanked her when Vernon had signed the form for the library card... that wasn't ungrateful, nor was it scheming, it was genuine. His whole face had lighted up. Perhaps there was more to the Boy than she thought. Then the very next day, the Boy had broken one of Dudley's new toys out of spite, upsetting her dear nephew greatly. What a vicious ungrateful child! He didn't even have the grace to look guilty when Vernon assigned his punishment. The hardened delinquent showed no emotion at all.
But she couldn't forget that smile. Why would the Boy have smiled at all, if he was so hardened?
Marge began to notice things she'd never noticed before. The Boy always made breakfast. He also made lunch. He helped Petunia with dinner. He did all the dishes, and cleaned the house, and weeded the garden. But there were always spilled drinks, muddy footprints, broken toys, and food missing from the larder. Her clever Dudders caught the Boy red-handed more than once. Yet no matter how many times Vernon gave him the belt, the Boy continued to misbehave.
What was the matter with the child? It was almost as if he had a split personality. No, that was a ridiculous notion. It was just bad blood. The Boy's wastrel of a father got himself killed drunk-driving, didn't he?
Soon enough, Marge's holiday visit to Vernon was over, and she was back home with her beloved bulldogs. But every now and then, her puzzled thoughts went back to the Boy.
Aunt Marge had gone, but Harry continued to be very selective in which books he brought home from the Library; he still had Uncle Vernon to placate. He spent as much time at the library as he could after all his many chores were done. Uncle Vernon thought that the summer holiday was a good time for Harry to do things like paint the shed, steam-clean the carpets, and re-pave the front path. But even Uncle Vernon couldn't make him work every single hour of the day.
Then came the day he learned that Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia had lied to him. He was used to them lying about him, but he hadn't expected them to lie to him. Harry was surprised that he was surprised, though he realized that he shouldn't have been.
Harry's interest had been piqued by the Library's microfilm machine, because microfilm was what spies used to pass on secrets. Harry didn't expect the Library to have secrets on microfilm, just old newspapers and things like that. But he still wanted to have a go at it, and pretend he was James Bond thwarting the Russians. But in order to use the machine, he had to have something to look up. He couldn't say he had a school project, because it wasn't term-time. He listened to the reasons other people gave for looking things up, and he thought, until the idea came to him: he would ask to look up the time when his parents died, to see if there was something in the newspaper about the car crash. Why had he survived with nothing but a jagged scar, when both his parents had died? He knew the date it had happened - 31st October 1981 - but none of the details. Morbid to look it up, perhaps, but why shouldn't he know?
Mrs. Hartigan appeared to approve of his quest; she showed him how to look for the correct printed sheets of plastic, she wasn't sharp when she corrected him ("It's microfiche, not microfilm, child") and she didn't hover over him when he used the machine.
Harry looked through the articles on the 1st of November. Nothing about a car crash, just articles about shooting stars and strange flights of owls. He started looking through the obituaries, and in the notices on the 3rd of November, he found it.
POTTER, James and POTTER, Lily
Late of Godric's Hollow.
Passed away suddenly in a gas explosion, 31st October 1981.
Beloved father and mother of Harry James.Relatives and friends are invited to their funeral service, to be held at St. Jude's, Godric's Hollow, on Friday 6th November, commencing at 11:30am.
What?
They'd died in a gas explosion?
It seemed that the Library had secrets on microfilm after all.
Why had his aunt and uncle said that his father had been drunk and crashed the car? The answer came to him at once: they hated my parents. But why? Because they were freaks. But what did that mean? It meant abnormal, strange, ugly, weird. It meant not-like-the-Dursleys. Had Aunt Petunia thought his mother a freak when they were children, or was it only after Lily had married his father? His father who hadn't been a drunk. If they'd lied about the car crash they must have lied about that too. In fact, he couldn't trust anything that they'd ever said about his parents.
How was he going to find out the truth? Harry didn't know. But he printed out the information in the death notice, using the special printer attached to the microfiche machine, and stuck the paper to the inside of his cupboard door to remind him that Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia were lying liars who lied.
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here, have a photograph-esque icon in honor of microfiche
Date: 2012-06-09 05:56 pm (UTC)Re: here, have a photograph-esque icon in honor of microfiche
Date: 2012-06-09 05:59 pm (UTC)I was planning on listing all the books at the end of the story...
Re: here, have a photograph-esque icon in honor of microfiche
no subject
Date: 2012-06-09 04:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-09 05:38 pm (UTC)I do want to finish this... at some point...
(I need a "Fight evil: read books." icon of my own...)
no subject
Date: 2012-06-09 09:49 pm (UTC)I love the passing reference to "strange flights of owls".
So Harry prefers science. What will happen when he starts to do magic.
no subject
Date: 2012-06-10 12:59 am (UTC)I do hope it will get finished too...
So Harry prefers science. What will happen when he starts to do magic.
Indeed, that is the question... (evil grin)