The Portkey—a rusted iron key Harry had kept in his pocket for months—dumped him unceremoniously onto the cold, slick cobblestones of a dead-end alley. The hook behind his navel released with a sickening jerk, sending him stumbling forward. He caught himself on a rough brick wall, retching dryly, the damp night mist chilling the cold sweat that slicked his forehead.
He wasn't in the Burrow. He wasn't at Grimmauld Place. He was in Sofia, Bulgaria, outside a safe house he used for deep-cover extraction.
Harry slid down the wall until he hit the wet stones. He pulled his knees to his chest, his breath coming in short, panicked gasps that smoked in the freezing air.
Drop your wand, Harry.We know what you did.
The look in Ron's eyes. The cold, steel hatred in Hermione's voice. It was a wound deeper than any curse Voldemort had ever cast. They looked at him not as a friend, but as a monster. As a Dursley.
His hand, trembling violently, unclenched. The crumpled piece of parchment lay there in the mud, illuminated by the flickering streetlamp at the end of the alley.
Harry stared at it. He didn't want to touch it. He wanted to burn it. But he couldn't.
He picked it up, smoothing the damp paper against his thigh.
My Dearest Cho... Our son... I have to go back...
The handwriting screamed at him. It was his. The erratic slant of the letters, the heavy pressure on the downstrokes where he got impatient, the specific, lazy loop of the 'y'. It was the handwriting that had signed Auror reports, marriage certificates, and birthday cards for Albus.
"I didn't write this," Harry whispered, his voice cracking. "I didn't."
But did you?
The thought slithered into his mind, cold and reptilian.
Harry squeezed his eyes shut, trying to summon the fortress of his Occlumency. He tried to organize his mind, to find the clear, linear timeline of his life.
Battle of Hogwarts. May 1998. Clear. Auror Training. September 1998. Clear. The Wedding. 2000. Clear.
But between the Battle and the Training... the "Lost Summer."
Everyone had told him it was trauma. Hermione had said it was dissociation—a mind protecting itself from the horrors of war. He remembered drinking. He remembered sleeping in Grimmauld Place. He remembered the feeling of being suffocated by the adulation of the wizarding world.
But when he tried to look at the specific weeks... the weeks Cho Chang would have been conceiving a child...
Grey.
It wasn't just a lack of memory. It was a scar in his mind. A wall of static. He pushed against it, willing himself to remember where he was in August of 1998.
Where were you, Harry?
A sharp, blinding spike of pain drove through his skull. Harry gasped, clutching his temples, curling into a ball on the pavement.
And then, a fracture. A glimpse.
Rain. Not the soft rain of England, but the driving, horizontal rain of the Highlands. The smell of heather and ozone.A woman's face. Cho. But she wasn't the girl he took to the Yule Ball. She looked older. Wrecked. Her hands were clutching his robes."You can't stay," she was sobbing. "You have to go back. The world needs the legend."And a name. She whispered a name against his chest."Harvey..."
Harry's eyes snapped open, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird.
The name echoed in the empty alleyway. Harvey.
He remembered the sound of it. He remembered the feeling of being called that. It wasn't a stranger's name. It felt... familiar. It felt like a coat he had worn to keep the cold out.
"Oh god," Harry choked out. "Oh god, no."
He looked at the letter again. 'The timeline has to be protected.'
Had he done it? Had he cracked under the pressure of being the Chosen One? Had he run away, found solace in Cho, created a life under a fake name, and then... when reality came knocking... had he panicked?
Had he wiped his own memory? Or had he begged Hermione—no, Hermione didn't know—had he begged someone else to take the memories away so he could go back to being the hero?
"Am I him?" Harry whispered, tears leaking from his eyes. "Am I Vernon? Did I lock a boy in a cupboard? Did I drug him to make him normal?"
The horror of it washed over him. If this was true, if he had suppressed a son because the boy was an inconvenience to his narrative, then he wasn't the Savior. He was the very thing he had fought his entire life to destroy.
He thought of Ginny. Of James, Albus, and Lily. If this was true, his entire life with them was built on a foundation of rot. He was a fraud.
He stood up, swaying. He couldn't go to them. He couldn't go to the Ministry. He couldn't go to Ron and Hermione. He was toxic.
He needed the truth. Not the letter. Not the accusations. He needed the physical truth.
The cottage.
The memory fragment had given him a scent. Heather. Ozone. The Highlands. And a specific visual—a jagged ridge of rock that looked like a dragon's spine.
He knew that ridge. He had flown over it during the hunt for Voldemort.
Harry pocketed the letter. His hand brushed his wand. For the first time in his life, holding it felt wrong. It felt like holding a weapon of deception.
He wasn't running away anymore. He was running in. He was going to dive into the hole in his memory, into the grey fog of the Lost Summer.
"I have to know," Harry whispered to the cold Bulgarian night. "I have to know if I'm the monster."
He turned on his heel. He didn't Disapparate to England. He Disapparated to the border, moving fast, moving erratic, moving like a man possessed. He would find the cottage. He would find the ghost of Harvey. And if he found out that Harvey was him...
Harry didn't finish the thought. He vanished into the dark, leaving his innocence on the cobblestones of Sofia.