Two Weeks Later:
Arabella Figg had never missed a morning walk in thirty-seven years.
Rain or shine, cats or no cats, she trod the same cracked sidewalk with the same shuffling pace, carrying the same basket of dry biscuits and milk saucers. And so, it was no small matter when, two weeks after the Dursleys' hasty departure from Privet Drive, she placed a trembling hand on a long-distance Floo call and informed Albus Dumbledore of something... unusual.
"The Dursleys are gone," she whispered.
Dumbledore, who had just been reading an account of the Goblin rebellions of 1511, lowered his spectacles slowly.
"Gone?" he repeated, brows arching.
"Vanished," Figg muttered, eyes flickering. "I thought at first they were on holiday. But no. The house is empty. The boy—Harry—he's not there. I haven't seen him in days."
Dumbledore's teacup froze halfway to his lips.
"Are you certain?"
"As certain as I am that Snowball is pregnant again," Figg huffed. "And that black cat is not the father."
Dumbledore, distracted, failed to smile at the joke.
"Thank you, Arabella," he said quietly. "I shall look into it."
XXXX
It took him longer than he liked.
He sent a charm to trace the forwarding address, only to find the Dursleys had used Muggle legal channels to shield their new location. Clever, for such simple people. Paranoid, even.
He then summoned an owl with a Notice-Me-Not tracking charm and sent it into Surrey, circling likely neighborhoods.
After a week, it returned with a signature.
Petunia Dursley. New address: Rosewood Court.
Dumbledore smirked as he looked at the address; no matter how talented, no one could evade Albus Dumbledore for long. Not when he wanted them found.
XXXX
The house was ordinary. Dreadfully so.
Two stories, beige paint, a too-clean lawn. The neighborhood was quiet, as though something had frightened all the dogs into silence. The sky was low and gray, and the trees stood still as if holding their breath.
Dumbledore approached the front door and knocked politely. After several moments of silence, the door finally creaked open to reveal Petunia Dursley standing in the doorway, pale as skim milk, her lips bloodless, her hands visibly trembling.
Behind her, Vernon hovered like a bloated thundercloud.
"You…" Petunia breathed.
Dumbledore offered his most kindly smile, though his stomach twisted.
"Petunia. May I come in?"
She looked to Vernon, who gave a tiny, helpless shrug; with a sigh of resignation, Petunia stepped aside, and Dumbledore walked in cheerfully.
The sitting room was pristine. Unlived in. It was as if they'd just moved in yesterday and hadn't touched anything since. Vernon offered no tea, and Petunia didn't ask. Dumbledore took the high-backed chair nearest the fireplace and folded his hands.
"It's been some time," he began gently. "I understand you've moved."
"New job," Vernon grunted. "Transfer."
Petunia nodded stiffly. "It was sudden."
"I see," Dumbledore murmured. "And... Harry?"
The name hung in the air like a noose.
Both Dursleys flinched.
"Oh, he's…. he's staying with... relatives," Petunia said too quickly. "Yes. On James's side. You understand... summer visit..."
Dumbledore tilted his head slightly at that.
"Relatives?" He repeated softly. "James Potter was an only child. And I believe your side of the family is otherwise accounted for."
The silence deepened.
Petunia's knuckles whitened.
Vernon's face turned redder.
Dumbledore's eyes narrowed behind his half-moon spectacles.
"Where," he asked gently, "is Harry Potter?"
Petunia tried to hold her ground.
Dumbledore let his aura unfurl; quietly, but unmistakably.
It was not loud.
Not violent.
It was pressure, the kind of silence that comes before an avalanche, the kind of weight that bends time. Magic older than Hogwarts itself filled the room like thunder held in glass.
Petunia gasped and backed away, and Vernon stepped in front of her protectively, but even he was shaking.
Dumbledore didn't raise his voice. "Tell me," he said, and the power in his voice was ancient and terrible, "what happened to the boy."
And Petunia broke. "It was her," she whispered. "A woman. Pale. Beautiful. Horrifying. She came to the zoo with a girl in black. She said she was taking him, and we couldn't stop her."
Dumbledore's breath caught.
Vernon stammered, "I—I tried to stand up to her. I did! But she—she had this knife, and it was inside my coat, and I swear I couldn't move—she just—looked at me, and I couldn't even breathe—"
"What woman?" Dumbledore asked, though his voice was now barely a whisper.
"The girl called her 'Mother,'" Petunia said. "She was tall. Raven black hair. She dressed like... like she'd just stepped out of a Dracula film, and she had the voice of a funeral and a smile like death."
Dumbledore was already pale.
But now he turned ghostly.
"Oh, Merlin preserve us," he murmured. "Not them. Not again."
"Do you know her?" Petunia asked.
Dumbledore rose slowly to his feet.
His hands were trembling.
"Who was she?!" Vernon bellowed, trying to reassert himself now that the danger was gone. "Who are they?"
Dumbledore turned toward the door.
"The Addams Family."
The room fell utterly silent.
"The Addamses?" Petunia echoed, confused.
"You don't understand," Dumbledore whispered. "No one does. Because no one speaks of them… we don't dare…"
He was halfway to the door.
"I thought they were still in America," he muttered. "I thought they'd... left us alone."
"What are you talking about?" Vernon snapped.
Dumbledore paused at the door.
Then turned back, his expression carved from ice.
"Let me tell you what you allowed, Mr. and Mrs. Dursley."
He took a slow breath.
"You handed Harry Potter, perhaps the most magically significant child of the century, into the care of the darkest magical family in the known world. A family so saturated in ancient power, so deranged in their bloodlines, so profoundly immune to fear, that even Voldemort would think twice before knocking on their door."
Petunia choked.
"They are not like other dark wizards," Dumbledore said. "They do not seek dominion. They do not crave wealth. They are not cruel for power's sake."
He stepped into the hallway.
"They are cruel because it delights them. And you two imbeciles gave your nephew to them!
And with that—
He vanished in a crack of magic and smoke, leaving behind only the scent of ash and ancient parchment.
XXXX
Hogwarts:
The Headmaster's study was quiet.
Fawkes dozed on his perch.
The portraits of past headmasters peered down, curious, as Dumbledore entered and staggered to his chair like a man burdened by prophecy.
He slumped back, staring into nothing as his mind raced faster than a Nimbus 1500.
The Addams Family.
He hadn't thought of them in decades.
Not since that summer in Prague, when Morticia's mother had turned a basilisk into a centerpiece.
Not since he'd crossed paths with Uncle Fester at a grave-robber's duel in Vienna.
Not since he'd once dared to duel the family matriarch during a Council of Shadowed Houses and had awoken three days later on a funeral barge headed down the Thames with a love letter pinned to his robes and a live spider in his beard.
No one crossed the Addamses twice.
And now… Harry was with them.
His ward. His weapon. His hope.
The Boy Who Lived, nestled in the arms of necromancers, death-dancers, and dark wizards with black hearts and bloody hobbies.
He was being raised by them.
Molded by them.
And yet…
Dumbledore hesitated.
He remembered the Addamses' strange code. Their terrifying loyalty. Their power.
He remembered how fiercely they protected their own.
He had to get Harry back before it was too late.
Before he became one of them
XXXX
Addams Manor:
It had been two weeks since Harry Potter entered the Addams Manor.
Fourteen days of dodging guillotines, refusing to eat things that blinked, and waking to the sound of swordplay in the drawing room. Fourteen days of trying not to scream when Pugsley dropped an eyeball down the back of his shirt, or when the hallway mirror called him "meat puppet."
Fourteen days of being seen.
Of being wanted.
And it had changed him. The first three nights, he'd barely slept.
The bed was too hard, (more like a coffin bed than an actual one) and the air smelled of dried herbs and wax. Somewhere in the manor, something wailed like clockwork between 2 and 3 a.m.
But Morticia had come to his room each evening to tuck him in. And the lamp at his bedside never went out. The skull-shaped bulb whispered bedtime riddles if he asked politely.
By the fourth night, he started sleeping through the wailing.
By the end of the first week, Harry had developed what could only be described as a conditioned reflex to the words "let's play."
This was because Wednesday and Pugsley had drastically redefined the word game.
The first one had involved shackles and a clock.
"You have thirty seconds to escape," Wednesday had said matter-of-factly as she fastened his ankles to a slab of stone in the basement.
Harry had sputtered. "Escape from what?!"
Pugsley grinned. "The rising water."
"I'm sorry, what?!"
Wednesday calmly turned the crank.
There was also a "friendly" game of archery in which Harry was strapped to a spinning wooden wheel while Pugsley threw knives and Wednesday aimed her crossbow.
There was a scavenger hunt in the cemetery (Harry had found an actual finger), a potion-brewing contest that ended with an explosion and several animated vegetables, and a duel involving umbrellas and a pit of leeches.
But… Somewhere around day ten, Harry realized something disturbing.
He wasn't scared anymore. Not really.
He was thrilled.
Every day in the Addams household felt like a secret, like he'd been handed the keys to a world no one else knew how to see. A world of whispered spells, old books that breathed when opened, and a family that smiled when you talked about your nightmares.
A family that encouraged curiosity.
And that was the real danger: the more time he spent with them… the more Harry wanted to be one of them. And he eagerly soaked up every lesson they offered like a man dying of thirst in the desert.
Morticia took to Harry's education with eerie enthusiasm.
Each afternoon, she led him to her personal study, an ivy-choked solarium with glass walls, filled with antique instruments, withered flowers, and scrolls bound in black silk.
She taught him how to make a poison that smelled like vanilla.
She showed him how to carve runes into candle wax so that they wept shadows instead of light.
When he asked what one of the tomes was bound in, she had simply smiled and said, "Never ask that question unless you want the answer, my dear."
He didn't ask again, but he read it.
She read him stories.
But not fairy tales.
They were histories, Addams histories. Of great-uncles who outdueled inquisitors with violin strings. Of distant cousins who raised graveyards to defend besieged cities. Of Addams women who married death and came back laughing.
Every story ended the same way.
"Because we are Addamses," Morticia would say, brushing back Harry's hair as he leaned into her side. "And we do not run from the dark. We dance with it."
Uncle Fester took it upon himself to oversee Harry's "practical studies."
They blew things up in the attic.
Genuinely.
Fester taught Harry how to rewire an antique phonograph into a soul amplifier ("for parties") and once encouraged him to lick a nine-volt hex crystal to "see what it tastes like."
"It'll only lightly singe your soul," he said brightly.
Harry had coughed smoke for three hours and giggled through all of it.
They made an electric slingshot together and tested it on the family portraits.
Cousin Balthazar (1623–1705) shouted indignantly from his frame and called them degenerates.
Fester wept with laughter.
Harry had never laughed that hard in his life.
Wednesday took him ghost hunting. Not the fake kind.
Actual ghosts.
They wandered the old cellar tunnels with black candles and salt rings, whispering in Latin and calling for lost souls.
One answered.
She was a French widow named Elise who wept blood and asked Harry if he'd seen her husband. He hadn't. She wailed and passed through a wall. Wednesday seemed satisfied.
"You're getting better," she said, as they climbed back to the main hall. "You didn't flinch this time."
"I kind of wanted to," Harry admitted. "But… I didn't."
Wednesday looked at him then—really looked at him—and for the first time, Harry saw something soft in her usually cold eyes.
"Good," she said simply.
XXXX
By the end of the second week, he didn't scream when Thing jumped onto his shoulder.
He didn't flinch when the hallway armor clanked at him.
He no longer avoided the library's cursed aisle.
He walked into rooms without fearing a trap.
He ate the soup, even when it winked at him.
And when he passed by the great hall mirror—the one that once showed him as someone else—he saw something new in his reflection:
A boy standing taller.
A boy wearing black.
A boy who smiled with his teeth.
One evening, after Fester declared it "Bat Polishing Night" and Pugsley had gone off to test a new kind of firework in the east wing, Harry wandered into the main drawing room, where Morticia played the harp alone.
She stopped when she saw him and patted the cushion beside her.
He sat down.
She studied him for a long moment. "You're changing," she said at last.
Harry looked at his hands. "Am I?"
"Not into something new," she said. "Into something true."
He didn't quite understand that, but it felt… good. Like truth carved into bone.
He looked up at her.
"Do you think I'll be like you? Someday?"
Morticia smiled, reaching up to fix his slightly crooked collar.
"You already are, my darling," she said. "But you'll learn in time how to wear it like a crown."
Harry leaned against her shoulder as the harp sang again.
And somewhere in the manor, the mirror in the hall smiled back.
XXXX
Hogwarts:
The torches in the staff room burned low.
Outside, the wind howled like a wounded beast across the towers of Hogwarts, rattling windows and moaning through the eaves. The fire in the hearth crackled faintly, casting dancing shadows across the stone walls.
Dumbledore stood at the head of the table, his expression unusually grim, the twinkle in his eyes long gone. "I have confirmed it," he said, his voice hoarse with the weight of the words. "Harry Potter is no longer with the Dursleys."
Minerva McGonagall, sitting ramrod straight near the fire, inhaled sharply. "Then where is he?"
Dumbledore's shoulders slumped slightly. "With the Addams Family..."
A beat of silence.
Then all hell broke loose.
McGonagall's teacup shattered against the hearth as it slipped from her hand.
Professor Sprout made a noise somewhere between a gasp and a squeak.
Hooch muttered, "Merlin's bleeding beard… them?!"
Even Professor Trelawney, who rarely noticed anything beyond her tea leaves, seemed momentarily sobered.
But it was Severus Snape who spoke first.
Or rather, sneered first. "Well," he drawled, crossing his arms, "that seems appropriate. James Potter's brat, raised by a nest of gothic lunatics. How poetic."
Flitwick's eyes snapped toward him, sharper than they'd ever been in a duel. "Careful, Severus," the Charms Master said coldly. "You insult them at your peril."
Snape turned, one brow raised. "Oh? Defending them, Filius?"
Flitwick's voice was quiet, but his tone could have carved stone. "I've met them…"
The room stilled.
Dumbledore closed his eyes.
"I saw what they did to the Black Forest Coven when their cousin was insulted at a ball," Flitwick continued. "They smiled. Laughed, even. And when they were done, there was nothing left of the coven but ash and a dozen black roses planted in the ruins."
He looked Severus dead in the eye. "They are not bound by our rules. They are not merciful. And they do not forget."
Snape's mouth twitched, but he said nothing.
McGonagall stood, her tartan robes flaring behind her. "So, what is your plan, Albus? Because surely you have one. You must."
Dumbledore didn't speak right away.
He walked slowly to the fire, stared into it for a moment, then whispered,
"I must pay them a visit."
Flitwick choked. "Alone?!"
"No," Dumbledore said. "Not this time."
He turned to face them, the firelight casting deep lines across his ancient face.
"I will need volunteers."
There was a long pause.
Then McGonagall stepped forward. "You have mine."
Sprout glanced around nervously, then nodded. "And mine."
Flitwick's smile was grim. "I've survived them once. I suppose I can tempt fate again."
Snape scoffed. "You're all mad."
"And what would you suggest?" McGonagall snapped. "We cannot leave the boy in their hands! What will he become?"
Dumbledore sighed.
"That is what haunts me, Minerva."
He sat down slowly. "They are not... evil," he said, almost as if trying to convince himself. "They are not Death Eaters. They have no allegiance to Grindelwald or Voldemort or even the Ministry. They follow only themselves."
"They raised the banshee uprising in Dun Laoghaire," Flitwick said grimly. "They reanimated a basilisk just to study its mating habits."
"They hosted a dinner party with a vampire court and outlived them all," McGonagall added.
Snape sneered, but something in his eyes flickered. "And you're going to walk in their front door and ask nicely?"
"I'm going to ask," Dumbledore replied. "Because if I demand... we all know how that will end."
An eerie silence descended upon the room, and each Professor shuddered at that. Peeves' sudden cackle echoed throughout the room in an oddly ironic manner that suited the mood nicely.
"I saw what they did in Prague," Dumbledore continued, voice low. "I saw what Morticia's mother summoned when the British Ambassador insulted her poetry."
Sprout shivered.
McGonagall whispered, "Albus. What if it's already too late?"
Dumbledore looked up.
And for a moment—just a moment—he looked his age.
"Then Harry Potter is no longer the Boy Who Lived."
He paused.
"He will be something else."