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Harry does not learn his birthday until he is five years old.
Before this, he was able to tell people his age based on the loose knowledge that he is as old as Dudley. It’s never occurred to him that anyone might want to know when he turned that old. He sort of assumed that birthdays, like full plates of food at teatime and bedrooms with locks on the inside rather than the outside, were things reserved for normal children. Freaks, on the other hand, are relegated to cupboards. They cannot dream of cake after dinner, because they are lucky enough to get dinner in the first place.
But it is in his first year of primary school that their teacher, Ms Wilson, asks him if he can write the answers to two questions he has never before thought to ask. He tells her he doesn’t have a middle name. When he tries to say the same of his birthday, she tells him that’s ridiculous, because everyone has a birthday. And then she shakes her head a bit, and laughs. She says, “Just write the month it’s in, then. Surely you remember that much?”
He writes down June, because that’s when Dudley’s birthday is. He spends the remainder of the school day upset, though he cannot say why. During dinner, Dudley cheerfully explains what they did in school today. The assignment comes up. While Dudley is too busy filling his mouth to speak, Harry swallows back his trepidation and asks, “Aunt Petunia, when is my birthday?”
For a moment, Dudley’s chewing and swallowing is the only noise in the kitchen.
He does not meet his aunt’s eyes, but he can feel the way they bore into him, like pins and needles.
And then she says, “July. The thirty-first.”
Nearly six full months ago.
“What else did she make you write?”
The question is barbed, frosty. That is how Harry knows it is meant for him and not his cousin.
There were other things about himself, but he knew the answers to those. The colour of his hair, of his eyes. How many people are in his family (three, not four). He knows these things, because he can see them.
Softly, not wanting to incur her wrath, he says, “Our middle names.”
Before he can even blink, his plate is snatched out from under his nose.
“Harry James,” she tells him, voice tight with all the rage he never can seem to avoid. “No more questions, do you hear me? Go to your cupboard.” When he hesitates, the plate is set on the table, hard. “Now!”
Dudley laughs, while Vernon sets a consoling hand on Petunia’s arm. Harry goes to his cupboard and thinks back to his fifth birthday, but is disappointed to find he cannot remember the specific day at all. He was likely weeding the garden, which is wilted under winter now, or perhaps stuck in his cupboard for one alleged infraction or another.
He cannot remember. It is his—and his alone—but it can’t be that special, he thinks, curling up into a tight ball on his side and staring at the door in wait of the moment someone will come by and lock it, if he can’t recall even one detail. It is just a day, then.
He wishes he had never asked
-
He does remember in time for his sixth birthday. For perhaps the first time in living memory, he watches Dudley open his mountain of birthday gifts with a stab of real envy. Before, he thought there was no chance he could ever have that, because he didn’t have a birthday. Now, he does.
He doesn’t ask for gifts, though. To his surprise, on the morning of the last day of July, his aunt drops a box in front of him. Sounding quite nasty, the way she often does when watching the neighbours through the window, she says, “Happy birthday.”
He dares not even breathe. Excitement thrums through him, accelerates his heartbeat. A gift, a real gift, for him. It is almost too good to be true.
Dudley must think so too, because he demands, “Where’s mine?”
Petunia puts a gentle hand over his head and smooths down his hair. If she says anything, Harry is too busy taking the lid off the box to notice.
Dudley sees its contents at the same time he does. He roars with laughter, while Harry sits back, face stinging.
Too good to be true, indeed. Within the box is an old pair of socks, which he recognizes from weekend afternoons spent doing laundry under his aunt’s critical gaze to be Vernon’s. He lifts them and unrolls them and tells himself he is not expecting anything there, either. Still, it is like a blow to the stomach when all it reveals is a large hole at the toe of one of them.
“I can’t even wear these,” he says.
“No?” Petunia sniffs disdainfully. “And you wonder why we don’t get you gifts. Clean this up. Mind you don’t miss any spots this time.”
She kisses Dudley on the cheek, then sweeps out of the room. Harry clenches his fists around the socks, so tightly it becomes painful. Anything, he thinks, to keep from crying about this. Anything at all.
“Bet they’re smelly too,” says Dudley. “Picked ‘em out just for you.”
Harry says nothing. Perhaps bored of tormenting Harry for now—he will be back at it within the hour—he totters off, dirty dishes left on the table next to the box for Harry to deal with.
He looks down at the socks. Tattered, worn, damaged beyond repair. Dudley got a bicycle this year. A real one, with a promise from his father to teach him how to ride it.
Suddenly revolted by them, Harry stands abruptly and drops the socks back into the box. It is a small thing, brown and unassuming. Hardly a gift box at all, and yet it shows not even a dent, no evidence of weathering whatsoever. The socks are old, but Harry is sure, beyond sure, that the box is not. Whether she bought it just for this or not, it is hard to say. But he decides it has not been used to hold something else. Everything he gets is secondhand, after all; he knows used when he sees it.
He puts the box in his cupboard, then returns to the kitchen to scrub the dishes. There is a small step stool by the sink already set out for him. He turns the water as high as it will go, like his aunt always tells him to, and lets the pain of dipping his fingers into it distract him from the smelly sock-infected wound in his chest.
-
They don’t bother with a box on Harry’s seventh birthday. They send him to his cupboard with an old scrub brush, angry red welts on his right palm, and a throat sore and ragged from screaming, and say they don’t want to hear or see or think of him until tomorrow morning.
Apparently, even on birthdays, there is no excuse for burning food.
-
By the time his eighth birthday comes around, he is far better at cooking. It was not the last time his aunt would press his hands against the searing stovetop, but he learns his lesson fast: the better his food tastes, the less horrible the Dursleys will be. Sometimes, they’ll even let him sit at the table and eat it with them, though they never give him more than a quarter of what they make him load on to Dudley’s plate.
It is almost no surprise, then, when today Petunia gives him a ratty old book of recipes.
“I don’t want to have to tell you how to do everything all the time,” she says. “Don’t think that doesn’t mean I won’t notice when you mess it up.”
He nods, but does not crack open the book until he is safely in his cupboard for the evening. It is difficult to read in the dark, but he catches a swirling script on the back of the front cover, which reads Evans. He wonders if that means anything, but knows better than to ask his aunt. Once the evening hours begin to wane, he removes the lid from the box he got two years ago, and sets the book inside, as far away from the socks and scrub brush as he can get it. There is something different about this gift, he thinks. Something almost special.
He puts the lid back in place. As he lies down to sleep for the night, stomach grumbling in mild protest, he cannot quite quell the hope that his next birthday will be at least as good as this one was.
-
His ninth birthday is his worst ever.
It is his own fault, really. His uncle pushes some old shirts of Dudley’s into his arms. When he stumbles back, they fall to the ground. Vernon grunts in irritation, and Harry just—
Gets angry.
He just gets angry. And it is a feeling usually reserved for long stews in his cupboard, but today it teems at the surface and before Harry even knows it, the clothes light up in sudden flames. They reflect only briefly in his uncle’s wide eyes before there comes a muted pop and the burning pile disappears completely. There is not even any smoke to indicate it was ever there.
Just as soon, his uncle is shouting at him: “What did you do, boy?” He reaches forward, gets Harry by the neck and gives him a hearty shake. “Are you trying to burn the ruddy house down?!”
His hollering brings Petunia and Dudley into the hall, but Harry cannot explain himself around his uncle’s hands on his throat. Not that explaining has ever made a difference before, but he really doesn’t know what happened, or how.
That part is not his fault.
It’s a few seconds later, when he is dropped again, and staggers, winded, against the wall. Each word is agonizing, makes it feel like something is ripping inside of him: “I didn’t—do—anything!”
“Don’t lie to me!” his uncle barks.
“I’m not!” Harry stops, gasping, as the next words get caught in his throat. Alarmed, his hands fly up to his throat. It is already sore to touch, but it is not the skin that hurts. He opens his mouth, then closes it again, unable to expel more than a raspy breath.
But his uncle does not look concerned at all. His lips twitch. He says, far quieter now, “Lost your voice, have you, boy? That’ll teach you to talk back, eh?”
Harry just stares at him. The anger is still there, but nearly drowned out, now, by a panicked fear, the thought that he’s done it this time, that he’ll never be able to speak again.
He does not need to be told twice to go to his cupboard.
He lies there, throat burning, and wishes they had just given him another pair of socks instead.
-
Harry’s tenth birthday is spent running away from his cousin and his friends. It is only marginally better than being bullied by his uncle, but that might just be because he can scamper up into trees to escape Dudley. There is no escape on Privet Drive.
When it becomes clear Harry won’t be coming down, and he has climbed too high for any of them to reach him, they give up and leave him be. Harry sits there for a few hours longer, sure they are lurking around a corner waiting for him. It does not matter what time he gets back, because they will not be expecting him for dinner.
Their birthday gift is a substitute for a meal, he supposes. This year, he did get another pair of socks. Along with an old wire coat-hanger. He does not know what compelled him to put them in the box too, but he did. And now that is there, and he is here, and he knows better now than to hope that next year will be better. Sometimes, late at night, he still wakes up gasping for air. Even hours later, he cannot fall back to sleep, because he cannot rid himself of the feeling of hands on his throat crushing his vocal cords one by one.
But he was fine, in the end. He did not speak to his uncle for weeks after that, though his voice was fine after a few days. He has always healed quickly from things he thought were very bad. He supposes it just means that he is as weak as Dudley says he is. That he overreacts. He always has.
It’s not so bad, really. A few hours in a tree is far better than he could have possibly asked for. A coat-hanger and some socks aren’t nothing.
He is ten years old. Maybe when he comes of age, he can leave this place for good. He’s already made it nine years. What’s eight more?
It is too long, a voice in his head whispers. If the Dursleys don’t turn him to the streets by then, maybe they’ll finally forget him in his cupboard instead, and he will starve to death either way. Sometimes he thinks that’s what they want to happen to him anyway.
The sun is setting by the time he returns. No one asks where he was, or how he is. He goes straight to his cupboard, and looks blankly up at the stairs above his head until someone locks him in for the night.
No, there is no escape from Privet Drive. Not now, and probably not in eight years, either. It can be nice to dream sometimes, though.
-
Up in Dudley’s second bedroom—Harry’s bedroom, now—he tapes the lid shut on a five-year-old box, and tucks it away in a corner where he will not see it.
He glances back at the snowy white owl behind him, whom he has yet to name. He wants her name to mean something. She is special. She is not old and used. She lives and breathes and when he extends a hand out to her, she lets him touch her.
For the first time, his birthday feels like it is really, truly his.
Harry is eleven years old when he receives his first—real—gift.
-
At the Burrow, Ron asks his mum over dinner if they can have a cake for Harry’s birthday.
Harry’s head snaps up. “My birthday already passed, though.”
“Yeah, but you didn’t return my letters.” Ron eyes him across the table, almost suspicious. “Even if you already had cake, why say no to a second one?”
Harry doesn’t point out that he has never had a cake with the Dursleys. Instead, he forces a laugh and teases, “You sure it’s about my birthday?”
Mrs Weasley smiles fondly, but says nothing. Her voice would have been drowned out by the twins’ rapid-fire interrogation of Harry on cake flavours, anyway.
The next evening, Mrs Weasley clears their plates, then returns with a small, somewhat misshapen cake adorned with twelve candles. She sets it in front of Harry and says, “Go on, Harry dear, make a wish.”
Ron grins from across the table, and, later, Harry will tell him his eyes were watering from the smoke of the candles. Neither will point out that they were enchanted to not let off smoke at all.
-
For the first time in his life, Harry likes his birthday. Not his thirteenth birthday specifically, but the fact that it is his birthday. His friends send him cards. He stows them all safely in his trunk, but takes them out to look at at least once a day for the next week.
He does not hope for next year. He already knows it will be a good one.
-
Harry’s fourteenth birthday is overshadowed, a bit, by the impending Quidditch World Cup. He doesn’t mind too terribly, though; he eats some of the sweets his friends send and strategically saves the rest. Like every other gift he has gotten in the last three years, he wraps everything else protectively in his trunk. He has long outgrown some of the sweaters Mrs Weasley has knit for him for Christmas, but it doesn’t matter. He has not thrown away a gift in his life. He will certainly not start now.
The accompanying letters and their birthday wishes, he saves too. He always does.
This year, he doesn’t need to look at them again to remember people care.
-
For the first time, Harry throws away a gift. Two, in fact. He regrets it, but it doesn’t steal away the anger that motivated him in the first place. He spends his birthday miserable and alone, risen early on the vivid edges of a dream he cannot change, cannot fix; a classmate he cannot save, a resurrection he cannot prevent.
The thought occurs to him, after he has done away with Ron’s and Hermione’s gifts, that Cedric Diggory will never turn eighteen years old. Then, it occurs to him that he is not so far off himself: three more years, but to think that five years ago, before he even knew the truth, he doubted he would live to be that old—it is laughable.
He will be lucky if he sees sixteen. If Voldemort doesn’t kill him, then maybe he will go insane here on Privet Drive first. Maybe this time his uncle really will choke him to death, the way Harry’s sure he always wished he had. Maybe Harry will do it himself, because he never should’ve made it out of that graveyard in the first place.
It’s not very funny, really. But the thought makes his lips curve up anyway. He imagines a world that turns without him in it. He wonders if Ron and Hermione would regret not telling him anything if it ever came about. He hopes someone will miss him, but knows they will not.
It is just a thought, though. It flits around behind his eyes for a few contented moments, and then it leaves him. Leaves him empty but for all this rage. Leaves him alone but for all these memories.
He is so very lonely.
He does not like his birthday much anymore.
-
Maybe it ought to be ironic. Born as the seventh month dies.
Harry thinks of his first teacher in primary school. Recalls distantly something she said. That everyone has a birthday, that it is their own. He was not born in June, no. Now, perhaps he should be wishing he had been.
Wishing is pointless, though.
Harry’s birthday is not really his. It belonged first to Trelawney, and then to Dumbledore. To some scummy Death Eater, and then to their even scummier Lord. After that, for a few years, it belonged to Petunia. Like most things, she withheld it from him. When he finally reached it, the three of them just made it a miserable affair for him.
Harry’s sixteenth birthday shouldn’t be a miserable affair, but it is. He sees Sirius in all his absence. Remus brings war back to their doorstep, as if it isn’t already waging ceaselessly within Harry’s head. He smiles and he accepts everyone’s gifts and he wonders if they will still celebrate his birthday when he’s dead. He hopes they won’t. He almost wishes they wouldn’t celebrate it now, even.
That night, while Ron is asleep, Harry stares up at the ceiling and imagines he is five years old and does not know he has a birthday at all.
-
He leaves Privet Drive not at eighteen, but seventeen. It is not a bittersweet departure. It is hardly even just bitter. Like the walls are now void of pictures, the house is void of memories. He picks up a box with a taped-on lid in his room and packs it away in his trunk where he cannot see it, where he hopes to never see it again.
His seventeenth birthday isn’t so bad. It is a bright spot in a dark patch, really.
Though he could not bear the thought of leaving them at Privet Drive, he leaves all his gifts and cards at the Burrow. None of them really mean anything anymore. If they did, Hedwig would still be amongst them.
But she’s not.
There is a reason his aunt and uncle never gave him gifts, he thinks. He sees it now, more clearly than he ever has before.
And for the first time, he is grateful to them for it.
He is not—has never been—a normal child, after all. Why should he ever get to be treated like one?
-
On the second day of May, Harry dies. He is ninety days shy of his eighteenth birthday.
-
After the war ends, Harry lives at the Burrow, because he doesn’t know where else he can possibly go and it feels right, really; it is a reparation for Fred’s death, in a way. He silently tidies the house when Mrs Weasley isn’t looking, and she is too preoccupied with her grief to notice. Ron notices, but he doesn’t say anything.
Harry’s eighteenth birthday is spent with Hermione and the Weasleys—eight of them, anyway—because everyone else who could have been there to celebrate is dead. They eat cake. Mrs Weasley digs eighteen enchanted candles into its fluffy top, and Harry asks Ginny to blow them out for him. His eyes are dry, his voice steady. He just has nothing left to wish for.
They give him their gifts. He says his thanks, and excuses himself to put them safely away.
And he has every intention of doing so, but when he opens his trunk, something else catches his eye:
A box. Unbeaten, in perfect shape, like it was purchased just yesterday. It is flimsy cardboard, but it has remained sturdy in his care for twelve long years.
He sets this year’s gifts on his bed in Ron’s room, then begins, one-by-one, taking out all the others. There aren’t a lot of them, exactly. But it is more than he ever expected to receive as a child. It is more than he ever asked for.
And then there are the letters. The cards. Birthday wishes, loving salutations. He reads every single one, his chest constricting tighter and tighter with each word he passes. Sirius’s are the worst, but he does not think he will cry about it. He does not feel like he is going to cry.
Finally, all that remains is the box. With a deep breath, he raises his wand and uses it to peel the years-old tape away. Feeling almost like he is six years old again, he takes the lid off and peers inside.
Two old pairs of socks. A scrub brush. A wire coat-hanger. A worn recipe book—and it is more worn than he remembers, pages nearly falling out of it. It is no wonder his aunt gave it to him; the only other option for it would surely have been the bin—with one word written on the back of the front cover.
He supposes it belonged to one of his maternal grandparents, or to his mother or aunt when they were very young. But the script is elegant, refined by age. He doubts it ever belonged to either of them. He doesn’t know if he ought to be disappointed it isn’t his mother’s or relieved it isn’t his aunt’s.
The book slips from his grasps as the door opens and Ron peeks his head inside.
“What’re you doing?”
Harry’s lips twitch. He gestures miserably around him. “Reminiscing, I s’pose.”
Ron comes into the room now, and sits on his bed. He stares at Harry’s little pile for a long while.
And then he says, “I didn’t know you held on to all that stuff.”
Harry can’t look at him.
“Er.” The mattress creaks with an awkward shift. “We were just starting to worry, but if you want some space—”
Suddenly, the thought of being alone is a frightening one. He shakes his head. “You don’t have to go.”
“Are you…okay?”
They worry about him, since what happened at Hogwarts in May. He sometimes gets the idea that they think he wants to die as often as he thinks he does.
Whether it is Ron’s words or his own thoughts, he finds his eyes welling with tears. He swallows them back desperately. Thinks of his skin burned against the stove or his uncle’s hands wrapped around his throat and knows this is one of the best birthdays he has ever had, and he did not cry about those ones so he shouldn’t cry about this one, either.
But it’s pointless to try. One jagged breath in expels itself as a sob, and then one, and two, three, and they don’t stop. He does not know the last time he cried over something to do with the Dursleys. Five or six, perhaps. Maybe at seven, but only tears of sheer pain.
Are these any different from those? He feels like he is being strangled. His hands ache and sear, phantoms of an injury he hasn’t sustained again in years, not since he got that recipe book.
“Harry?”
Harry sniffles and rubs at his eyes under his glasses, but they don’t stop coming. He curls in on himself, wishing he could just disappear, wishing he could just die.
Though hoarse, he manages to say, “I’m sorry.”
“But…but what’s wrong?”
He sounds positively bewildered. And that is the question, isn’t it? There are too many answers to it, too many derivations of the same howling misery that has been sitting beneath his heart since the day he learned everyone has a birthday, since the day he learned he has a birthday.
What he says is, “I hate my birthday.”
“…What?”
“I hate it,” he goes on. He stops, wipes his nose. It does not make his voice any steadier. “I never thought—I would live this long. I wish I hadn’t.”
When Harry chances a glance at him, Ron looks somewhat ill. Perhaps as a testament to his loyalty, though—however misplaced it may be—he does not move.
“We’re all glad you’re here,” he says quietly.
“I’m not.”
“…I know, mate. We know.”
It’s why he came up here in the first place, probably. Hermione thinks Harry will kill himself. He’s not an idiot. He knows she thinks that. Knows she has convinced Ron of the same, as if he isn’t already dealing with enough.
Harry doesn’t know what he thinks himself, though. He feels half-dead as it is. Past expiry. The prophecy is fulfilled. He is not at Privet Drive.
It is more than his birthday, of course. His life, his existence in this world—it never belonged to him. Now, it should. But it doesn’t.
“D’you want to come back down?”
Harry’s eyes fall to the fallen recipe book. One of its pages has torn away entirely. Inches separate them. Harry has no idea where the page goes, not anymore, if he ever even did.
“No,” he says. “I want this day to end.”
It is beyond clear that Ron doesn’t know what to say. That’s more than fine with Harry; he wouldn’t accept the comfort anyway. Not now. Not like this.
“Hermione—”
“Listen,” Harry interrupts, “I’m not about to string myself up in the closet, all right?”
“I didn’t think you were.”
It’s a lie, but Harry doesn’t have it in him to say so. There is a part of him that relishes in their fear for his safety, in their desperation to keep him alive. He knows it is wrong. Knows it is cruel. But he doesn’t know how to make himself okay with letting it go.
“I can go, if you want me to. But I don’t mind staying, either.”
“I might mind,” Harry admits. “Sorry for crying.”
Ron snorts. “Why’re you apologizing for that, mate? Come off it. I cried loads at Fred’s funeral.”
“This isn’t a funeral, though,” Harry mutters. “I’m saying sorry because it’s not fair to you. Any of you, I mean. You’ve all tried to make today a good day, but I still—“
“What’s that matter? Even if you weren’t grateful—but I’m pretty sure you are—then who gives a damn? Reckon it’s enough to just know you’re here at all. I mean…one more year you live is another year you didn’t die. That’s worth celebrating to us.”
Harry screws his eyes shut. Thinks about his ninth birthday. His fifteenth. His seventh. His tenth.
“It’s all right to hate your birthday,” Ron says. “Honestly, mate—with six siblings, I can’t say mine’ve all been a walk in the park, either.”
“But at least you knew,” Harry whispers.
“Knew what?”
“Your birthday. At least you knew— At least someone cared enough—to tell you it was your birthday.”
“Oh. You…”
And for the first time since that day in primary school twelve and a half years ago, he tells someone, “I didn’t know I had a birthday.” The rest is there, just under his tongue; he draws in a deep breath to hold them down, but they are too heavy and he cannot keep them back, cannot swallow this like he has swallowed everything else: “My first birthday present was”—he reaches into the box and grabs them. Tosses them to a dazed-looking Ron with trembling hands—“a pair of my uncle’s old socks. My second—and my third—and my fourth, unless you count—“ He stops, cuts off with a shuddering gasp. His hand brushes against his throat, if only to make sure no one else’s are there. When it drops again, he says, “I thought I’d die there. Even after I went to Hogwarts, I felt like I wouldn’t make it to my next birthdays. I hoped I’d never make it to this one.”
“Mate—“
“I’m sorry,” Harry says again.
This time, Ron doesn’t bother to tell him there’s nothing to be sorry for. Maybe they both know this would be a lie too.
Instead, he says, “You can tell me if you want to. I’ll stay either way.”
Harry hesitates. He looks around the room, at all his birthday memorabilia sprawled around him. It isn’t much, but it’s just about all he’s ever had. He doesn’t know how he’s supposed to let go of any of it, even the ones that have always just hurt him.
Across the room, Ron stays silent. These past few months have been a lesson in patience for him like no other. He is grieving. His family is hurting.
But he is here, with Harry. He always has been.
And so, Harry tells him. Every awful birthday, every slightly less awful one—he doesn’t need to mention the good ones, because Ron is one of the reasons they were any good at all, but Ron asks anyway, so Harry tells. He talks until his throat grows sore, but it does not feel like anything is wrapped around it. His voice does not flee him this time. It never really left him in the first place, but even when he could speak, sometimes it felt like it had, like someone had stolen it from him, the same way they stole his autonomy—his life—his soul.
When it is all over, Ron rises, crosses the room, and wraps him in a tight embrace. He says, very quietly, “Thanks for telling me.”
He doesn’t seem insulted when Harry can’t respond. He just steps back and smiles, the same easy grin he has been sharing with Harry for what feels like their whole lives.
Harry says, “I’ll go down with you.”
“You will?”
He nods. Ron looks very pleased. In an instant, he is moving to leave the room ahead of Harry.
And as Harry follows, he finds himself thinking—his eighteenth birthday has been horrible. It will stay horrible, undoubtedly. It still weighs him down, from his chest to his feet.
But maybe, just maybe, his nineteenth won’t be so bad. He thinks he might even hope for it, a bit.