Chapter 5 : The Boy in the Library
Little Whinging Public Library — July 12, 1990
The library smelled like carpet cleaner and old paper, the universal scent of underfunded public buildings trying their best. Fluorescent tubes hummed overhead. A rack of pamphlets near the entrance advertised community yoga and a lost tabby cat named Gerald.
Matt pushed through the door in trainers, jeans, and a jumper two shades too brown — Muggle clothes selected by Tilly, who had studied a catalogue with the focus of a battlefield tactician and pronounced the outfit "sufficiently ordinary." He carried three fantasy novels under one arm. The top cover showed a dragon in mid-flight.
Pip had found Harry in April. The old elf had Apparated to Little Whinging, Disillusioned, and spent two days observing Number Four Privet Drive with the patience of a creature who had served the Summon family for six decades. His report had been clinical and devastating: the boy slept in a cupboard, ate less than the family dog, and fled to the public library whenever the Dursleys' enormous son organised his favourite sport of Harry Hunting.
The library was Harry's only safe harbour. Matt intended to dock there.
He chose a table in the reference section — visible but not central. Opened a novel. Settled in. Through Creature Sense, he catalogued the room: fourteen Muggles, no magical signatures, one sleeping cat behind the librarian's desk that registered as purely mundane. No threats.
Harry was in the corner.
Matt had prepared himself. He'd seen the films, read the books, imagined this moment across two lifetimes. None of it was adequate preparation for the reality of a ten-year-old boy who had been systematically neglected for nine years.
Harry Potter sat cross-legged on the carpet between two shelving units, half-hidden, like he'd chosen the spot specifically because adults couldn't see him from the main desk. His clothes were absurd — a T-shirt that hung past his knees, shorts cinched with what appeared to be a length of electrical cord, trainers held together by faith and grey tape. His hair was black and wild. His glasses had been mended with sellotape at the bridge.
He was reading. A battered copy of something with a spaceship on the cover, held close to his face, shoulders curled inward like a parenthesis.
Smaller than I expected. Thinner.
Matt's chest tightened. He'd known. Intellectually, clinically, the way you know a case file before meeting the patient. But knowing and seeing were different animals entirely.
Don't rush. Let him come to you.
Matt read. Or pretended to — the words blurred behind the focus of his peripheral vision, tracking Harry's movements. The boy read for forty minutes, turned three pages, and glanced toward the exit seven times. Checking. Always checking. The body language of someone who'd learned that safety was temporary and doors were exits, not entrances.
At the fifty-minute mark, Harry stood. Stretched. Wandered toward the fiction section, trailing his fingers along spines the way some children touch things to confirm they're real.
His path brought him within six feet of Matt's table.
Matt didn't look up. He turned a page. The dragon on the cover caught afternoon light from the window.
The footsteps stopped.
A pause. Matt could almost hear the calculation — approach or retreat, speak or stay silent, risk or hide.
"Is that good?"
The voice was quiet. Not shy, exactly — careful. The voice of someone who'd learned that speaking up got you noticed, and being noticed got you punished.
Matt looked up. Green eyes behind taped glasses, watching him with a mix of curiosity and readiness to bolt.
"Brilliant, actually." Matt held up the book so Harry could see the cover properly. "Third time reading it. The bit with the ice dragon is my favourite."
"There's an ice dragon?"
"Chapt er twelve. He's grumpy and doesn't want to help anyone, but then this girl shows up with a broken wing mirror and —" Matt caught himself. Smiled. "I'll ruin it. Do you want to borrow it when I'm done?"
Harry blinked. The offer had caught him off guard — Matt could see it in the way his weight shifted, the micro-flinch of someone bracing for the catch.
"You don't even know me," Harry said.
"Matt Summon." He stuck out his hand. "Now you know me."
Another pause. Harry looked at the hand like it might be a trap. Then he reached out and shook it. His grip was light, fingers cold.
"Harry. Just Harry."
---
Matt came back three days later. Same table, same section, new book. Harry was in his corner again — same spot between the shelves, different sci-fi novel. This time, when Matt sat down, Harry glanced over within ten minutes.
"Did the girl fix the wing mirror?" Harry asked.
"Nope. The dragon ate it."
Harry's mouth twitched. Not a smile, not yet, but the muscles had moved. That was enough.
They talked about books. Safe territory. Matt let Harry lead — which authors he'd read, which ones he wished the library had. Harry spoke in short bursts at first, as though rationing words, then longer as nothing bad happened. No one told him to shut up. No one walked away. Matt asked questions and listened to the answers, and he could see the effect of that attention landing on Harry like sunlight on a plant that had been kept in a cupboard.
Which he literally was.
On the fourth visit, Matt brought crisps. Two packets — cheese and onion, salt and vinegar. He'd bought them at the Tesco on the corner. Muggle money Pip had exchanged at Gringotts.
"Hungry?" Matt tossed the cheese and onion across the table.
Harry caught the packet by reflex. Stared at it. "I — you don't have to —"
"I bought two. Can't eat both."
A lie. Matt could absolutely eat both. But Harry opened the packet and ate the crisps with the controlled speed of someone who'd learned to eat fast before food was taken away, and Matt filed that observation alongside every other piece of evidence building in his mind.
He brought extra every visit after that. Crisps, biscuits, apples. Never enough to be conspicuous. Always offered casually, as though sharing food with a near-stranger was the most natural thing in the world.
On the sixth visit, Harry asked the question Matt had been waiting for.
"Where do you live? I haven't seen you at school."
"Scotland, mostly. Big old house. It's just me and some —" a fractional pause — "family staff. My parents died when I was a baby."
Harry went still. The crisp packet crinkled in his tightening grip.
"Mine too," he said. "Car crash."
Not a car crash. A killing curse from a dark wizard who feared a prophecy about a one-year-old boy. And you don't even know.
"I'm sorry," Matt said. Meant it. "That's rubbish."
"Yeah." Harry looked at his crisps. "It is."
They sat in the quiet of the library, two orphans eating crisps, and Matt could feel the fragile architecture of trust being built one shared silence at a time. No system notification for this. No affection meter rising. Just a boy who'd never had a friend, and a man in a boy's body who'd decided that this particular wrong was one he could fix.
Harry looked up. The beginning of something — gratitude, maybe, or just the unfamiliar warmth of being seen — flickered behind those green eyes.
"Same time Thursday?" Harry asked.
"Same time Thursday," Matt confirmed.
Harry left the library clutching the borrowed dragon book against his chest. Matt watched him go through the glass doors, watched the thin shoulders square as he turned toward Privet Drive. Watched until the boy disappeared around the corner.
Then Matt pulled out the old gold coin he'd been carrying in his pocket for three weeks. Turned it over in his fingers. The protective ward Pip had helped him layer into the metal hummed faintly against his skin.
Soon. But not yet. One more visit first.
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