His Little Shop of Horrors

Chapter 1: The Funeral

The funeral was small. There were only a handful of people present, mostly because the Will of late man Borgin would be read soon after.

Among the tall, dark clad figures a small child clung close to his caregiver. The child had a mop of messy raven black hair that fell over his expressive green eyes and needed to get cut soon. He was dressed in dark, second hand robes that sported several patches already, but nobody paid him any attention, or the adult he was with. Said adult did not look any better than the boy, in his own second hand robes. He looked paler than the boy, almost sickly. And the boy was used to that look from the man. Brendan Borgin, that was the man’s name and he looked nothing like the man in the marble tomb. Brendan was young, barely forty years old but his long hair was already a nice silver grey colour. His eyes, the boy’s favourite feature of the man, were warm amber, betraying the man’s unique condition, that of lycanthropy. He had been bitten by a werewolf some ten years before, something that for his pure-blooded family (even though the Borgin's did not hold as strict a view as other purebloods as they no longer had the wealth and power they once had) that was unforgivable. Brendan had been cast out of the family but never really disowned.

It was because of the beast-wolf inside him that Brendan took the boy in; he had seen the small child with the large green eyes and had claimed him on the spot.

That very day Harry James Potter learned what a family, a proper one, was supposed to be like. After meeting Brendan, little Harry woke for the first time in a bed and in a warm, caring embrace. Later he ate fresh food and drank fresh, warm milk, a luxury for the child. And when he got his own clothes, still second hand and patched. But ones that fitted him unlike Dudley’s cast-offs, the child had hugged his very own hero.

Harry had been four years old when the Dursley’s had left him out to freeze in the cold.

And now it was one year after Brendan had rescued him from freezing out in the cold. A difficult year. Brendan might have been kind enough to rescue the boy but he was a bitter man himself. Still he never lashed out at Harry and on nights when the child had nightmares he would allow the boy to seek him out and crawl under the covers with him. And on days closer to the full moon the werewolf avoided Harry as the man was edgy, abrupt and often mean, even though he always apologized to the boy he now thought of as his son. And Harry looked a lot like the child Brendan had lost the night he was turned, the very night his beloved wife and two year old son had died by the same beast that cursed him. Harry would hear of the story much later but it had touched him even more that Brendan had taken him in, especially since they were not related by blood.

The pair had stayed at Brendan’s small, cramped apartment in a dodgy part of Knockturn. Money was a problem and not easy to come by but little Harry had never been happier.

Then the owl came and Harry was brought to this place, Brendan keeping a hand on his shoulder, renewing the warming charms on their clothes to keep away the freezing cold.

The other adults all looked similar to Brendan, except their sour looks and mean words to his hero. But Brendan ignored them all.

At the end of this morbid and warped family reunion Brendan walked away with a smirk and a hefty inheritance.

End of chapter