It was always the same. Once a week, without fail, Petunia Dursley's doorbell would ring, and she would open it to find a person in robes. The person changed from week to week--most often, it was a middle-aged man with fraying clothes of poor quality. Sometimes it was a red-headed young man who looked vaguely familiar, sometimes a young woman with brown hair pulled back in a bun, but every Friday evening, just as she had finished cleaning up from supper, the doorbell rang.

"You're not welcome here," she said, or, "why can't you leave us alone," or occasionally she simply told them, "go away." They always sighed, eyes flicking to the stairs behind her, to the rooms that were conspicuously empty.

"Can I--"

"Leave." This time, she was more forceful, injecting in her voice a world of pain, of scorn, of anger.

They always left.

"It's alright now," she said, and the cupboard door cracked open. "You're safe," she said, and Harry looked up at her. He was always crouched inside, arms wrapped around his knees. She kept his bedroom neat for him, but he never used it, glancing fearfully at the window the few times he went upstairs, or at a floorboard near the bed. When he first to came to her, the room still had traces of his childhood, things she had been loathe to remove after Vernon and Dudley--after. They were gone now, eradicated. The house was cleaned of all hints of magic.

It bothered her more than she liked.

"You're safe," she said again, but it never helped. Every time, she sank slowly to her knees, took her sister's child in her arms. "I won't let them have you," she said, and it was only then that he would cry.

She had promised, years ago when he first appeared on her doorstep, and she never broke her word. She had promised, and Harry needed her, and she wouldn't, she wouldn't let them touch him, not again. They nearly took him once, they nearly killed him, with Dementors and Voldemort and at night he screamed of prophecies and death and his cries were muffled by wood and stairs but she heard them still in her empty bed. They nearly took him, but he was hers, and she had promised.

"Shh," she said, and Harry sobbed in her arms, and when he was finally still she laid him carefully in his bed, drew the sheets over his shoulder, and quietly closed the cupboard door.

He was safe.