It started with a friend Dudley had brought over, though the story is told different each reiteration. But the basics are just about the same: Harry is a chronic liar with chronic pain, who steals to eat and points fingers to the nearest person so he can keep doing it. He's not fed by his family, but he is not scrawny. He refuses to be. 

But, though his nimble fingers have snagged fries to burgers to watches, he is a child. He is not as experienced as he wants to be, not as subtle as he tries to be, so from time to time, he gets caught. Most of the time afterwards, he runs as far and as fast as his little legs can take him and he gets away scotch free. Most of the time. But some of the time he does not run far enough, or he does not run fast enough, and for every stomach rumble intended, he gets a bruise in its place.

Fair is fair, he's learned. Unless you don't get caught.

Harry had known pain before he knew thievery. Aches in his joints that keep his eyes peeled in the dead of the night. Pulsing soreness in his muscles. On his best of days he gets off without a migraine, but those come as often as he eats without stealing.

But getting fed right helps, even if just a little bit. 

On the evening his life changed as he knew it, Dudley had brought the new kid over. He was tall, quiet, and pretty. But he sat at the kitchen table with Dudley and his friends and ate snacks Petunia prepared, so Harry decided he hated him. No different, Harry thought, than the rest of them. No friend of Dudley's is a friend of his.

Harry washes the dishes with pruned hands and an empty stomach, and listens to Dudley's friends eat chips, laughing. Occasionly they will throw trash at him. Harry stares intently at the water, focuses on his task, because if he doesn't he's going to hit one of them over the head with a plate. 

They eventually trickle out of the living room and Harry stays in the kitchen, working, because that is all he ever does.

Harry notices the jacket a few minutes later, swung over one of the dining chairs. It's... the new kid's, he realizes. And the ever present urge sneaks up on him; irresistible, spawned from hunger, but not maintained from it. He leaves his post before he knows it, wiping the water off his hand before checking the pockets of the jacket.

Fair is fucking fair. 

There is nothing but a ring, which Harry pockets with glee. A part of him thinks it deserved and another part of him argues that he had just wanted to steal. This is what one gets when you get a klepto and your bully's friend in the same room: A declaration of fair is fair, even when it isn't.

He returns to the sink and washes the dishes with rejuvinized energy, occasionally patting the ring through his pocket. It is one small victory, a war fought and won against a stranger. 

The boy returns to the kitchen for his jacket. He slips it on, sticks his hands in the pockets, and says, without missing a beat, "You can keep the ring."

Harry knows a bear trap when he sees one. It is like with honeyed up police interoggaters, like cheese in a mouse trap; they are not your friend, and one is only foolish to believe differently. The boy is looking for a confession. One he will not get. 

"Sorry?" says Harry, glancing back with a confused expression. "I can keep what now?"

The boy laughs and shrugs. "Who knows?" 

He slips out the front door, and even though he does not even do so much as glance back, Harry knows he's still smiling. Harry is gifted with fascination. If it had been any other of Dudley's friends Harry had stolen from, then he would be shoved and beaten black and blue until he resembled more a corpse than a person.

And yet. Here he stands. Unharmed, treasure in his pocket, smile on his face.

Fair is fair... perhaps the new boy knew that too.

Harry lies in his cupboard that night, the walls confining him seeming to leer at him. To mock him for his box of stolen possessions in place of friends. He is eight years old when he slips on the ring and sees the ghostly figures of his parents, both long dead, who tell him something he has not heard in Death-knows how long. ("I love you.") He thinks it's a dream, thinks it impossible.

But the following night he slips it on again and his parents greet him kindly. It is no dream. It is the only reality he knows.

From then on, he watches the new both with a fluffy afro and smooth dark skin, and thinks that it's okay if he is called pretty. He decides that he does not want any friends of Dudley's... but he does want that one.

So he befriends him, and so on, and so forth, and all is well if all is swell. But Dudley. Dudley tells the story differently.

The new boy has an afro thrice the side of his head and always wears a letterman jacket. He's odd. But kind, and with something insightful to say at every situation. He moves in on the same day that what would soon be called "The First Arrival" started.

People, on the day when Nirnasha, that pretty little boy of Number Five, stop dying. It's a worldwide phenomenon, entirely unexplainable. Baffling to scientists, and soon enough, science as whole.

Christians, bless their hearts, try to say that not allowing people to pass is God's way of saying that Revelation is coming to  be. But there are no trumpets, no demons not already there beforehand, and no divine missing. It is a failing theory, through and through. It is reasoned that if it is not the second coming of Christ, or something of the like, then it must be the first arrival of something entirely different.

Dudley doesn't understand the uproar, at first. Doesn't understand why the lack of death is as big a deal as it is. There is no more mourning, no one to mourn. He sees no downside, at eight, until he sees the suffering.

It's a trip his school is making them take. Since the First Arrival, hospitals have nearly doubled in number. They would quadruple in the following years. The trip itself is to visit one of them, to see those who are meant to be dead but aren't. It's probably something propaganda pushed mission by the school's sponsor. The reasoning for the trip itself is forgotten, though, because it's no where near as memorable as what lay behind closed doors.

He sees people with slowly healing gun-shot wounds to the head. Elderly past their expiration day. People holding on by a thread that is too sturdy.

And then he understands. Dudley comprehends then that immorality is a terrible curse, and for the indefinite future, it is one everyone has.

As he gets older, he thinks back to the first day of First Arrival. Of the day Nirnasha moved it. He didn't consider then, nor now, that the two were more than a coincidence. 

On Harry Potter's tenth birthday, that changes.

Dudley wandered upon the sight by accident. That is the story he tells to his closest friends, to everyone but himself. He knows, though, that if fate exists, it came into play. He feels a tugging at his wrist and he practically drags himself to the side of the house. He plasters himself to the wall and listens carefully at the voices flowing in.

".... and you know that ring you stole from me?"

"When we first met? Yeah. The vision-y one." Harry, Dudley knows. Harry is talking. To Nirn.

And he had known for some time that Harry and Nirn had some sort of kinship. That Nirn's loyalty belonged not to Dudley alone. For some reason, still, their conversation strikes him as (odd.)

"I had stolen it myself. That's how I got it," said Nirn. A ring? Vision-y? Dudley concentrates on the words.

"Really? From who?"

"Some old guy named Tom Riddle. He won't miss it."

So, thinks Dudley, they're both klepto. He is almost disinterested until Nirn continues: "There's something that's been bothering me about that ring, actually."

"What's that?"

"When you became the owner of it, I got a little bit of my magic back."

"You -- you think that's more than a coincidence?"

"I do. There's some other items you should collect. I think if you get them all, I'll be back at full power."

"I can do that, Nirn."

"You wanna see some of what I can do right now?"

"I always do."

Dudley glances over at them, eyes wide both in admiration and in fear, and watches the two boys huddle over his shoe, floating about a foot off the ground. They had, first off, stolen his shoe. Which is just rude. And then they had done their freakish -- magic on it.

Harry and Nirn meet his eyes, watching as he panics and scampers off. "What was that about?" ask Harry. 

Nirn has smiled and shrugged. "Who knows?"

The story Dudley tells is different, as it is as it gets told each time. He does not speak about the magic to his friends. But he tells them Harry and Nirn had stolen from him. They corner the pair one day and Dudley roars, filled with fear and confusion and so on and so forth, "This is not just retribution! This is a declaration of war!"

Perhaps Harry can see the misplaced truth in the words. Perhaps he sees that Dudley is angry at what he does not understand and perhaps Harry knows that there are few ways people like him deal with anger. He grabs his few items that night, places a hand to the locked door of his cupboard, and leaves the Dursely household. He steals some of Petunia's jewelry and a photo album on his way out.

He moves into Nirn's house, and Dudley does not see either of them ever again, though they live just right next door. He still thinks about them, though. The two of them. He thinks of the times when Harry did what could not be rationally explained, and how he was punished for it. Harry was just like his friend, Dudley realizes a few years on.

Dudley will think back. To the start of this all, the appearance of Nirn, the start of the First Arrival. It will be only when he can do nothing about it that he considers Nirn to be more than a bystander in the situation.

Dudley's tale ends there, but Harry's kicks on. He's the main character, after all. Living with Nirn is nice. He does not have to steal to eat. He gets told all about the world his Aunt kept from him. He learns about magic, his birthright.

He learns about Hogwarts, and his only disappointment is that Nirn isn't coming.

"I'm not registered," Nirn had said.

"Then register yourself!"

"It doesn't work that way. I can't do it like that."

"Then how does it work?"

A laugh, a shrug. "Who knows?"

But, other than that, life is good. He does not steal to eat, but he keeps stealing. "I don't get it," he'll say to Nirn. "I'm -- I'm wealthy in wizarding money. I... don't have any reason to be doing this."

Nirn had grinned. He held up a stolen wand. "Nor do I."

Harry's thievery was started from hunger, but not maintained by it.

When Harry is eleven, he receives his Hogwarts letter. He is excited. But, "I don't think Hogwarts in infallible."

Nirn had handed him an icy-pop. "Nothing ever is, darling."

"I know, I know, it's just that--" He thrusts the letter toward Nirn. "It says 'Harry Potter, The Death Household's Second Bedroom.' That's wrong."

Nirn grasped it gently. "Quite," he said. "All writers make typos. Nothing is infallible."

Harry had licked his icy-pop. "Quite," he echoed.

He is sorted into Slytherin. Hears his name whispered viciously and admirably, the mixed opinions of him churning through the student body. At least, he supposes, I am not hungry.

Stealing is a lot more interesting in Hogwarts. There is a constant high risk-high reward, the high of it unbeatable. It's hard to run when you can just be stunned on-stop. It's hard to point fingers when there's so many witnesses, when there's truth serum. He gets better at it. Gets both a box filled with items not his own and friends, gets potions to dull his chronic pain. It never goes away completely, but it doesn't need to.

There are no cupboard walls to mock him here. There is no monster he could face that could possibly be worse than what he's already seen.

He gets caught trying to steal from Professor Snape -- the foul-mouthed man who hates Harry almost as much as Harry hates him -- and is taken to see Headmaster Dumbledore. He is an old man and, if he were a Muggle, he'd be only breathing because of the First Arrival. He is surprisingly un-angry with him.

He tells a story he's heard plenty times before -- of a Dark lord, whose name is taboo, and how Harry supposedly defeated him with the special powers of a one year old. He says he understands why he's acting out. "I had to put with your Aunt -- for your protection, you see," he had said and Harry hadn't understood. He remembers Dudley's furious expression the day he left. This is a declaration of war. "She had not taken fondly to magic, so if she pushed that belief onto you, then it would explain your wayward behaviour."

"You knew?"

"Knew what, son?" 

"That she wasn't fond of magic -- of me. Why was I put there if you knew she wouldn't like me?"

He had taken a solemn look to his eyes and said, "There are more perilous things than family."

Harry disagrees. He thinks there is nothing more dangerous than blood. But instead he asks about that Dark Lord, because he has seen monsters, but none of this sort. "Could he have caused the First Arrival?"

"Could? Most certainly. But would he? ...I believe not," he said. "He wanted immortality for himself. He would not give it to anyone else, let alone the Muggles he oh-so despises. He uses pain and the fear of death to keep his people in control -- without that then..." Dumbledore shrugs. The gesture looks unwell on anyone other than Nirn. "What does he have?"

He gives him a birthright long delayed before he leaves and an invitation to talk anytime he needed. The Invisibility Cloak is nice. Nirn owling him that he has more of his magic now is nicer.

In Harry's second year, the Chamber is opened. He is blamed and it hurts, but he is not one to stand down. He was never scrawny because he never allowed himself to be. He stands outside the Gryffindor commonroom afterhours when he is approached by the infamous Weasley twins.

"If it isn't--"

"--Harry potter! What brings you here--"

"--at such late hour?"

Harry does not even look back at them. "I'm looking for a way in so I can ransack the place" The Fat Lady looks offended and Harry shrugs.

Fred and George, ever the trouble makers, ask only two things. That he avoids stealing from the two of them. (Doable, and they were nonoffender either way.) That he doesn't sell them out if he gets caught. (Shady recognizes shady. Deal, deal, deal.)

They give the password and Harry slips in past the Fat Lady's rumbling. He leaves with a bag full of treasures not his own and two more friends. He Oblivaites the Fat Lady on the way out.

He causes chaos and it is beautiful, sweet revenge, deserved in all the right ways. It is the eptimone of fair is fair. The Gryffindors blame each other and he connects with his fellow Slytherins as they laugh at their confusion. Even his chronic pain does not dim his joy.

Dumbledore eyes him oddly. 

He find out the real opener of the Chamber of Secrets before Christmas break. It's a diary. One who claims to be the memory of a sixteen year old boy, fifty years ago. But Harry is not interested in what he has to say about the Chamber, not fascinated by Hagrid's alleged confession.

'What did you say your name was?'

'... Tom Riddle, why of course.'

'Can I ask you something?'

'Absolutely, John.' He had told Tom his name was John Smith -- common, Muggle, easily untraceable. Names have power. Power given freely is power lost.

'Do you have a ring? Onyx, gemstone in the middle? Causes you to see the dead?'

'No.'

So one says. If he does not have it then, then he would soon. He had learned, through his time as Hogwarts, that the ring is an artifact rarer than gold. In the classic wizard fairytale, it's a gift from Death himself.

He does not know why Tom would have such a thing, or.. why he did, considering it is Harry who wears it now. It's, as the Muggles might say, sus as fuck. He sends the diary to Nirn, explaining the connection.

He does not get it back. Doesn't know what Nirn did with it, doesn't quite care. But the attacks stop soon after and Harry is not dumb enough to miss the coincidence. 

He thinks that Dumbledore knows. That he's got eyes everywhere that simply drip with good intentions. It's confirmed when, at the end of term, Dumbledore calls him into the office and explains the influence that Miss Ginny Weasley confessed to have had witnessed with the diary. 

It is mostly unshocking information. Mostly. "Tom Riddle is Voldemort?"

"Yes, my boy."

"So, that means... he'd had contacted Voldemort--"

"Who had, young Harry?"

Harry smiles and shrugs. "Who knows?"

Harry Potter goes home that summer to Nirn. Nirn explains he "went through a vigilante phase, you know, where I'd only steal from bad people. I guess during that, I got my hands on one of Voldemort's followers. Who knew?" Harry believed him, and so on, and so forth, but Albus.

Albus told the story differently. 

His tale starts when the First Arrival does. He is considered more of an influence on wizarding Britain than the Minister himself. People turn to him for answers, and he is solemn to say that he has none. He was the first to suspect Voldemort's influence and the first to drop it. For even voicing such thoughts, he is criticized.

Voldemort had been gone for seven years running, they'd say. There is no reason he'd return now.

Dumbledore disagreed. He'd seen evil in Tom Riddle, seen it formed from a young age, and is reluctant to admit that he fed the flames of it. He's a man of many regrets and even more mistakes. But it is because of those mistakes that he knows, more than anyone, that if Voldemort were to return now -- well, then, he'd have the reason for it.

When Harry Potter comes to Hogwarts three years later, Dumbledore notices nothing out of the ordinary. Even when he is Sorted into Slytherin. It is another one of his regrets. Abused children are far more likely to be painted green.

This one is on him. There is nothing out of the ordinary. 

The stealing, too, is both explainable and excusable. 

Harry Potter's second year arrives, and things turn the vibrant shade of out of the ordinary. The slip of the tongue -- "that means... he'd have contacted Voldemort" -- is just the tip of the iceberg. Harry had noticed something off about the diary which contained young Tom Riddle... and he had sent it to someone else.

Whom? That is the question. Dumbledore, even after a decade after the war, is the most trusted public figure there is. Who else would Harry send such a dangerous artifact to?

The answer lies in the ring. On Harry's finger, throughout all the years, sat a black ring with an unrecognizable gemstone in it. When Dumbledore dares to wonder if it's a gemstone at all, he wonders if it's the Resurrection stone.

Dumbledore searches the student records. They list date of birth, bloodtype, phone number (if one does so exist), and... the title of what was sent in their first Hogwarts letters. "Harry Potter, The Death Household's Second Bedroom." It is more proof then needed, really. Death likely arrived when the First Arrival started -- the dates match up, it fits.

Albus Dumbledore concludes that Harry Potter is collecting the Deathly Hallows. Concludes that Death being here means that he isn't letting people die. 

... Concludes that the two are deeply intertwined.

So, no. Albus Dumbledore mentions not Harry's hardships in any other way than necessary. Mentions not his deiviousness in any mal-intent. Albus Dumbledore tells a different story. He tells how he saved the wizarding world.

It happens in Harry's third year and the summer beforehand. The Muggle world has come to a collective conclusion: If science does not explain our presumed immortality, then magic does. The discovery of the wizarding world becomes public knowledge not long after.

A war is declared by the world powers against every magical being. Harry doesn't understand why, at first. "We can help them," he says, frustrated, to Nirn. "We're going through the same thing here."

Nirn hands Harry a piece of cholcate and ruffles his hair. "That is the beauty of wars. There is a lot of so on and so forth, for if all is well all is swell."

Harry takes the chocolate. "What's that mean?"

A laugh, a shrug. "Who knows?"

A few days later they receive a post. A Daily Prophet article. "Dumbledore's trying his Dumble-damndest to negotiate," says Harry.

"What's he offering?" asks Nirn.

"A cure," said Harry. "To the First Arrival, in return for peace. You think he can manage that?"

Nirn smiles, kisses Harry's forehead, and says, "For your sake, I would hope not."

Harry wants to ask what it is that means. But he knows the answer already. A laugh, a shrug. Who knows?

(It is only sometimes that Harry believes being full isn't worth it.)

His third year also begins with an escaped criminal. Sirius Black; convicted murder, jailed without a trial. Harry steals the newspaper from Draco Malfoy on the train. Draco yells, but Harry simply states, "Fair is fair."

Harry is not concerned. He's seen real darkness, nights confined in his own personal hell, and knows that there was no greater fight than that. There is no battle that can top such. Mass murderer, or no.

Remus Lupin is a good teacher and kind man. Severus seems to hate him more than he hates washing his hair, which is a plus in Harry's book. Harry practices his Patronous with him and eats chocolate.

Before the first Hogsmeade trip of the year, one of many he is not allowed, Remus hands him a long, narrow box. "It's from Dumbledore," he explains. "If you choose to sneak to Hogsmeade... then he wants you to be armed with this."

Harry opens it. "A wand?" He looks closer. "The... Elder wand?"

"Isn't that a fairytale?" says Remus with a laugh. "It's just Dumbledore's wand."

Harry is hardly listening. "Quite," he says.

He writes to Nirn. Receives no response. Writes again. "I have the last item you told me to collect. I've got all three. You should have all your powers back, right?" Writes again. And again, and again. Knows with his desperation that this is the only thing worse what he's faced before.

He goes home that Christmas break to an empty house. His letters all lay unopened. Nirn is nowhere to be seen.

Fair is not fair. This is not... fair. 

People start to die again. The First Arrival ends just as suddenly as it had began.