Under Wing

Summary: Prophesies where tricky things and lies are even tricker, Sirius's death becomes a catalyst and Dumbledore's lies crumple like a house of cards. Harry is left with a burning question…Who is he really? Crossover with Katekyo Hitman Reborn!

Author's note: Plot Bunny borrowed with permission from the lovely Araciel~! XD Go read EVERYTHING she's written. Seriously go now~!

Chapter 1

Prophecies were tricky things. Tricksy. Slippery. Ephemeral. About as clear as a mudslide. And that was the problem that now faced Albus 'All Knowing' Dumbledore.

He had really screwed the pooch on this Prophesy.

He had arranged everything ever so carefully, and cleverly, in order to bring about Tom's downfall. It was a shame that two of their best and brightest had to pass for it, but sacrifice was a necessary evil in the ruination that was war. And he knew that neither Lily nor James would feel regret in passing when they attempted to protect their young son. Their young son who had brought about the temporary banishment of Voldemort.

At the cost of his life.

He stared down at the still and silent infant. This wasn't supposed to have happened.

Harry Potter was supposed to have survived, become the beacon for the light, a symbol of progress for the magical world, just as much of a political example for the pro-muggleborn as he was a hero for defeating the most evil Dark Lord seen since World War II. He wasn't supposed to have died before he could have even lived.

He had misinterpreted something in the Prophesy.

All his manoeuvring, all his plotting, for naught.

Quick as lightning, his mind drew up and discarded plans. All that could be seen to betray his thoughts was the odd intensity of his eyes as he stared down at the dead baby. A dead baby that he then knelt down beside and picked up, bundling into his robes before he Transfigured a plank of wood into a perfect copy, casting several animation charms, and sound charms. He would cry and scream like any normal child, go into a 'sleep' mode. It would have to do for now. This was in no way a permanent solution. But... well...

He was working on that.

His mother was sweaty and tired, but there was a smile on her face as his father walked him to her. She was sat up in the funny white bed, a bundle of blue blankets in her arms, her long dark hair was loose and laying across her shoulders in a mess and her blue eyes gleamed as she looked over to him.

"Come say hello to your little brother, Kyo-chan," she cooed as he tottered over to her. He felt his father's hands band around his chest and lift him onto her bed where he clambered to her side, feeling her warmth as she lifted an arm and hugged him to her, supporting him as he tried to get a look at the blankets. "Meet your little brother Takeru," she told him, gently pulling away some of the blankets.

Little Kyo-chan wrinkled his nose as he looked down at his baby brother. In his enlightened opinion, Takeru looked like a messed up potato. He didn't say this of course, he wasn't an idiot. Okaasan would get annoyed with him if he said his brother looked like a potato.

Hibari Kyoya may have only been two, but he was still a genius.

Uncle Fon was taking time out from his work in China to visit for Takeru's first birthday. He usually attempted to visit for every birthday, Okaasan, Otousan, his, and now his little brother's. Sometimes he didn't manage it, but he always tried and always remembered to send gifts, so Kyo didn't mind so much when he couldn't make it. Uncle Fon still tried.

At first, he hadn't been too sure about having a little brother. Takeru hadn't done anything interesting at all. But at least he had stopped looking like a messed up potato. He was pretty smart too, and already he and Kyoya were chattering at one another, even if Takeru didn't understand a lot of what was said, he usually figured it out later or asked Okaasan. He could crawl pretty quickly too, and loved following his older brother around the house, much to their Okaasan's delight – she took many, many pictures. Often times even dressing them up in matching clothes, much to Kyo's disgust.

It was a pain, but he guessed his little brother was alright.

He still called him a Potato when their mother wasn't looking.

Okaasan was screaming. Furious. Heartbroken.

Uncle Fon was silent, his head bowed, taking the abuse his younger sister threw at him, her face streaming with tears as she screamed about how it was his fault.

Kyoya watched from a crack in the doorway before turning away and going down the hall, by-passing the inner courtyard and heading towards his room. Only he didn't go into it. He kept going until he reached his little brother's bedroom, and slid the door open.

It was clean now. The scorch-marks had been painted over. There was no sign of the broken crib, or shattered glass that was once his window. The wooden shutters were gone, broken, and not yet replaced. The wind was free to steal into the little room with its brightly painted walls. Birds could be seen decorating the sliding screens, yellow canaries and skylarks, sparrows, swallows, parrots, and swans.

Takeru had loved birds.

He loved all small animals really. Hedgehogs especially. The moment he was old enough to know what it was, he dubbed his Kyo-nii a hedgehog.

In revenge for the potato comments.

Kyoya was only four, he knew what was going on, but didn't necessarily understand it.

Someone had taken Takeru away. Okaasan saw him and they got into a fight. But it didn't matter. The person took Takeru away. And Okaasan said it was Uncle Fon's fault. That someone had gone to his boss and wanted a special little boy for something. And one of the men, one of his students, told them about Takeru. So they took Takeru. It didn't matter that Uncle Fon had bartered for his family's safety, they needed a special little boy, and they were being paid more money than they had ever received before to get one. A special little boy from a family of people who weren't special. So the Bosses let them take Takeru away, and tried to make it look like someone they didn't like had done it. But Momma recognized him. The man who took his brother away.

Uncle Fon didn't know. But the person who took Takeru had been his student.

It was his fault.

Petunia Dursley felt like she had invited a demon into her house for the first four years after her sister's spawn was dropped off on her doorstep. The little black haired, green eyed baby looked and acted like a real child, made all of the same noises that her own baby Dudley had, crawled around like every other baby she'd ever seen or heard of but there had always been something about hi… no it that had her hair standing on end.

It was like taking care of a living, breathing doll, his face was mostly blank and expressionless and the baby operated almost like clockwork. When fed she could expect the food in the diaper within half an hour, whenever he cried he stopped immediately upon being touched regardless of whether or not she continued to pay attention to him. He never complained of being cold or warm, not even when she'd once accidentally upset her mug of tea over all over him one difficult morning she'd been making breakfast for her family.

After a few weeks of living with the… freak of nature she'd gone out and bought a recorder and taped the baby's crying the next time it got worked up, then played it the second it started crying again, every hair on her body had stood up on end when the tape matched the baby's cries perfectly, pitch for pitch. The same thing happened when she videotaped it reacting to other things, she thought she'd been going mad when she first noticed the baby use the exact same sounds and expressions every time she fed it or changed its diaper.

She didn't know what she'd allowed into her house. That thing wasn't a baby, she had no idea what it was but it was. Not. A. Baby. It acted nothing like a real baby, (all she had to do was look at her own son to see the difference) and it scared the ever living daylights out of her, had she had no knowledge of the world that had taken her sister from her she'd have taken it to the nearest church and had it exorcized!

It never got sick, it never got properly tired, it never fussed or whined for extra attention, it never spoke a single word even after four years, the thing had also grown at around the same rate as Dudley but it never walked around for more than a few minutes at a time and never babbled like her son did, she'd never heard so much as a peep from the thing that wasn't it asking for food or 'attention'. She tried over feeding it, she tried starving it, she tried locking it out of her house and eventually in the cupboard under the stairs when the neighbors started to ask questions. Nothing got a reaction. Nothing.

Dudley was a balm to her soul, her husband had taken to pretending the thing didn't exist, the stress of having this near-demonic being living in their house straining their relationship and she was at her wits end trying to keeping everything from falling apart at the seams. If things hadn't changed a month after the thing's fifth birthday… she had hardly any doubts as to what would have happened to her family. Vernon would have left her, probably taken Dudley with him and left her alone with the soulless doll-like creature that her sister had supposedly given birth to.

She wouldn't have lasted a week alone with it.

Without Dudley to comfort her, without her husband providing her a shield at night to hide behind, without a full household to distract her from the void that was her nephew she would have done something permanent, either to herself or to the thing that had been living in her house for the last few years. That she hadn't already tried something permanent was only thanks to her instincts as a mother and Dudley, though had things continued as they had been… she'd have eventually forgotten that the thing was child-shaped and have lashed out lethally.

As it was, she had almost done so anyway, the change the thing had undergone overnight one month past his fourth birthday was jarring. She had shut the thing up in the cupboard under the stairs after feeding it the night before and crawled into bed with her husband between her and the door like normal, slept through the night without hearing so much as a peep and had minced her way down the stairs in exactly the same way she'd done every night since she had started keeping it in the cupboard underneath. She made breakfast, fed her family and then went to feed the little monster.

The change had been immediately apparent.

If her throat hadn't choked the air out of her lungs she'd have emptied them screaming the house down, because while the thing had been insanely freaky it was nothing compared to having it change overnight.

Instead of lying flat on its back like it usually was when it was sleeping her nephew was curled up in a loose ball on the pile of blankets she hurriedly changed every week, instead of the rhythmic, near robotic breaths he's usually breathed in he was breathing softly and his hair had a healthy sheen that made it curl sweetly around his pale face rather than hang limply with the straw like texture it had been the night before.

Hesitant to so much as poke her nephew in case it decided it was going to jump out and bite her she took a step back, the door fell open to swing against the staircase and let out a thump that woke it up, then she witnessed it doing things it had never done before.

It scrunched up its nose. It cringed against the sunlight to bury it's face back into the folds of blanket it had been sleeping on and startled at the thump of wood on wood. It blinked it's eyes rapidly and turned to look at her with green eyes that she noticed for the first time were full of life, but that wasn't what made her want to scream the house down. No.

"Aunt Petunia?"

Even years after the first time she heard his voice she shuddered at remembering his first words. It was like a switch had been flipped and turned on all the lights that had previously been off in the boy's head on to full power and he acted like he hadn't just spent the last four years acting like a soulless husk and that was freaky on a whole other level than he'd been on before!

Suddenly he was speaking, not just speaking but speaking in complete sentences! Not even Dudley was so advanced! He was always talking now, if he wasn't asking questions a mile a minute he was trying to get closer to her son, or he was talking to the neighbors, or strangers in the street or even the birds in the trees!

And he was suddenly more active than all three of the Dursleys put together and always getting into things young children shouldn't. He was under the car, or in the roof, or with his arm sticking in the lawn mower trying to reach a ball, he was up in the trees in the back yard or scaling the fence, it was like he was trying to make up for four years of not moving more than a few steps at a time.

Whatever switch had been flipped in the freak's head had hit full-throttle and overdrive! He was constantly running around from place to place, heedless of any damage he might bring to himself with a reckless abandon of a suicidal maniac. In the years following she lost the fear that she'd one day wake up to see him standing over her with a kitchen knife ala Chucky but was now tearing her hair out at trying to contain the spastic ball of energy that had replaced the automaton!

Also… as if she needed the trade-off of freaky to even freakier… the strangeness that had once been confined to her nephew, and thus contained to inside the cupboard under the stairs, had exploded outwards.

Toys moved on their own, things exploded, clothing shrank or expanded, food went missing and electrical appliances would randomly short out. She had a call from the elementary school that the teacher had her hair turned blue and another to say he'd appeared on the roof! Had she not known about magic she'd have thought her house was haunted!

It was when she had nearly reached the end of her tether that she'd discovered something life-changing… at least for her. The more tired he got, the less he seemed to make things happen around him, if she wore him out and redirected all that spastic energy into other, more normal things, than maybe her situation could be salvageable!

Again Dudley was her saviour here, a little encouragement and he had the freak running around at all hours and kept running whilst at school, utilizing his growing group of friends like the future leader he was growing up to be! After school hours she had the thing doing chores until she shut him away in the cupboard, incidents went from thrice daily to maybe three times a month and her life calmed down enough to almost be considered somewhere approaching… normal.

Years after the change in his personality, when the giant had broken down the door to the hut her husband had secreted their family away in… she had, behind her panic and fear, heard something that almost made her snort despite the situation.

The boy had his mother's eyes? Sure, compare Lily's leaf-green to the boy's unnatural electric green. Of course they must be the same... Whoever this giant was to Lily, clearly his memory was faulty! The boy may have had her sister's husband's looks and had 'the same' green eyes as her sister… but there was nothing of Lily in the freak that had been dropped off on her doorstep.

No matter what anyone said.

Four summers after that particular encounter when her son had come home ash pale, shivering and ready to sick up she had been ready to commit the murder she hadn't been able to bring herself to do all those years ago when the freak had been baby-sized. Dudley had been attacked by monsters that had been aiming for the freak! Worse, Dudley began to pull away from her! Began planning on showing the ungrateful freak compassion it didn't deserve and wouldn't understand.

She had finally reached the end of her patience, she was tired of the stress, the heartache and the constant fear. She was NOT dealing with that for another summer. Not for a single more day. She was done. She'd had enough. Even if she had to go to jail to keep her family safe, she'd gladly do it and she'd do it with her head held high.

Vernon's new shotgun would work. Would have worked all those years ago against that giant had Vernon's compassion not gotten the better of him. Should the freak come back this time… she was ready.

She was done with nursing the little demon. It had taken years away from her, damned if she was going to let it take her son away from her too!