Message in a Bottle

1. The Porter Mansion

Disclaimer: I own nothing of the Harry Potter universe. I don’t make money from writing this rubbish that drips from my fingers to the keyboard. Don’t sue me, because you’ll only be disappointed when you find out how poor I am.

A/N: Welcome back to the new and revised ‘Message in a Bottle.’  This story has been adapted to take into account The Deathly Hallows… including the ‘epitaph…’ err, I mean, ‘epilogue.’  As I’ve been writing, I’ve found that a lot more needed to be explained about the future Wizarding and Muggle Worlds in this story, so the setup is a bit more informative and comprehensive and takes up the first two chapters.  Hopefully, this story won’t be quite as long as my ‘Demon’ story, but you never know what path my mind may take as I work through this iteration of the Harry Potter universe.  The chapters are going to be somewhat shorter than with the ‘Demon’ story, probably between 3000 - 4000 words each, as compared to 4500 - 7500 words per chapter that was common to ‘Demon.’  As always, I’m trying to make this story as different as possible from anything else out there.  With any amount of luck, I can keep you all both interested and guessing!  The first few chapters are going to be quite angsty, (at least, that’s what I’m aiming for) but I have plans for future H/Hr fluff, too!  I’m planning that the fluffiness will come much quicker than it happened in the ‘Demon’ story, but who knows?  I hope that all of you will enjoy this story, because that is the main reason I write this stuff… not only for myself, but also for you!  Sit back, relax, and immerse yourself in this time-bending tale of angst, friendship, betrayal, power, and the love that should have occurred in canon! (Word Count: 3608)

-Junko- (aka - Hotaru/Angry Hermione)

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Chapter 1: The Porter Mansion

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October 31, 2141 - 11:03 PM

A pair of teenaged boys were walking uneasily along an overgrown dirt road on the outskirts of Ventnor, a community on the Isle of Wight off the southern coast of England. The boys stopped and looked at each other for a moment, before turning to look back at the group of teenagers who were urging them on.

A laughing voice called from the group, “You mates chickenin’ out so soon?”  That voice was followed by another higher pitched voice, “What are you scared of? Afraid that the ghost of ‘Ol’ Man Porter’ will get you?” The group burst out in laughter when one of the girls yelled out, “Look at ‘em! They’s about ta wet theyselves!”

The two boys looked nervously at each other, and then continued to walk silently down the dark road. One of the boys, who had a mop of longish sandy brown hair and wearing a white tee shirt with a pair of faded jeans that were slightly too small for his slightly portly frame, jumped in alarm when a raven cawed out loudly from a nearby branch of one of the many long dead trees that seemed to inhabit the area around the old estate.

The other boy, a tall, thin teenager with dirty blonde hair and light blue-gray eyes shook his head at his friend and said, “Cor, Nigel, don’t be so jumpy. It’s just an old house. We’ll poke around a bit, grab something to prove we were in there and pop out again.”

The shorter boy turned his scared hazel eyes to his friend, “I don’ like this, Ian. Not one bit. What abou’ ol’ man Porter? Getting’ snuffed ain’t worth being a member of a club o’ gits like them. An’ it bein’ ‘alloween ain’t too comfortin’, neither.”

“Nobody’s seen that geezer in over thirty years. ‘E’s probably in the ground already, anyway. Just look at the place. Nobody would live in a dump like that, and Halloween is just another day. You still don’t really believe in ghosts and ghoulies, do ya?”

Nigel looked through the wrought-iron fence than encircled the Porter estate. The nearly full moon in the cloudless sky illuminated the old Victorian manor house in the distance. No lights were visible through the scores of windows, many of which were missing panes of glass because of weather, neglect or vandals.

A few minutes later, they found themselves in front of the large, rusting wrought-iron gates of the old Porter estate. They looked at the thick chain that secured the gates closed, fastened together with a huge, antique looking brass padlock.

Ian’s eyes scanned the length of the ten-foot tall fence before he hesitantly reached for the lock, but apparently thought better of it and lowered his hand, saying, “There’s got to be a way in. Let’s follow the fence around.”

They walked along the tall fence in silence, keeping their eyes peeled for any breach through the wrought iron bars. The silence of the night was sporadically punctuated by the call of the strange raven, which, if they didn’t know better, had appeared to be following their progress around the estate.

After over a half hour of walking, the iron fence came to an end, butting against a high stone wall that stretched out into the ocean, separating the estate’s beachfront from the outside world.

Ian walked along the wall towards the beach, studying the rough surface and looking for any place where it might be scalable. He stopped close to the waterline, running his fingers over the weathered wall. Due to decades of exposure to the salty ocean air and the eroding effects of the water, he saw that a lot of the mortar between the stones had crumbled, creating open cracks in the wall that could be used as toe and hand holds.

With a little effort, Ian managed to scale the wall. Once on top, he reached down and helped Nigel, who had a much more difficult time climbing up the wall than he had. The land on the inside of the wall was much higher than the outside, making it easy for the boys to jump down the few feet to the beach of the estate.

The moment their feet hit the sand, both Nigel and Ian jumped in fright as a loud caw sounded from the raven that was now perched on top of the wall from where they had just jumped. The black bird let out another angry screech and then flew off in the direction of the manor house.

The two boys looked at each other, as if waiting for the other to call the whole thing off. A biting cold wind suddenly swept in from off of the ocean, causing them both to shudder involuntarily. Ian took a deep breath and said, “Well, we’ve come this far…”

Ian started walking towards the large house with Nigel following slowly behind. It seemed that the nearer they got to the house, the colder and more forceful the wind became. By the time they reached the large, overgrown mass of dried and decaying vegetation that at one time had been a sprawling garden, they were sprinting through the underbrush, anxious to get to shelter of any kind. They rushed up a set of stone steps from the garden to a wide patio. The paver stones were cracked and uneven, causing each of them to stumble more than once before they reached the set of wide French-style glass doors.

When Ian reached for the tarnished brass handles, he was surprised to find that the doors were unlocked. With no small amount of force, the two boys pushed the doors closed against the wind. The moment the doors clicked shut, they were plunged into nearly complete silence, save for the eerily wailing gale from outside.

They each turned on their torches and scanned the room in which they found themselves. Long ago, this must have been a richly furnished grand ballroom, but time and neglect made the huge room look more like an abandoned church. They looked up at the faded and cracked murals that were painted on the vaulted cathedral ceiling. The high windows that lined the walls were nearly opaque with soot and grime. Old, rotted tapestries and ruined portraits lined the once golden walls, which were now blackened with a slimy mildew.  The vast hardwood floor was warped and covered with patches of moss and mold. In the looming darkness that was the far end of the room, they could just make out a set of huge oaken doors, presumably leading to the main area of the house.

“Come on, let’s find something and get out of here,” said Ian as he stepped towards the oak doors.

Nigel nodded and said, “The sooner the better. This place is creepier on the inside than the out. A righ’ fine settin’ for a ‘orror film this ‘ouse’d make, t’ be sure.”

They crossed the creaky, uneven floor, scanning for any trinket they could take to prove to the others that they were actually inside of the old house. Bits of debris lay all over, collapsed chairs, rotted branches, long dead leaves and many small piles of some smelly, unidentifiable matter, but nothing that could be considered anything more than rubbish.

When they reached the doors, Ian turned the ornately engraved brass handle and pulled on the door. A loud creak from the rusty hinges echoed through the vast hall. Instantly, the air was filled with shrill, piercing shrieks, accompanied by the sound of hundreds of flapping, fleshy wings.

“Bats!” yelled Ian, as he realized that the piles of stuff all over the floor were mounds of guano that had fallen from the high rafters. They rushed through the door amidst a cloud of the startled, flying rodents, who were desperately swooping around, looking for ports of egress from the old house.

They frantically pulled on the door and it closed with a loud slam that echoed through the manor. Several of the bats that had made it through the doorway before it closed were buzzing haphazardly around the room, eventually finding an exit through the many missing or broken panes of glass.

They trained their flashlights around the dark room and saw that they were in a large entrance hall. On each side of the door they just entered through, two wide, curving staircases ascended to the second floor. Another set of stairs under the staircase on their left descended down into a lower level. The smell of mildew and decay permeated the room, mostly from a wide, rotting old oriental carpet that spanned nearly the entire hall. Two sets of doors on either side of the room led off into rooms unknown, and a wide pair of glass doors straight ahead of them led to what appeared to be a receiving hall, with the massive front doors of the manor on the far side.

“Look around,” commanded Ian breathlessly, “there’s got to be something here we can use.”

Nigel uneasily nodded and began searching through a set of cabinets on the right, while Ian searched a long counter along the left wall that appeared to be a wet bar.  They both noticed an old grandfather clock in the corner, obviously broken for many, many years.  Most of the numbers were missing from its’ face, and both hands hung limply over where the Roman numeral six used to be.  Its tarnished brass weights and chains lay on the bottom of the case, and its’ pendulum was half-protruding out from the broken glass that had once covered the bottom compartment.

Ian moved behind the bar, searching around the dust covered bottles. He glanced up on the wall over the bar and was surprised to see a very large painting that was relatively untouched by the ravages of exposure and time.

It wasn’t really the condition of the portrait that drew his attention, but the subject of it. It was a painting of a room, papered in red velvet, and cheerily warmed by a roaring fireplace in the background that looked so real that it appeared that the flames were actually moving. In the center was a small table on which rested a large jug of wine, a partial loaf of bread, a small fruit bowl, and a plate that contained a wheel of cheese with a knife protruding from it. Right beside the table was an antique, red leather chaise lounge with a strikingly pretty, and very naked, girl lounging upon it holding a crystal goblet of the red wine. She appeared to be in her early to mid twenties, with a thin, lithe body, unusually long, yellow-blonde hair and wide, strikingly beautiful icy-blue eyes. If it weren’t for her leg being positioned just right, he would have been able to tell if the carpet matched the drapes. She also held the goblet so that it and her arm strategically covered the important bits of her rather full breasts. Ian stared at the portrait for a long moment, noticing the tarnished brass plaque that was affixed to the bottom of the frame that read, ‘Jaana Marie Figg: 1970 -’

Ian turned around and called to Nigel, “Oy, Nige, come have a look at this bird. Must be one of Ol’ Man Porter’s relatives that… that…”

Nigel turned away from the frustrating cabinet after pulling off one of the handles from a wedged, worm-eaten drawer and looked to see why his friend went abruptly silent. As he walked across the room, he saw Ian was still standing behind the bar, just staring at a large painting of a room with a sofa, table and fireplace.

He looked at the painting for a few moments before asking in a whisper, “What did you say, mate? What bird?”

“The girl,” he said with wide eyes and a wavering voice as he pointed at the now unoccupied portrait, “she was lying there on that couch a moment ago, naked as a baby, she was… now she’s… not there…” he turned to Nigel, and seeing his friend’s suspicious frown, said angrily, “I know I saw her!”

Nigel turned his head away from his friend’s piercing glare, where his eyes rested on a dusty bottle of old wine. Picking it up, he said, “‘ere, we’ll take this. It’ll make a fittin’ toast to our acceptance into the club, now le’s go.”

Ian’s eyes drifted along the line of bottles. He reached out and grabbed another, muttering, “I’m gonna need more than just one.”

Ian walked around the bar and towards the large oak doors, hoping that the bats had all left to go hunting insects for the night. As he passed the front of the bar, he trained his light back to the painting to give it one last look.

Nigel, who was already reaching for the door handle, heard the smashing of a bottle on the floor. He spun around to see the bottle that Ian had been carrying lying broken on the floor in a puddle of spilled wine. Ian’s face was pale and his eyes were wide with terror as he stared back at the bar. Nigel looked to where Ian’s torch beam pointed and felt his own blood run cold. Sitting on the chaise lounge in the painting was an old man with long gray hair and sporting a white beard that was nearly as long, smiling serenely while casually holding a crystal goblet full of wine.

Suddenly, the old grandfather clock in the corner, the one that both boys could have sworn was broken beyond repair just a few minutes before, began loudly chiming, with its’ hands both pointing to the roman numeral twelve at the top of the eerily glowing face, announcing that midnight had arrived.

A startled gasp escaped Nigel’s throat. He turned and grabbed the handle to the oak door. As he threw his weight on the door, it opened with the loud screeching of the rusted hinges, which seemed to snap Ian out of his shock because he immediately began sprinting towards the door.

As the door swung fully open, Nigel let out a terrified scream as he found himself face to face with a pearly, translucent figure of a young woman.  Her shimmering facial features were contorted into a scowl of rage as she opened her mouth and emitted a mournful, banshee-like wail.

Nigel was back-stepping away from the door with his mouth moving in a panicked, silent monologue. Ian skidded to a halt upon seeing the ghost of the girl he had just seen in the large painting a minute before. Both of the teens turned in the direction of the glass doors that led to the front of the manor, desperate to flee from this house of nightmares. They hadn’t moved three steps when something materialized right in front of the glass doors. It appeared to be an old, graying bed sheet with elongated holes cut out of it for eyes, and a jagged rip as a mouth just beneath the eyeholes made for a very disturbing sight, especially since there was a red, evil-looking illumination glowing from within the sheet. It was hovering between where the teens stood and the glass doors that led to the front exit and freedom.  The floating sheet began moving slowly towards them.

The jagged tear in the sheet opened, emitting a deep, otherworldly voice, “How dare you enter my home… unbidden… unwelcome… Are you here to plunder my treasures? Alas, you’ll find no treasure here… only your doom!”

Ian’s eyes rolled up into the back of his head and he fell backwards to the floor in a dead faint. Nigel wore a blank, empty expression as he stood motionless, staring at what appeared to be a point on the distant horizon.

The young ghost floated lazily across the room and stood in front of the catatonic boy. She waved her translucent hand in front of the youth’s face, but it elicited no response from the boy at all. The ghost sighed and turned to the old man with his pet raven perched on his shoulder who had just emerged from the stairs to the lower chambers.

“We nearly killed these two, you know,” she said with the slightest touch of mirth in her voice, “They would have left quick enough. Did you have to use that thing, too?” she asked as she pointed to the ruined bed sheet that was now lying motionless on the dirty floor. Before he could respond, she hastily added, “If you’d only remember to renew the muggle repelling charm every few years like you’re supposed to…”

“Enough, Jaana…you know how busy I’ve been,” replied the old man as he reached down and picked up two shards of the broken wine bottle, “and these stupid muggles aren’t dead. You’d think that kids these days would have better things to do than break into old houses.”

The old man walked up to the catatonic teen and looked into his unfocused eyes. His nose wrinkled as he detected the pungent smell of urine and excrement. With a chuckle, he commented, “Oh, dear. It seems this one had a bit of an accident. Maybe I did overdo it a smidgen. Still, he’ll be okay in a few days. A quick modification and he’ll be right as rain.”

He drew his wand from the sleeve of his robes, pointed it at the teen and muttered, “Adjicius Commoneo.”

“I’ll let the other one remember what happened. Nobody will believe him anyway, and if they do, then maybe it’ll keep his friends away from here.”

He tapped each shard of glass with his wand and incanted, “Portus.” The bits of jagged glass shuddered in his hand, and after the familiar blue glow subsided, he placed a shard onto the unconscious teen and placed the other into the pocket of the one still standing before tucking his wand back into his sleeve. He turned his head to the raven on his shoulder and after thanking him for keeping a lookout, sent him out through a broken window and into the night. He turned and slowly walked back to the stairs.  Before he made it to the first step, the two teens had disappeared in a fall of colour.

The old man made it halfway to the lower landing when he was stopped by a pointed clearing of Jaana’s ethereal throat. He looked up at her standing at the top of the stairs and he asked her exasperatedly, “Well? What now?”

The ghost put her hands on her hips and said in a shrill, bossy voice, “The muggle-repelling charm? Honestly, Harry… if it weren’t for me, you’d forget your head if it wasn’t attached!”

A pained look flashed in the old man’s eyes and a slight frown crossed his lips, which didn’t go unnoticed by the ghost. She knew that look… he was thinking of her again.  Sometimes Jaana wished that her personality wasn’t so eerily similar to his long lost friend.

The old man turned and walked back up the stairs.  He stood in the middle of the room, and with a slow, practiced sweeping motion of his hand, he muttered a long phrase in perfect Latin. A glowing blue circle appeared around his feet and quickly expanded outwards in all directions. He held the incantation long enough for the radius to reach just beyond his property, where he flicked his fingers and sealed the ward. With a sad, tired sigh, he returned to the stairs and continued his descent into the lower chambers of the mansion.

He reached the bottom of the stairs and walked past the moldy, deteriorating bric-a-brac that had been in the basement well before he had claimed the house as his own.  He stood before a portion of blank wall, which he tapped with his wand causing a doorway to materialize.  He deftly stepped through the new doorway into a warm, sparsely furnished antechamber, moderately lit by a fire crackling in a wide fireplace. He walked over to a desk that was positioned near the warmth of the fire and sat heavily down. He picked up his quill, loaded it with ink and began scribbling into the thick book that was resting on the desktop.

After he had written a few lines, his eyes glanced up to the line of magical photographs that adorned the topmost shelf of his desk and rested upon one in particular.  The enchantment that allowed the figures in the picture to move had long since faded, but the frozen image that remained was enough to fuel his resolve.  The intense gaze of the pair of enlightened brown eyes, framed by the mass of unruly, chestnut-brown hair, was all the motivation he needed.  Why couldn’t he have seen then what was so clear to him now… now that it was far too late for him to do anything about it?  Well, he hoped it wasn’t too late, in a sense.

He tore his eyes from the photograph and resumed his work.  He couldn’t do anything about it directly, but maybe if he had a wake-up call when he needed it most… if he had just been given a timely clue… not just about his romantic life, but of the perils that awaited him that were caused by actions that seemed so trivial… so unimportant at the time…

‘Almost done,’ he thought to himself as he continued to chronicle his life’s story, ‘I don’t know how much longer I can live with this.’

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2. A Trip Prepared

Disclaimer: I do not own, nor do I make any claim to, the ‘Harry Potter’ universe.  I claim the plot and whatever original characters I choose to create.

A/N: Here’s the second chapter of Message in a Bottle.  Many of you who have read the first chapter long ago will know that this was originally the last half of Chapter 1.  Since I’m trying to make the chapters smaller, I split it into two.  I have made MANY changes to this story since then, so I strongly suggest re-reading the first chapter.  I’ll try to keep up with the updates to this story in a timely manner.  (Word Count: 3868)

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Chapter 2: A Trip Prepared

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November 1, 2141 - 1:37 AM

The old man could feel Jaana’s pearly eyes silently watching him as he worked. After an hour had passed, he lay the quill down and tiredly rubbed his eyes. His gaze gravitated back to the set of old wizard photographs that lined the upper tier of his desk. He could feel the ghost float up behind him and look over his shoulder at the set of very familiar photographs. He wasn’t surprised at all when she began speaking to him.

“Are you sure that you know what you’re doing? I mean, you’ve led a long and hap… productive life. I know I’m not the best company one could have, considering what I am, but it hasn’t been that terrible being with me for these past hundred and thirty years, has it?”

“One hundred thirty three years, two months, sixteen days, twelve hours and thirty…” he glanced at the clock on the mantle and paused for a few seconds before continuing in a whispered monotone, “thirty two minutes, to be exact.”  His eyes drifted back to one particular photo, “Has it really been that long? It still seems like… I mean, have I really lived with it for this long?”

She could tell that he was about to go into one of his ‘moods’ again, and knew there was nothing she could do or say to stop it. She wished that she could hold him, to comfort him somehow, but there were distinct disadvantages to being a ghost. All she could do was try to reason with him, knowing full well how futile the effort would be.

“You do know that you could make things worse, don’t you?” Jaana offered, “Maybe much worse?”

The old man let out a tired sigh and looked up at the youthful ghost, “I can’t imagine how it could get worse. I can’t believe I let it happen in the first place. All I’ve been doing is thinking about it… how I failed them… how I had failed myself.”

Jaana let out a sigh, thinking, ‘Yep, one of his moods.’

“You’re right, I could spend my remaining months cloistered here beneath a dilapidated mansion and let Voldemort have what’s left of the world…” said Harry distantly, not really looking at his ghostly friend, “just a handful of scared magicals and a country full of clueless muggles… but you already know what he’ll do.  There’s nothing left here in Britain that he wants except me.  Once I’m gone, he’ll go to the continent and beyond…. with nobody around to stop him.  Do you really think I could pass on and doom the world to enslavement for the remainder of time?”

Jaana simply nodded in a morose sort of way, then looked down to the book that he’d been working on for decades, “How far along are you? I know you finished the part about advanced magic years ago.”

“Yes, that bit’s done. There have been quite a few advances made since I went to Hogwarts, you know. I daresay I’d have been quite the wizard back then if I knew half of these spells and techniques.  It’s ironic how most of those new techniques were developed by…”

Harry drifted into silence as his eyes once again looked up to the photograph atop his desk.

“So, what are you adding now? Philosophy? Poetry? I mean, what else can you send that would be useful?”

He reached up and lifted the photograph that had captured so much of his attention over the years. His heart sank in his chest and the painful ache returned, just as it always did when he concentrated on those soft chocolate eyes.  Without lifting his gaze from the image of his long lost friend, he answered in nothing more than a whisper, “I’ve written about what happened. All of it.  About what I did… what I saw… about everything that happened, and everything that should be changed… everything,” he looked up to the ghost and added more firmly, “That’s the whole point of this project, isn’t it?  You say it could be worse, but how can it?  There’s nothing left… a whole race… the entire magical world… snuffed out in an instant.”

“Are you sure it’s wise writing so much about it? I mean, just the fact that you’re sending it is going to change everything. You’re going to make him more powerful than anyone could ever imagine. Won’t the knowledge of those events be pointless?”

“No, not really. It will let him know why I’m sending it... why I needed to do it. It will make him aware of what I lost, and of what everyone will lose if he doesn’t wake up and smell the pumpkin juice… and I have to convince him that this is real… he needs to understand.”

The ghost looked up at a painting on the wall, seeing herself as she looked when she was alive. The portrait Jaana and the ghost Jaana smiled wistfully at each other before the naked painted image walked to the edge of the frame to return to the red divan and the jug of wine that awaited her in the receiving hall.

She turned to the old man and asked, “Have you decided when you’re going to send it? Will it get there before I… you know… died?”

The old man smiled at the hopeful spirit and said, “Yes, I figure the best time would be the summer before his sixth year, at least that’s what I’m aiming for… that’s when everything started to go to hell in a handbasket.  A spell like this has never been attempted before… for obvious reasons… and of course I’ve written all about you. About how wonderful you are and how you came to be in your current state. I’m sure he’ll take the appropriate steps to ensure your safety,” then he added with a wink, “After all, he has the same ‘saving people thing’ that I do, you know… and you are practically family.”

She just nodded as she continued to look over his shoulder.  After a few minutes, she broke the silence, “So, how much more do you have to write?”

The old man glanced at the clock on the mantle and saw that it was nearing two in the morning. He lightly blew a breath on the freshly written page to dry the ink, and then closed the book as he rose from the seat. He picked up the large tome, tucked it under his arm, and said, “Nothing. I’ve just finished it. I’m going now to have a last look around.  Then I’m going to place it where only he can find it and perform the ritual.”

“So, this is it?” asked the ghost anxiously, “I’m never going to see you again?”

With a wry smile, he answered, “Oh, I believe that you’ll be seeing me much sooner than you think.”

The ghost stared into the old man’s piercing, green eyes and said, “I hope you’re right, Harry. I hope you’re right about everything.”

“Well, if I’m wrong, then we’ll know soon enough, won’t we?”

When the old wizard silently faded from sight, the ghost wiped a silvery tear from her face and said to the empty room, “Goodbye, Harry, and good luck.”

The old man appeared on a jagged outcropping of rock overlooking the silent rubble that was once Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.  Gone were the lofty towers and proud battlements, long ago reduced to rotted timber jutting out from broken stone during one of the ‘final battles’ with Tom Riddle. This particular destruction happened during his fourth rebirth… the fourth ‘final battle.’

As his eyes scanned over the ruins and through the murky mists he could just catch a glimpse of one or two of the hundreds of ghosts that still wandered the area.  There were many more today than when he had gone to school there. Many, many more.  Most of the people here died so suddenly… so horribly… that they didn’t have time to ponder whether to ‘pass on’ or not.  He then thought that, because of the dark nature of the magic that was used here, maybe they didn’t have the choice at all.

His gaze drifted over to where the vast Forbidden Forest used to be, now just a wide bramble field littered with decayed stumps.  Nothing grew there, no animals inhabited the land.  The centaurs, the acromantulas, the unicorns… everything gone… except for the bones of the giants and the others that were caught in the forest when it went up.

He turned towards where the lake had once been.  In the dim moonlight, he could see the bleached bones of the merpeople sticking out from the dry, cracked lakebed.  He could also see imprint of where the massive remains of the giant squid that once inhabited the former lake had rotted away to a squid-shaped stain on the now barren lakebed.

He finally let his eyes wander to the far end of the lakebed where the little hamlet of Hogsmeade used to stand.  That was destroyed just after the Dark Lord’s second rebirth.  There was nobody there, no lights, no people… just a few dozen burned-out husks that once were wizarding homes and businesses.  That area was also infested with ever-wandering souls, most of them existing as if they were still alive, which caused the wizarding world to dub the place a true ghost town.  They sold their ethereal goods to one another, they drank at the decimated pubs, they ate their dinners in the midst of the wreckage that was once their homes… oblivious to the fact that they were dead.

Already feeling the draining effects of being in the area, he prepared to leave.  He gave one last look at the ancient tomb that sat upon the barren ground near the dry lake.  His eyes narrowed briefly as the memories flashed through his mind.  The memories of all the things that he found out far too late to be of any use to him or anyone.  If Dumbledore had only pulled his head out of his arse sooner… if he hadn’t kept so many secrets from him.  By far, his biggest gripe with his former Headmaster was that he withheld the knowledge of his older sister from him, but he only found out about her after she was already dead… after nearly everyone was already dead.

Harry’s face hardened as he disappeared from the cliff.  He faded into existence directly in front of the old Ministry of Magic building.  He looked around the dark, empty streets of central London.  Nobody lived here anymore.  The muggles believed that some kind of a nuclear device, a ‘dirty bomb,’ was detonated by a terrorist, making the area uninhabitable for a thousand years.  He knew the real reason.

It was during Lord Voldemort’s seventh return to the land of the living.

Almost as if that thought summoned them, a throng of slow, hulking figures shambled out of the darkness surrounding him.  Emaciated flesh hung loosely from brittle bone, soulless eyes stared blankly at him as the horde of inferi continued their endless, mindless search of any magical being.  With a sweep of his hand, he created a tall wall of fire around himself, keeping the animated corpses at bay as he removed the seal that he, himself, had placed on the entrance and quickly entered the building.

The place was just how he had left it nearly two decades before.  Scores of skeletons, some dressed in auror robes, some dressed in the infamous black cloaks and skull masks, littered the floor of the atrium. The place was almost as silent as a tomb, save for the scratching and pounding of the inferi as they tried in vain to follow him in.

He stepped through the once golden gates that led to the magical lifts.  He looked longingly at the now useless lifts.  The magic that allowed them to operate had long since faded, forcing him to take the arduous trip by the stairs.

It took quite a while for him to reach level nine, where he stepped out of the stairwell and began walking down the bare, windowless corridor.  When he opened the black door, he was momentarily surprised when he saw a figure standing in the center of the circular room.  He could barely make out his features in the dim light, but the identity of the figure was obvious to him.

Standing in the room was a thin young man, with dark, unkempt hair, a lightning-bolt shaped scar, and wild eyes that flashed with an emerald fire.  The young man had an eleven inch, holly and phoenix feather wand pointed at him threateningly.

The initial shock wore off quickly when he realized what was happening.  With surprising agility for someone his age, he instantly had his own wand in his hand and incanted, “Riddikulus!”

The effect was immediate.  The angry young man before him morphed into a life-size, inflatable sex doll, which immediately let out a comical farting noise as air escaped from it, causing it to haphazardly zip around the room like a rocket before it disappeared under the door that led to the Brain Room.

The half-smile that he wore disappeared as he walked through the door to the Time Room. He paused to look around at all of the different clocks that appeared to take up every free surface on the desks, tables and walls.  All of the clocks and gadgets were silent, as the magic that kept them going had left them long ago.  All except for one item… the item that he had come for.

In the far corner of the room, next to the bell jar that had once housed the time-cycling hummingbird, stood a small table with an old hourglass resting upon it.  He studied the hourglass for a moment.  Inside, instead of sand, it contained a strangely swirling mist that reminded him of one’s memories before being placed in a pensieve.  With an appreciative nod, he gingerly picked the item up from the table.

He placed it in an inside pocket of his robes and began the long trip back to the first level.  He exited from the building by climbing up through the visitor’s entrance, thereby avoiding being caught in the middle of the inferi that was awaiting him at the main entrance.  Once clear of the building, he silently faded from view.

The old man reappeared on a street in a quiet neighborhood in the village once known as Little Whinging. For a few moments, he just stood and stared at the row of old houses, noticing that very little had changed in the past one and a half centuries. He looked between the houses to the northeast and saw the spotlights and warning beacons of the mile-high wall that the muggles had built around London.  They said it was to keep the radiation from spreading… he knew that it was due to the inferi infestation.

He briskly strode to the door of Number Four, Privet Drive, which opened for him automatically at his approach.  When he stepped into the old house and scanned the interior, his eyes briefly paused on the small door to a cupboard beneath the staircase that lead to the second floor. He saw the flickering light from a muggle holographic running in the living room, telling him that the current occupants might still be awake.

As he walked to the stairs, a voice called out from behind him, “Oy! What’cha doin’ in me ‘ouse?”

He turned to see a rather large, middle-aged muggle rising from an easy chair with an angry look on his face. With barely a gesture from the old man, the muggle’s eyes glazed over and he silently sat back down and continued to watch his holographic of a naked young woman, gyrating seductively to slow and rhythmic music.

The old man climbed the steps and entered the smallest bedroom, which was currently furnished as a small home office. With a sweep of his hand, the desk silently slid across the room, and with another sweep, the carpeting lifted from over a small area of the ancient hardwood floor where a tiny bed had once rested over a hundred years before.

With a pained groan, the old man sat down on the floor and pried up a loose floorboard, revealing his secret cubbyhole. He carefully placed the large book into the space beneath the floor and stared sadly into the dark opening.

He drew his ancient holly wand from the sleeve of his robes and began drawing on the floor with its tip while incanting long sentences, alternating between the Latin, Greek, and Sumerian languages. The tip of his wand left a glowing green line in its’ wake, forming a circle around the hole in the floor. The speed and intensity of his incantation grew as he began drawing glowing red runes around the circle, which began pulsing brighter and brighter with every new rune added. As he placed the last rune, the very air in the room seemed to vibrate with magic.

He withdrew the hourglass from his robes and set it in the center of the circle, right over the loose floorboard.  He tapped the hourglass with his wand while saying, “Novotempus!”  The swirling gaseous liquid inside that had been gradually seeping from the top half to the bottom seemed to slow, then came to a stop.  A moment later, the process began to reverse, with the contents quickly moving up through the aperture to the top half of the hourglass.  As soon as the bottom half was empty, he turned the hourglass over and the process repeated itself.

He was counting each time he flipped the glass… twenty… fifty… seventy-five…

As he sat turning the hourglass over and over, a frown marred his face as he thought about the seventh and final, elusive horcrux… he had never found the seventh horcrux due to a fatal error on his part.  He thought Nagini was the last horcrux.  He remembered the relief he felt when Neville Longbottom decapitated the vile snake… but he was wrong.  Voldemort discovered that Harry was after his horcruxes.  That day, Voldemort created his last horcrux… the seventh horcrux… and hid it somewhere…somewhere… well, if he knew where, he wouldn’t have had to fight the persistent prick every ten or fifteen years.  At the bottom of the ocean?  Frozen under the ice at the South Pole?  Buried in the sand somewhere in the middle of the Sahara?  Perhaps buried under a tree along the banks of the Amazon River?  Maybe it was a nondescript manhole cover in the middle of Trafalgar Square?  Only one being knew, and he certainly wasn’t going to tell a soul… living or dead.

Every time the Dark Fuck returned, he was angrier and more desperate than the last… The last time, there was such vast, senseless devastation... such massive loss of life…  Even the muggles were dragged into the fight.  The resulting World War left very, very few unscathed.  So little was left… so little…

Every sign pointed to his next return, but Harry wasn’t getting any younger.  He now knew what Dumbledore must have felt like in his final years.  Harry knew he couldn’t fight again and win… this thought steeled his resolve as he continued to turn the hourglass.

Unnoticed by him, Harry had accidentally repeated a count or two during his disturbing ruminations…

One twenty-five… one forty… one forty-four, one forty-five, one forty-six.

He watched as the remainder of the substance climbed up through the hourglass until the bottom was empty.  With another tap of his wand, he incanted, “Recolo,” and watched as the ethereal sand reversed itself and began trickling back down to the bottom.

He raised his wand, but paused as a rush of vivid memories flashed through his mind... memories of the seventeen years that his scar didn’t bother him at all… until that one night, the night of September First after he had seen his children, or who he thought were his children at the time…off on the doomed train that was the Hogwarts Express… the train had never made it to Hogwarts.  The memory of the second ‘Final Battle’ came to his mind, where he once again defeated the Dark Lord, Voldemort, and during which, he lost his wife, Ginerva Potter.  He had found out about the ongoing affair that his wife was having with Draco Malfoy only after her death, where the fact was thrown in his face by Malfoy himself.  The blonde-haired bastard gleefully rejoined the ranks of the new generation of Death Eaters upon Voldemort’s return, all too willing to torture Harry by telling him of the affair and of the fact that Ginny’s children were actually his, and not Harry’s.  He was never able to verify that particular point, but he was sure of their lengthy affair they had.  It explained the ‘look’ that Malfoy had given them just before the last Hogwarts Express trip so long ago.

The faces of long dead friends, enemies and strangers flashed before his eyes.  Every time the Dark Fuck returned, more faces were added to the seemingly never-ending throng.

He vividly recalled the engagement of his two best friends to each other, and their subsequent wedding. The memories of their constant bickering, both before and after their wedding.  He recalled with a scowl their vicious, sometimes violent arguments that he always seemed to be around to witness. After the deaths of their children, Ron had changed.  The memory of his friend’s drunken rage that sent his once-again pregnant, bushy-haired wife to St. Mungo’s came to the forefront of his mind.

Tears were streaming down into his beard at the memory of Hermione’s deathbed confession of her unrequited love, her true love, for not his best friend, Ron, but for himself. His face screwed up in anguish as he recalled the funeral of the forty year old, brown haired, brown-eyed witch, and atthe memory of his despondent, red-haired best friend’s suicide and subsequent funeral.  The memory of the past one hundred and thirty long, lonely years of researching and experimenting, and fighting a losing battle against an immortal Dark Lord… all culminating to this very moment in time.

Time that he was about to re-write… the world deserved a second chance… HE deserved a second chance…

With a final sweeping gesture of the Elder Wand, he called out in a strong, determined voice, “Contrado Terebrum Aetas Pridem!”

A wave of rippling energy flashed out from a small, aged house on a street called Privet Drive and instantly expanded out past the horizon. Time and space reconfigured and reinvented itself… The world shifted and changed, until it no longer resembled what it once had been, or more accurately, it changed to resemble exactly how it was before Britain was plunged into unending chaos.  Nearly a century and a half collapsed in upon itself, focused upon a single, pivotal point in the old planet’s history.

Time… such a beautiful and terrible thing.

3. Just Another Ordinary Day

Disclaimer: I own nothing of the ‘Harry Potter’ universe.  I don’t make any money at all from writing this drivel.  For entertainment purposes only!

A/N: Well, I just got through with the cliffhanger known as Chapter 5, so I figured I’d post this chapter early.  Here you find out just how badly ‘old’ Harry screwed up with his counting! (Well, give him a break, he was rather distracted with his thoughts!)  Many things are set up here, so sit back and enjoy!  (Word Count: 3787)

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Chapter 3: Just Another Ordinary Day

Wednesday, March 2^nd, 1988  7:25 AM

A scrawny, seven-year-old boy lay shivering, curled tightly in a small, threadbare blanket, which was really nothing more than a torn and dirty scrap of cloth that was barely the size of a dish towel.  He had been awake since his portly cousin, Dudley, came stomping down the stairs that served as a ceiling to his cramped ‘bedroom’ that was actually a tiny storage cupboard under those same stairs.

The boy laid there wishing he was still asleep.  If he were asleep, he wouldn’t know how cold he was.  As the smell of the breakfast that was currently being served to his cousin and uncle drifted in through the cracks around the cupboard door, he doubly wished he was still asleep.  If he were asleep, he wouldn’t know how hungry he was.

He closed his eyes, hoping that sleep would overtake him once again, but unfortunately, the sounds of silverware clattering loudly on plates and the roars of lighthearted laughter and conversation from the kitchen prevented him from doing so.

Some time later, he heard the chairs being dragged across the floor and two sets of heavy footsteps rambling up the staircase above him.  A few moments later, he heard the bolt being briskly undone on the cupboard door.  It opened, sending in a wave of bright, early morning daylight that temporarily blinded him.

“Get out of there, boy!” came the screeching voice of his aunt, “You are not going to have a lie in all day when there’s work to be done!  Get out here and eat your breakfast, and don’t forget to wash the dishes when you’re through!”

The blinded boy reached out his hands to find the edge of the small doorway when he felt her thin, claw-like fingers firmly grab hold of the collar of his shirt.  He let out a yelp of pain as he felt her long, sharp nails scratch along the skin on the back of his neck.  A moment later, he tumbled into the kitchen after being roughly pulled from his cupboard and hurled through the doorway.

He heard his aunt’s voice call waspishly back from the stairway, “You had best get a move on, boy!  You’ve half an hour to leave for school, or you’ll be late again!”

The boy picked himself up from the floor and looked at the stack of dirty cookware piled in and around the kitchen sink.  His eyes then drifted hopefully towards the table, but they were only met by a stack of the nearly empty dishes that rested upon it.

He plugged the drain in the kitchen sink and turned on the tap, running his cold, stiff fingers through the warming stream of water.  He then walked to the table, picked up the stack of dishes and carried them to the counter by the sink.  One by one, he picked up a dish, licked whatever scraps and crumbs he found on it, then placed it into the soapy water.  He smiled when he reached the bottom dish, for there he found a half-eaten slice of bacon that was obviously overlooked during the morning feeding frenzy, or maybe it had been dropped on the floor.  It didn’t matter to him, he just happily stuffed it in his mouth and greedily chewed and swallowed it.  He liked to imagine that his aunt had purposely hidden it there for him.  He knew that idea was a totally unrealistic fantasy, but fantasizing like that helped to make his wretched life a bit more livable.

After hastily washing all of the plates and silverware, he started on the cookware.  He found a few more small bits of bacon left in the fryer that were much too overdone for either his uncle’s or cousin’s liking.  They were rock hard and tasted like crumbling bits of ash, but at least it was something.  After scraping off the cloudy layer of bacon grease in the fryer with his fingers, he licked each digit clean before he submersed the pan in the dishwater and began scrubbing.

After he finished drying and storing the last pan, he began scrubbing along the counter and was thrilled to discover a single piece of dried toast that was left forgotten in the toaster.  At the same time that he noticed the toast, he heard the heavy footsteps of his uncle thundering down the stairs.  In a panic, he snatched the toast from the toaster, shoved it down the front of his oversized, hand-me-down shirt, and then turned to face his uncle who was just reaching the bottom of the stairs.  He silently prayed that he wasn’t wearing a guilty expression.

He tried to look as innocent as possible as his uncle paused at the bottom of the staircase and sent him one of his usual, menacing sneers.  His uncle’s beady eyes glared at him for a few moments longer than he usually did, which caused the boy’s pulse to immediately quicken.  After a tense moment, the boy turned away from his uncle, and with cloth in hand, began to hurriedly wipe down the countertop.  He could feel his uncle’s stare boring through his back for a few heartbeats longer before he heard the framework of the easy chair in the living room groan under the man’s formidable weight.  The boy felt the tension leave his shoulders as he finished cleaning the countertop.

He placed the dirty rag in the laundry chute and headed for his cupboard to get his books and papers ready for school.  He was on his hands and knees, reaching into his cupboard when he heard a sharp intake of breath behind him.

“What have you done, boy?” he heard his aunt’s scolding voice just above him.

He froze in place for a moment, but then tentatively looked up over his shoulder.  His aunt was standing right behind him with extreme displeasure in her eyes.  His hand instinctively made his way to his waistline, and he could feel the slice of toast still securely nestled under his shirt.  Knowing that he couldn’t be in trouble for that, a confused look appeared on his face.

“Put on another shirt this instant!” his aunt commanded, “Do you want people to think that we abuse you?”

The boy almost… almost… snorted at that last statement, but he was in no mood to pay that kind of price again.

She roughly pulled the back of his collar, stretching the loose material around so that he could see the streaks of blood on the back of his shirt.  He knew it was from when his aunt’s fingernails scratched the back of his neck as she pulled him from the cupboard earlier that morning, but he knew better than to put voice to that particular fact.  Again, that would cost him more than he was willing to pay.

The boy hesitated, realizing that he couldn’t remove his shirt with the toast tucked underneath it.  Of course, his aunt took his hesitation as a blatant act of rebellion, and that type of behavior would never be tolerated in that household.  Well… that kind of behavior wouldn’t be tolerated from him in that household.

Immediately, he felt his aunt’s bony hands grasp his shirt at the shoulders and she began pulling the offending garment up over his head.  This caused him to drop his books and papers so that he could place both his arms around his stomach to keep the hidden toast concealed from view.

It was then that a much larger, meatier hand grabbed hold of the hair on top of his head and violently jerked him back, dragging the boy from the confined space of the cupboard.  The pain of having whole locks of hair being ripped from his scalp caused his hands to instinctively reach up to protect his head, which, in turn, caused the pilfered toast to slide out from under his oversized shirt and drop to the floor.

The boy watched in horror as the eyes of his aunt and uncle focused on the toasted bread lying upon the floor.

He closed his eyes, knowing full well what was to come next.

Heartbeats passed in silence.  Curious as to why he had not felt the slap to his face that he would have bet everything he owned, not that it was much, was coming, he opened his eyes just in time to see his uncle’s shiny, black wingtip shoe connect with his abdomen.  He felt his back connect painfully with the wall opposite the cupboard door before he slid heavily down and doubled-up on the hallway floor.

“Stealing food right from out of our mouths, are you now, Potter?” bellowed his uncle as he reared back his foot again, sending a vicious kick to his chest.

The boy could feel a ‘pop’ inside of his chest as the foot connected.  A sharp pain tore through his lungs, making it impossible for him to immediately draw a breath to replace the wind that was knocked from him.

His uncle placed his foot on the boys’ chest and leaned heavily down while panting from the exertion, saying in an enraged hiss, “This is the last straw, you mutant!  You’re just a worthless leech on this family!  I’m warning you now, boy… if you step out of line one more time, just once, and you’re out of this house for good!”

His uncle pushed off hard with his heel, causing the boy to roll onto his side, still making that horrid, high-pitched gurgling sound as the air still refused to enter his lungs properly.

The boy watched through teary eyes as his uncle stooped down with a wheeze and picked up the offending slice of toast.  Standing right behind his uncle was his obese cousin Dudley, who was wearing a wide, leering grin.  His uncle turned around to head back to the sitting room, and in the process, handed the toast to his son, Dudley.

Dudley took the toast, and making a grand show of it, prepared to take a large bite.  His face suddenly screwed up in disgust as he whined, “But… but there’s no marmalade on this!”  Still leering at the other boy, Dudley walked to the rubbish bin, spit on the toast and then carelessly dropped it inside.  He was still snickering heartily as he made his way back up the stairs to finish preparing for school.

After a long, harrowing minute, the boy on the floor finally managed to draw in a wheezing breath, in spite of the burning pain that ran across the right side of his chest.  He coughed piteously a few times as he tried to regain some semblance of normal breathing, but it just wasn’t coming easily.

The boy wasn’t sure how long he was on the floor, because he seemed to be drifting in and out of consciousness.  It wasn’t until he felt the bony hand of his horse-faced aunt lift him easily from the floor.  He choked out a groan of pain as she roughly pulled the oversize, bloodied shirt over his head.  In doing so, his arms were forced over his head so that the sleeves could be removed, which caused the stabbing, burning pain in the side of his chest to increase tenfold.  As soon as the shirt cleared his head, he bent over and retched what little he had put into his stomach onto the floor.

His aunt screeched in anger and she pushed the boy roughly towards the bathroom, “You get in there and clean yourself up, and when you’re done, you will clean and disinfect that mess you just made!  I’m certainly not going to do it!”

The boy lay still on the cool, tiled floor.  Tears were running down his face, not from fear or anger, but from the blinding pain.  A hiss escaped him as his fingers tentatively touched the growing purplish-brown bruise on the side of his ribcage.

After a few minutes, he pulled himself up to the sink and ran the cold water.  After rinsing the sick from his mouth, he splashed some of the water to cool his sweaty face.  As he turned off the tap, his eyes met his reflection in the mirror above the sink.

He stared at the reflection of himself.  He lightly touched the fading bruise on his left cheek that he received when he accidentally received a better grade than Dudley on the Mathematics exam the week before.  He involuntarily shuddered as he recalled the look in his uncle’s eyes when his piteously weeping cousin informed him of that little fact.  Of course, everyone at his school believed that he got the black eye from an enraged older brother of a neighbourhood child that he was bullying… or that was the story Dudley told everyone, anyway.

When he was finally able to leave the bathroom, he heard the tires of the family car crunching through the freshly fallen snow as it pulled out from the driveway.  His uncle Vernon was behind the wheel with his aunt Petunia in the passenger seat, and Dudley taking up nearly the entire back seat.  Vernon would drop Dudley off at the school, and then take Petunia to the local beauty salon for her weekly appointment, which was clearly an exercise in futility, before driving himself to work at Grunning’s.  That left the boy to make his own way to the school, after he cleaned up the mess that he made, that is.  Fortunately, the school that Dudley and he attended was only a few short blocks away, but God forbid that his obese oaf of a cousin would be forced to walk like he had to.

After cleaning up the hallway in front of the cupboard, the boy looked at the clock and found that he only had ten minutes to get to the school.  Normally, he could have run that distance with a few minutes to spare, but with the stabbing pain in his ribs, along with the snow covered sidewalks, he knew for certain that he was going to be late.  With considerable effort, he managed to don a relatively clean shirt, and, after ensuring that all of the doors to the house were locked, he made his way as quickly as his condition would allow towards his school.

As he expected he was over ten minutes late to his first class.  He didn’t bother apologizing to the teacher, just as he didn’t bother to explain his tardiness, because he already knew that his cousin would have already told some wild story about why he was late.  The teacher just gave him a disgusted look and pointed to one of the few empty seats in the room, a seat which just happened to be next to one Veronica Sbardella, a somewhat dim-witted girl with greasy black hair, a rather pronounced Roman nose, and a wide, round face with olive skin that told of her Mediterranean heritage.  Veronica took great delight in making those around her ill by her near manic aversion to soap and water and her apparent fondness for beans of all kinds.

With a resigned sigh, he made his way to the indicated seat. He could see his cousin sitting in the back of the classroom between two of his friends, Dennis and Piers, all three of whom sneered menacingly at him… indicating a promise of a round of ‘Harry Hunting’ later in the day.  He carefully sat down in the hard wooden seat and gingerly leaned into the backrest, thankful to feel the blissful pain of the pressure against his aching ribs.

The morning passed slowly, partly because of the constant nausea that he felt from the relentless pain in his side, and partly because Veronica seemed determined to find out exactly how he did so well on the previous week’s exam.  Her incessant prattling during each of their classes earned him a detention in each.  He noticed that for some reason, the teachers seemed unwilling to give Veronica detention.  Honestly, he didn’t blame them in the least.  If he were a teacher, he would ensure that the unpleasant girl spent as little time in his classroom as possible.

By the time that lunch rolled around, he was more than anxious to get to his latest hiding spot, a small alcove concealed by the school’s rubbish bins behind the cafeteria hall.  Even in his sluggish state, he knew he could make it there before Dudders and his gang came looking for him… After all, Dudley’s gang of hoods couldn’t expect his portly cousin to chase him on an empty stomach.

He sat in the dirty, snow-strewn alcove with his back against the back wall while quietly trying to read one of his textbooks, but the thought of Dudley stuffing himself in the cafeteria kept dragging his focus back to his own empty stomach.  He could even hear the clinking of silverware, the clatter of trays and the echoes of the differing conversations through the cracked-open window above his head.  He wished he had some money to buy food.  It wasn’t very comforting knowing that he would see nothing until the Dursleys finished their dinner that night, and if history was any indication, what he would get then wouldn’t satisfy a mouse.

With a sigh, he redoubled his effort to concentrate on the book in his lap, and even managed to get through two pages before he was startled out of his reading when the door to the kitchens opened.  A stout woman with graying, red hair emerged from the doorway carrying a large rubbish bin.  She hefted up the heavy can with ease, emptying it into the large rubbish container that blocked the view into the alcove that he was sitting in.

Just as the door closed, the first afternoon bell rang.  The boy unsteadily stood from the ground and brushed the dirty snow from his baggy pants, silently giving thanks that he made it through another lunch break without getting beat up by his cousin and his gang of thugs.

As he walked past the large rubbish bin, he glanced inside and saw the pile of refuse that the kitchen worker had just dumped on top of the rest of the snow-covered garbage.  It looked as though the kitchen staff had just cleaned out the older staples from their larders.  There were a few wrapped sandwiches and desserts, presumably past their freshness date, along with a few dozen containers of milk.

The boy briefly glanced around at the now empty schoolyard, and then looked back longingly into the bin again.  He was about to leave for his next class when his stomach let out a mighty rumble which stopped him in his tracks.  He reached into the bin, picked up one of the small cartons of milk and tore open the seal.  He nearly gagged when he smelled the sour liquid within.  He opened three more before he found one that didn’t smell too wretched and greedily drank it down.  While it wasn’t completely spoiled, it still burned slightly as it slid down his throat.

With all sense of embarrassment abandoned, he reached in and began sifting through the sandwiches.  The egg salad and tuna salad were all far from palatable, and it even looked as though the maggots weren’t entirely enjoying them.  He came across what looked like a meatloaf sandwich, and aside from the bits of mold on the bread, seemed to be the least spoiled of them all… and there weren’t that many maggots on that one.  Deciding that it was probably edible, he brushed off what few maggots he could find and carefully tore off the moldy bits of the bread before digging into it.  He just managed to force down the last bite when the final bell rang…

‘Damn,’ he thought, ‘late again.”

The afternoon progressed much like the morning had, trapped next to the olfactory nightmare that was Veronica Sbardella and being glared at threateningly by his cousin and his goons.

Sometime during his last class, he began feeling queer.  He was sweating profusely, and could feel a cramping in his lower abdomen.  The combination of Veronica’s odoriferous assault, the stifling heat that was coming from a grate in the floor right next to him, and the constant stabbing pain in his chest began to make him very queasy.  Five minutes after he had first raised his hand, the teacher, who it seemed purposely avoided noticing said hand, finally looked to him and derisively asked, “What is it now, Mister Potter?”

“Sir, I need to use the loo, if it’s not too much trouble.”

The teacher let out a dramatic sigh, then, while glancing up to the clock on the wall, said, “Come now, there’s only twenty minutes left to class… surely you can…”

The teacher’s words were interrupted by a loud, heaving belch as the half-digested dregs of partially soured milk and spoiled sandwich made its encore appearance on the floor of the classroom beside the boy’s desk.

“Why didn’t you say something earlier, you stupid little boy?” yelled the teacher before pointing to the door, “Out with you, Potter!”  The teacher turned towards the boy’s cousin and commanded, “You! Dursley!  Go summon the janitor to clean up this mess!”

Dudley narrowed his eyes at the retreating back of his cousin, angry at the fact that he had to actually move his bulbous body when it wasn’t absolutely necessary.

Moving as quickly as he could, he made his way down the stairs to the nearest lavatory, which happened to be in the basement near to the boiler room.  He made it inside the lavatory, and was just a few yards from a stall when he felt the first push against his colon.  Before he even made it to the stall door, he felt his bowels release into his pants.  The odor almost instantly met his nostrils, which caused his stomach to clench and launched a new wave of vomit out of his throat, fortunately, aimed at the toilet that was now in front of him.  The compression of his abdomen sent a jolt of pain through his chest, and the effort of vomiting caused yet another explosion from his bowels.  He could feel the liquid waste creeping down his legs under his trousers.  Being next to the boiler room, the air inside of the lavatory was stifling hot, and the heat, along with the smells of his vomit and waste, made his head spin.  He could hardly breathe.

The next thing he knew, he was lying on the warm concrete of the lavatory floor just before unconsciousness claimed him.

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4. The Nurse’s Office

Disclaimer: I own nothing of the ‘Harry Potter’ universe.  I make no money writing this stuff.

A/N: Hmmm… Either you love it or you hate it…  I think I’ll delay my major comments about this story and the reviews I’ve been getting until a few more chapters are up.  Let’s just say things are going to get worse before they get better, but they *will* get better, and soon!   I’d say, ‘Enjoy!’ but I’m not so sure anymore…  (Word Count: 4026

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Chapter 4: The Nurse’s Office

Wednesday, March 2^nd, 1988 6:27 PM

When Harry next opened his eyes, he found himself lying on a cot in a dimly lit room with a cold compress resting on his head.  The room smelled strongly of isopropyl alcohol and some sort of disinfectant.  After a few more moments of consciousness, he sat up and discovered, to his horror, that he was wearing nothing at all beneath the thin white sheet that was covering him.  Well, he wasn’t entirely naked… someone had firmly wrapped his chest up in neat bandaging.  The pain was certainly still there, but it was dulled considerably by being nicely packaged the way it was.  It was a ‘good’ kind of ache, meaning one he could easily get accustomed to.

Harry looked around the unfamiliar room, noting the variety of health related posters that adorned the walls.  One proclaimed the benefits of brushing one’s teeth regularly, another reminded the viewer of the upcoming booster shot schedule, and yet another sang the praises of a well balanced diet.  If he wasn’t feeling so dreadful, he might have laughed at that one.  He then noticed the clock on the wall, and was surprised to find that it read six-thirty.  He wasn’t sure if it was AM or PM, because from what he could see through the curtained window it was quite dark outside, so it could have been either.

His eyes drifted to the desk that sat off to the side of the cot he was laying upon.  In front of the piles of books and papers that littered the messy desktop was a small wooden name plaque with the words, ‘Mrs. Marie A. Figg – School Nurse,’ engraved upon it.  He briefly wondered if she was any relation to the Mrs. Figg that lived around the corner from the Dursleys.

Just then, the door opened and a pretty young blonde girl of about seventeen or so walked into the room.  She wore a small, lacy white cap pinned to her hair and a red and white vertical striped smock that appeared long enough to double as a dress, although he could just see the hem of her green skirt protruding from beneath it.  She was carrying a bundle in her arms that, upon closer inspection, turned out to be his clothes.  Harry glanced at the nameplate in the desk, and then back to the girl.  He thought to himself that she looked rather young to be married, and to be a nurse, but he figured that people were marrying younger nowadays... still, he always assumed that the school nurse would be much, much older.  He had never met the school’s nurse before, even with all the times he was beaten up by his cousin and his gang.  They always warned him not to tell or else the beatings would be much worse, so he usually suffered whatever injuries they inflicted on him in silence.

“Well, I see sleeping beauty has awakened,” the girl said with a smile as she laid the bundle at the foot of his cot, “I just got through washing these for you… they were a right mess, they were… and so were you, if truth be told.”  She moved closer to him and laid her palm on his forehead and asked, “How are you feeling now, love?  Better?”

Harry didn’t realize it, but he had instinctively pulled the thin sheet that was covering him up to his neck the moment the girl had entered the room.  The girl giggled as she took the edge of the sheet from his hands and lowered it so that she could inspect his bandages.

“No need to be shy around me… trust me, you have nothing I haven’t seen before.”

Harry just nodded bashfully, but then let out a pained hiss as her fingers lightly touched the bandages over the right side of his chest.

The girl’s eyes darkened as she quickly pulled her hand back.  After a few moments of scrutinizing the boy, she asked, “Your name’s Harry, right?”

Harry nodded.

“Well, that fat little sod wasn’t lying about that, at least,” the girl muttered to herself before she spoke a bit more loudly to him, “The doctor just left about three hours ago and said to let you sleep.  When the doctor was here, your cousin… what was it…? Duddie?”

 “Dudley,” offered Harry helpfully.

“Yes, Dudley… he had told the doctor that you injured yourself when you fell from the playbars in the schoolyard at lunchtime, is that correct?”

Harry instinctively lowered his eyes and just nodded silently.

The girl leaned towards him and gently placed her finger under his chin.  She lifted his head so that he was forced to look directly into her kind, ice-blue eyes as she softly repeated, “Is that correct?”

Harry opened his mouth, trying to force out the word ‘yes,’ but it just wouldn’t come.  He had a very hard time lying to anyone, but somehow he found it impossible to lie to this girl.  Rather than lie, his mouth snapped shut and he remained silent.

“I thought so,” said the girl as she straightened up, “Did that fat oaf of a cousin of yours do this to you?”

Harry dropped his head again and shook his head.

“Was it your father… or mother?”

Harry’s head snapped up as he vehemently said, “No!”  He immediately realized that the suddenness of his reply would probably make the girl think he was lying, so he clarified, “I… I don’t have parents.  They were killed in a car crash when I was a baby.  I was told that I almost died, too.  I ended up with this scar, and I…”

When Harry casually lifted the bangs of his messy hair, the girl’s eyes widened in shock as she let out a surprised ‘Eep!’  She put a hand over her mouth and instinctively took a step backwards, knocking into a metal tray that held an array of clamps, scissors and sutures and sending them clattering noisily to the floor.

Harry dropped his hand away from his forehead and lowered his gaze again as he ruefully said, “It’s not that ugly, is it, Mrs. Figg?  I don’t even remember getting it… I was only a baby when…”

The girl suddenly turned and raced the few steps to the desk where she lifted up a folder.  She stared blankly at it before she asked in a breathy whisper, “Y-y-your last n-name is ‘P-Potter… and not Dursley?’  You’re Harry Potter?”

Harry sighed in frustration.  Here was yet another of the school’s faculty who believed all of the stories and lies that his cousin had spread about him.

“You know, none of what you heard about me is true…” said Harry shortly.

“What?” said the girl with no small amount of wonder in her eyes, “Of course it’s true!  Everyone knows your story!”

“Listen, whatever you heard about me, none of it’s true,” Harry said forcefully, “I don’t steal from the teachers’ desks, I don’t vandalize school property, and I’m certainly not the neighborhood bully… just look at me!  Does it look to you like I could bully anyone around at all?”

The girl stared at him open-mouthed for a few moments, then shook her head as if to clear it and said, “I don’t know anything about that, but you… you’re… you’re Harry Potter! Are you telling me that you don’t know anything about yourself… about what you’ve done?  You really don’t know who you are?”

Harry gave her a quizzical look as he said, “Mrs. Figg, I know exactly who I am.  I’m an orphan who lives with my aunt and uncle… I’m the weird kid who everyone in this school either hates or is afraid of… or both… but really, I’m just a nobody.”

‘Then he really doesn’t know,’ she thought to herself before saying aloud, “Why are you calling me Mrs. Figg?  I’m not my mother, you know.”

Harry nodded towards the desk where the nameplate sat and said, “You are the school’s nurse, aren’t you?”

The girl glanced over to the desk and saw the nameplate, “Oh!  No, my mum’s the nurse here.  I’m just helping her out while she’s on vacation.  I’m a healer-in-training at Saint Mungo’s Hospital, so she thought a little exposure to muggle methods of healing would help my studies, although the most I’ve done here is to stop up a bloody nose or to give out an antacid for an upset tummy.  You’ve been the most excitement I’ve seen here all week.”

Harry had never heard of St. Mungo’s Hospital, nor did he have any idea what ‘muggle’ healing methods were, but then again, he really didn’t get around much, so that hospital could be right around the corner for all he knew.

“Anyway, I’m not Mrs. Figg, I’m Miss Figg,” the girl said with a smile, “but you can call me Jaana.”  The smile dropped from her face and was replaced with a concerned frown, “Now, are you going to tell me how this happened to you?”

Harry said nothing.

“Listen, the only reason I mentioned your parents was because I called the number that the office gave me to inform your family that you’d been injured.  There was nobody there for the longest time, but I finally got through about an hour ago.  I must say, the man who answered didn’t seem to be too concerned about your injury.  I told him that you shouldn’t be on your feet for too long and said that he should come to pick you up.  He then told me, and I quote, “You tell that boy that he had better get here right smartly… there are chores to be done, and the chores are not going to do themselves!’  Then he hung up on me!  I thought he was your father, so I had assumed that he might have been the one to do… that… to you.  I’m sorry if I made you feel bad by asking if your parents had done it… I just assumed…”

“That’s okay.  You had no way of knowing.”

Harry knew he had to get home soon.  He didn’t need his uncle angrier than how he appeared to be now.  Harry was about to swing his legs off from the cot and stand up, but then froze when he remembered that he was quite naked beneath the sheet.

“If you don’t mind?” Harry asked abashedly as he reached down to the foot of the cot and retrieved his bundle of clothes.

Jaana smiled at him and gave him a wink, “Aww, not gonna give an old lady a show?  You know, I’m the one who took those off of you and cleaned you up.”

“But… but I was asleep!” complained Harry with a comical whine in his voice that he really couldn’t help.

Jaana laughed as she headed to the door, “Don’t worry, love, I was just teasing.  Call out when you’re done.”

Harry dressed as quickly as he could, which wasn’t very quick at all due to his limited range of movement.  After almost twenty minutes and much wincing and groaning, he was just managing to pull his shirt down over his torso when a loud knock sounded from the door.

“Hey!  I was kidding before, but if you’re not out here in one minute, I’m coming in there and dressing you myself!  I didn’t have dinner and I’m hungry, so get a move on!”

“She’s hungry…” he muttered to himself as he slipped on his socks and shoes.  He was still feeling some of the nausea from earlier in the afternoon, but he had thrown up nearly everything he had forced himself to eat onto the classroom floor, and at this hour, he was definitely feeling quite empty.  He knew the Dursleys ate at precisely six o’clock, which meant that he had nothing to look forward to except dirty dishes to wash and a kitchen to clean.

With a tired sigh, Harry walked to the door and stepped out into the darkened hallway.

“Hit those lights and let’s go.  I’ll give you a ride home.”

Harry reached back into the office and hit the switch before hurrying to catch up to Jaana, who was already halfway to the faculty lounge where the exit to the rear parking lot was.  As he was half-jogging towards her, he watched her swaying hips, to which was connected a pair of impossibly long legs.  He was only seven years old, true, but he knew a good looking girl when he saw one.

He suddenly noticed that she was stopped and holding the door open for him.  His face burned red with embarrassment when he saw the amused look on the girl’s face.  She had obviously seen him staring at her backside.  He dropped his head abashedly as he squeezed past her and out into the cold, dark parking lot.  There was only one car parked there.  He didn’t know much about cars, but it looked like it was a rather expensive two-seat convertible… certainly a lot nicer and sportier than his uncle’s sedan.  He wished it was summertime… he’d like to have a ride in that car with the top down.

“Is that your car?  It looks nice,” complimented Harry.

Jaana laughed as she unlocked the car and said, “Don’t let the looks fool you.  This darkness hides a lot of sins as far as the body goes… and the roof leaks, the heater barely works, it’s got an electrical short somewhere, and I believe it burns more oil than petrol, but it gets me to where I need to go.  I’d hate to have to take the bus or the tube from London, especially in this weather.”

“You live in London?” asked Harry as he sat in the passenger’s seat.

“You make it sound like it’s halfway around the world,” laughed Jaana, “Don’t tell me you’ve never been to London before!  It’s only about ten minutes away by car.”

“I’ve only been once.  My uncle took me to the zoo last summer, but I didn’t have a very good time.”  Harry was recalling the incident with the snake, and his resulting punishment… nearly a week locked in his cupboard.

Jaana looked sympathetically at the boy next to her.  As she started the car, she took in the boy’s appearance.  The clothes he was wearing looked to be five sizes too large for him, the coat he had on looked equally large, but very worn and thin.  When she was cleaning the mess from him when he was unconscious, she couldn’t help but notice how terribly thin he was.

As Jaana put the car in gear and started off, she kept an eye on his face when she said, “Hmmm… it’s kinda late.  Maybe instead of leftovers from your family’s dinner, would you like to keep me company at a restaurant?  You can have whatever you like, my treat.”

She saw his eyes light up for a fraction of a second before he dropped his head and said, “If you don’t mind, I’d rather just go home.  I have a lot of chores to do, and I don’t want to get into tr… uh, bed too late… I didn’t get much sleep last night.”

Jaana’s eyes darkened again.  That was all she needed to know.  Something was going on with his family, and she was determined to find out what that something was.

“Oh, forget the chores.  I’ll stick up for you when I drop you off… you can blame me for making you come home late, I’ll just say you slept the whole time because I didn’t know you had to be home so early…”  Since it didn’t look like he was being swayed, she added, “You aren’t going to make me eat alone, are you?”

Harry looked at her suspiciously for a moment, wondering if he could really trust her to stick up for him… something that nobody had ever done for him for as long as he could remember.  After a few moments he smiled and said, “Well, okay… if you really want me to.”

Although he tried to act nonchalant, Jaana could tell that the boy was very excited about the prospect of eating out.  Thinking that she was offering to let him pick his favorite place, she asked him, “I’m not terribly familiar with this town, do you know of any good places to eat?”

“I really don’t know anyplace,” he said casually, “I’ve never been to a restaurant.”

‘Never?’  Jaana’s lips thinned into a straight line. She took a calming breath before she said, “Well, are you in the mood for fast food like hamburgers, or would you prefer a sit-down meal like fish and chips or something like that?”

“Whatever you like,” answered Harry timidly, “

Jaana nodded and took off down the street.  There was one place her aunt Arabella told her about that had pretty good food at a pretty good price, and it was relatively close by.

When the waiter placed the menus on the table, Jaana picked one up, handed it to Harry and said, “Order whatever you like, remember, it’s my treat.”

When the waiter returned to take their orders, Jaana waited for Harry to order first.  Her eyes narrowed when he ordered a plain broth soup. When the waiter nodded and wrote down the soup, Jaana motioned the waiter to look at the menu with her.  Silently, she pointed at the Devils on Horseback for an appetizer, and then pointed to the beer-batter fish and chips, steak and kidney pie, smoked ribs, O’Malley’s Demise, and then raised two fingers and pointed to the cherry pie a la mode for afters.  The waiter smiled as he finished writing the rather substantial order and walked hurriedly towards the kitchen.

“What did you order?” asked Harry curiously.  She seemed to take a long time, and the waiter seemed to be writing an awful lot on his pad.

Jaana smiled and said, “I ordered us an appetizer.  Have you ever had Devils on Horseback?”

Harry made a face and shook his head.

“Oh, don’t look at me like that… they’re just prunes wrapped in bacon. They’re very good, and you’ll never know if you don’t try them.  They’re better than Angels on Horseback… I really don’t like liver…”

The appetizer came at the same time as Harry’s broth.  For the rest of their stay in the restaurant, the broth remained untouched.  Jaana had a few of the Devils on Horseback, was able to finish half of a plate of fish and chips, and of course, a slice of cherry pie.  Harry managed to stuff down everything else that had arrived at the table, including the other half of Jaana’s fish and chips.

More than once, Harry had caught the girl staring curiously at him.  He felt slightly embarrassed because he thought that her disbelieving stare was because of how much of their meal he was consuming.  He tried to push the plates away, but she just pushed them right back in front of him and insisted that he finish everything there.  He was barely able to finish the pie and ice cream… but he managed.

After the bill was paid and they were back in her car, Harry was just able to tell her his address before he nodded off in the passenger’s seat.  The motion of the car, the rumble of the engine, in combination with his very full stomach, seemed to quickly lull the boy to sleep.  More than once she found herself smiling fondly at him as he slept.  Who would have known that ‘The Boy Who Lived’ was such a sweet kid?  She would have assumed he’d be a stuck-up prat, given his notoriety and all, but since he seemed to have no idea who he actually was, she guessed that the fame never had the chance to go to his head.  She wouldn’t mind having a little brother like him.

They arrived on Privet Drive a little later than they should have.  Seeing him sleeping so peacefully, she didn’t have the heart to wake him.  She ended up driving around his neighborhood until he started to stir.

While she was driving aimlessly around, she thought about the boy’s situation, and about how voraciously he had torn into their meal.  She certainly had enough of an indication that he’d be put to work the moment he entered his house.  She felt she had to at least try to make things a bit better for him, at least temporarily.  She pulled over to the side of the road and pulled out a notepad and a pen from her purse.  She quickly wrote out an official looking note and signed it, ‘William Warren, M.D.’  With a satisfied nod, she folded the note and put it in her pocket before pulling out onto the road again.

It was nearly nine o’clock when Jaana and the sleepy Harry pulled into the small driveway at Number Four, Privet Drive.  To Jaana’s surprise, the entire house was dark.  The porch light wasn’t even on.

As soon as the car stopped, Harry had pushed the door open as he quickly and quietly said, “Thank you very much for dinner.  It was really fun.  I’ve got to go in now… thanks again.”

When Jaana opened her door, Harry’s eyes widened in panic and he said, “There’s no need to trouble yourself.  My family’s probably in bed already, and I have lots to do.”

“But… I was hoping to have a word with your uncle,” said Jaana as she pulled the fake note from her pocket, “I have instructions from the doctor that your family should be aware of.”

Harry stopped and snatched the note from her hand before hurrying to the front door, “I’ll make sure they see it… thank you again!”

The door snapped shut, leaving a concerned young witch standing alone in the dark driveway.  She briefly considered marching up to the door and ringing the bell repeatedly to get Harry’s family’s attention, but figured she might do more harm than good for the boy’s situation.  With a sigh, she sat back in her car and started the engine.  As she pulled out of the driveway at Number Four, a thought came to her.

A minute later, she pulled into the driveway at Number Seventeen Wisteria Walk, the home of Jaana’s aunt Arabella.  Four minutes after that, she was disillusioned and standing in the back yard of Number Four, Privet Drive and looking through the kitchen window at the boy she had spent the evening with.  Sure enough, the lad was working slowly but diligently, scrubbing away at the pile of dirty pots sitting on the countertop next to the sink.

She watched for about twenty minutes, wanting to see how long the boy would continue to do the ‘chores’ unsupervised.  He worked quickly and methodically, more so than anyone his age should be used to.  She idly watched him finish off the plates and cookware, clean the countertop and the dinner table, but when she saw him pulling out the mop and bucket, she had to stop herself from bursting into the house, hexing whatever adults she could find and steal the boy away.  She couldn’t believe that anyone could treat a child, especially someone as sweet and polite as Harry, as a common house elf.

With a disgusted sigh, she backed a few feet away from the window before she disappeared with a slight ‘pop.’  She planned on properly visiting her aunt the following day to see if she realized that the famous ‘Boy Who Lived’ was living just a block away from her.

Little did she know, if she had stayed in the back yard of Number Four for just a minute longer, she would have seen the boy store away the mop and bucket, and then crawl into his ‘bedroom’ that was the cramped cupboard underneath the stairs.

-----~-----

5. The Bat and the Book

Disclaimer: I own nothing of the ‘Harry Potter’ universe.  I make no money writing this stuff.

A/N:  I’ve corrected most of the mistakes that were pointed out by you kind reviewers… Many thanks!  (I really could use a beta reader ^_^; )  I warned you all that this would get worse before it gets better… so here goes, and let the flaming begin!  (Word Count: 4403)

Chapter 5: The Bat and the Book

Wednesday, March 2^nd, 1988 - 10:21 PM

Harry stayed awake inside of his ‘bedroom,’ silently listening for any telltale noises in the house.  When he entered the cupboard, he was careful not to close the door all the way to prevent the latch from snapping closed.  If he heard any sound on the stairs above him, he’d have to close the door all the way and hope the sound of the latch wasn’t detected.  Being in his cupboard with the door unlocked was an extremely rare opportunity, and he had every intention of using said opportunity to the fullest.

Harry was fully aware that his uncle was awake when he had arrived home with Miss Figg, even though the house appeared to be asleep from the outside.  He could see the corner of the shade pulled up in his aunt and uncle’s bedroom on the second floor.  He was thankful that she didn’t press him to meet his uncle.  Vernon would have been genial enough to her face, only long enough to get her to leave quickly, but the repercussions to him would probably have been severe if the girl mentioned anything at all about his injuries.  If Vernon had suspected that Harry had even hinted at being injured to anyone, his uncle would have made life for him exponentially more unpleasant than it already was.  That eventuality must be avoided at all costs… he remembered the last time that Vernon was questioned about Harry’s home life by one of the neighbors who, strangely enough, had the same last name as the girl who had cared for him that day.  He still bore the scars on his upper back from that day.

Every so often, Harry would peek out from the cupboard to look at the illuminated clock in the kitchen.  He fully expected his uncle to come down the stairs to inspect his work, but this night he was unexpectedly lucky.  When he heard the unmistakable snores of his uncle, Harry glanced out through the door at the clock and saw that it was just past eleven.

Harry waited another half hour before venturing out of his cupboard, just to make sure that the rest of the house’s occupants were accustomed to his uncle’s thunderous snoring.  He made his way up the stairs, being careful to step over the third step, which would creak loudly with any weight placed on it.  That particular step almost had him discovered the last time he was free from his cupboard.  He barely made it back before his aunt sent his uncle hurrying down the steps to investigate the noise.

As he neared the top of the stairs, he cautiously peeked over the top step and looked down the darkened hallway.  All of the doors were open except for Dudley’s bedroom, which was the second door on the right.  The first door on the right was the guest bedroom, and the first door on the left was Dudley’s second bedroom where he stored all of his unread books, broken or boring toys, and anything else that he couldn’t squeeze into his regular bedroom.  Beyond Dudley’s second bedroom was the bathroom, and at the very end of the hall was his aunt and uncle’s bedroom.

In the very dim illumination that came from a nightlight in the bathroom, he could just make out the silhouette of his aunt and uncle… well, mainly his uncle, lying still on their bed.  He wished that their door was closed… it would make it easier for him to move around without having to worry about any little noise he might make.  If he was caught up here… well… he didn’t want to think about that.

As quietly as he could, he crawled across the carpeted hallway and into Dudley’s second bedroom.  After silently closing the door, he breathed a sigh of relief.  The hard part was over.  He crept over to the window and raised the blind to let in the light from the lamppost that was just outside.  With the new light, he was able to navigate through the room without much worry about accidentally bumping into something.

Harry looked around at all the wonderful toys and things that Dudley either broke or got bored with.  Heaven forbid he throw out the stuff that was useless to him, much less giving them to Harry to play with, broken or not.

Harry immediately went to the shelf that held Dudley’s old hand-held video game.  The only thing wrong with it was that his cousin stuck a pencil through the hole that held the speaker.  Since he couldn’t hear the sound, he whined and cried until Vernon got him a new one, resigning the ‘broken’ game to the second bedroom.

Having no sound on the game made it perfect for him to play with.  He huddled in a corner and switched the game on, fully prepared to spend an hour or two lost in mindless electronic entertainment.  To Harry’s dismay, the screen remained dark.  The batteries were either dead or removed to power one of Dudley’s other toys.  After a thorough search, he found that all of the games that ran on batteries were either dead or empty.  Not wanting to waste this rare trip to the black hole that was Dudley’s ‘broken toy room,’ he searched around for other forms of entertainment that wouldn’t make noise.

Amongst all the games and puzzles that had key pieces missing, action figures that had broken or missing arms, legs or heads, and other items that made different noises, he found nothing that was suitable.  He was reduced to perusing the unused bookshelf for something to read.  Harry scanned over the books, most of which were Dudley’s nearly pristine textbooks from past school years.  He managed to find a story book that his cousin had gotten from his aunt Marge for his birthday.  He remembered that day, and the look on Dudley’s face when he unwrapped his present and found a book beneath the colourful paper.  That particular tantrum lasted a solid two hours, a full twenty minutes longer than when he received his first article of clothing as a gift.  Of course, Dudley quieted down when Marge slipped him another five quid note.

Harry took the book and sat near the window.  There was just enough light coming through for him to read by.  The book was a collection of differing fictional short stories.  Some were about space travel, some were mysteries, and a few were fantasy stories.  It was one of the space stories that he decided to read.

Harry lost track of time while he was reading, so engrossed in the story that it took him a while to notice the strange hissing noise that sounded like bacon frying coming from somewhere behind him.  When he first noticed the noise, he instinctively ducked into the shadows below the window and then remained perfectly still.  The hissing was getting increasingly louder as he scanned the darkened room trying to find the source of the noise that was getting nearly loud enough to possibly wake one or all of his relatives.

Then he saw it.  On the floor, just in front of the bookshelves, was a faintly glowing circle.  Harry quickly stood up and pulled down the blind against the incoming light, engulfing the room in near complete darkness.  In the newly darkened room, he could clearly see the eerily glowing circle.  He moved a bit closer, and was startled to see a bunch of weird, smoking letters appearing from out of nowhere around the outside of the circle.  The letters didn’t appear to be of any alphabet he knew, they looked to him more like some kind of symbols.  He stood transfixed as he watched the symbols appearing one after the other, as if some invisible hand was drawing them around the circle in a glowing, florescent red ink.

Harry shook himself out of his daze when he realized that the hiss was becoming alarmingly loud.  Panicking, he did the only thing he could think to do… he threw himself down on the floor, covering the circle with his body in hopes of muffling the sound.  He quickly discovered that it probably wasn’t the brightest thing for him to do.

Harry immediately let out a surprised yelp as he felt a burning heat penetrate his shirt.  He instinctively rolled away from the circle clutching his burned chest, his hiss of pain echoing the hissing of the now smouldering circle.  Suddenly, a booming crack echoed throughout the room.  It felt to Harry that the whole house shook from the resounding noise.

Harry stood there in wide-eyed panic.  He was going to get caught in Dudley’s second bedroom.  He was going to get punished… very harshly punished.  He was going…

Harry’s frightened eyes passed over the spot on the floor where the circle had been, but there was no glowing circle, no strange lettering… nothing at all… except…

Harry saw that boards in the floor was lifted up, exposing a dark space beneath.  He could just see a corner of a thick, hardcover book propping the board up, as if the book had pushed that board up from below.

He didn’t know why, especially when he was fully aware of the absence of his uncle’s snoring, but he reached down and pried the loose floorboard the rest of the way up.  He picked up the book, and when he read the leather-bound cover, his mind seemed to go blank.  It read, ‘The Life of Harry James Potter.’

He was still staring numbly at the cover when the door burst open.  Vernon Dursley stepped into the room with a fire in his eyes and a cricket bat in his hand.  In the dim light of the hallway behind his uncle, Harry could just see the faces of his aunt and cousin.  Petunia’s eyes were narrowed dangerously, while Dudley was looking at him as though he had been violated just by Harry’s presence in his second bedroom.

“You’ve done it this time, boy!” roared Vernon as he walked threateningly towards him with the bat raised, “This is the last straw!”

Harry dropped to his knees and reflexively raised the book in his hands to cover his head.  He had seen Vernon angry before, but never, ever this angry.

Sooner than he had expected it, he felt the bat connect with his shoulder and heard a sickening crack.  It took a moment for his brain to register the pain, but as soon as he felt the first sharp spasm, he felt the second blow bypass the shielding of the book and connect with the side of his head.

Harry had never felt this scared in his life.  Tiny lights were dancing before his eyes and the only thing he could really hear was a pulsating, buzzing sound in his ears.  Only one thought raced through Harry’s head… he was going to die.  He was going to die right here, right now.

Then, in the span of a heartbeat, a dozen thoughts began racing through his mind.  At least he had a last meal… a last meal with a kind and pretty girl, who apparently wasted her time bandaging up his chest because he was about to die…  That girl seemed to like him… he felt safe with her in her mother’s office at school… safer than he had felt anywhere else…

Another blow connected with Harry’s chest.  As he was still trying to protect his head with the book, he left the rest of his body unprotected.  The thought he heard Vernon yelling something about teaching and lessons, and his aunt screaming for someone to stop doing something, but is head was spinning so badly that he really couldn’t make out the words.

He now wished the girl did come into the house… maybe this wouldn’t be happening… he’d be safely locked in his cupboard… he wished he was safe… he wished he was in a safe place… he wished he was in that girl’s office at school…

Harry thought he felt another strike from the bat, but he wasn’t sure… what he was sure of was that he was about to die.  It felt as though he were placed inside of an uninflated balloon and being squeezed from all sides.  Is that what dying felt like?  Maybe he’d see his parents… He couldn’t breathe, either due to the suffocating, ‘inside a balloon-like’ sensation, or because of his newly re-injured chest… he couldn’t be sure, but it didn’t matter anyway… he was dead… he was dead…

That was the last thought before his consciousness left him for the second time that day.

-----~-----

Thursday, March 3rd, 1988 - 6:51 AM

“Harry…?”

‘…’

“Harry?  Come on, love, stay with me… the healers will be here any moment.”

‘Where is that voice coming from? Mum? Is that you?’

“Damn, if they don’t get here soon, I’m going to lose him… I haven’t been trained for this stuff yet!”

‘I know that voice… Miss Figg?’

Pop…!  Crack… Pop!

‘What was that?’

“Thank Merlin you’re here!  I dropped him off at his house last night.  When I came in this morning, I found him here like… like this… about ten minutes ago… I think he’s been here all night.  I have no idea how he got into the school, or this office!”

“What have you determined so far?”

“He’s got a fractured skull, a compound fracture of the left collarbone and humerus.  His right lung is punctured, I think, most likely from the four broken ribs… they were only cracked this morning… he’s been coughing up blood… I tried to get the bleeding from his ear to stop, but I didn’t want…”

“Merlin’s beard!” said a male voice, “That scar!  Is that… is that Harry Potter?”

‘That voice is unfamiliar… how does he know me?’

“This isn’t good… massive internal bleeding… he’s lost too much blood… No, that potion won’t help him now…”

Ding… Ding… Ding…

‘That’s a weird sounding bell…’

“We’re losing him…” said an unfamiliar female voice.

“Oh, no you don’t, lad…” said a different male voice, “‘The Boy Who Lived’ isn’t dying on my watch!  ‘Aspis Mortis Arresto!’”

…Darkness…

-----~-----

Saturday, June 4th, 1988 9:02 AM

“Good morning, love.  Are you going to talk to me today?”

Harry heard the sound of a curtain being drawn back.  Though his eyes were closed, he could tell that the brightness of his surroundings increased tenfold.  He then heard a window being raised, and a moment later felt the cool early summer air wash over his face.  He could now hear the increased volume of the chirping of birds from outside.

“You’ve got to wake up sometime, you know…” said the pleasant female voice that he thought he recognized as Miss Figg’s.

It was hard for him to tell anything.  He felt as though he was run over by a bus.  He tried to think of the last thing he could remember, but his mind was strangely clouded.  After a few moments of lying still, he tried to move, but his entire body felt so stiff and sore that his limbs weren’t cooperating with his mental commands.  Harry then felt a soft hand brush his cheek.  He wasn’t expecting it and he involuntarily flinched his head away at the touch, the movement of which caused a groan of protest to leave his lips.

He heard a sharp intake of breath and the words, “Oh my!”  An instant later he heard the sound of feet hurrying away, and then a door being opened.  Harry cracked open his eyes just in time to see the back of Miss Figg hurriedly disappearing from the room.

Harry’s eyes wandered around the wholly unfamiliar room he was currently in.  The first thing he noticed was the bed he was laying upon.  It was huge, much larger than even his aunt and uncle’s bed.  He was covered in clean, cream-coloured sheets, and his head was resting on a large, very comfortable pillow.  He was in a very old looking room, with wallpaper which bore a print of hanging vines, antique furniture scattered throughout, and a rather large bay window that he knew was just opened.  A few old paintings adorned the walls, as well as a wide shelf that held a bizarre assortment of very strange stuffed animals such as dragons, unicorns, and some others that he couldn’t even begin to fathom what they were.  Out of the corner of his eye, he thought he saw movement from one of the paintings, an ancient looking portrait of a small black boy in knickerbockers and a ruffled shirt, but just assumed his eyes were playing tricks on him.

The sounds of footsteps and a rushed, whispered conversation came drifting through the open doorway.  The footsteps stopped just out in the hallway and Harry could barely make out portions of the banter.

“…I don’t care!” said the hushed voice of Jaana Figg, “I’m the one who’s been caring for him these past months…  I know, but I’ll be damned if they’re going to take him away now!”

Another voice, deep and slow, made a comment that Harry couldn’t quite hear.

“What?” Jaana said loudly before lowering her voice again, “He’ll just get sent…”  The rest of her sentence was so low that Harry couldn’t hear it until the very end when she said forcefully, “…Promise me!”

“Harry heard the strangely accented male voice sigh before he said, “Alright, I hope you know what you’re getting into.”

Janna then entered the bedroom and smiled at Harry.  She was immediately followed by a rather stocky middle aged man with very dark skin, a wide, jovial face, and a dark mass of long hair that fell around his head like a rag mop.

“Well, how is our little patient today,” asked the man in what Harry recognized to be a Jamaican accent.

Harry, still being a bit confused over what had happened to him, looked at Jaana and hoarsely asked, “Where am I?”

Jaana sat beside Harry on the bed and ran her palm over his forehead as she answered, “This place is called The Gables.  It’s owned by my friend here, Healer Raymond Cooley,” Jaana looked closely at Harry’s eyes as she asked, “Do you know who I am?”

“Of course… You’re Miss Figg… You think I’d have forgotten since yesterday?”

Jaana glanced nervously at her friend before turning back to Harry and asked, “Do you remember what happened to you?”

“Something happened to me?” asked Harry in surprise.  He made another attempt to recall what had transpired the night before… he remembered having dinner… which was very good… he remembered cleaning the kitchen when he got home, and… and… ‘Dudley’s second bedroom!’ Harry suddenly remembered! Reading the story book, the strange, glowing circle, being caught by his uncle… and the odd book he found beneath the floorboard!

Harry instinctively raised his hand to the side of his head, as if feeling for the place where his uncle had struck him with the cricket bat.  He opened his mouth to say that he remembered being hit, then snapped it shut when he realized that he was about to tell on his uncle.

Just by his actions, Jaana could tell that he did remember, and she could see his reluctance to say anything about it.

“Don’t worry, love,” said Jaana kindly, “We already know what your uncle did to you, so you don’t have to say anything if you don’t want to.  I just want you to know that I’ll do everything in my power to make sure you never have to go back there again.”

While Jaana was speaking, Harry was watching the man who was with her waving a stick at him while mumbling words that weren’t quite words at all.  As the man was waving the stick, Harry could feel different parts of his body tingling as if mild electric shocks were passing through him.

“Well, I’d say you’ve done a fair job with the child,” said Healer Cooley, “He checks out alright, and he seems to be alert and aware with all of his screws in place.  Just make sure he stays off of his feet for a few more days and gets enough rest over the next few weeks… and get him something to eat, woman!  The child’s probably starving after being force-fed nothing but potions for months.”

Harry was only half paying attention until he heard the man say he should stay off his feet for a few days, “Excuse me, but I have a test next week… will I be able to go to school?”

Jaana and Cooley looked at each other again, and Harry began to get nervous at their shared expression of concern.

“You’re not going back to school, Harry.  From now on, you’re going to be home schooled as a proper wizard should.  I’ve already removed your records from the muggle school, the proper memory modifications have been made to the staff and…”

“Home schooled?” asked Harry in surprise, until the rest of her sentence caught up to him where he asked suspiciously, “Wizard?  You mean like the magicians you see on the telly?”

“No, not like a muggle magician, ‘muggle’ meaning a non-magical person, by the way.  I mean like a wizard… a real wizard, using real magic… like this…”

Janna pulled out a stick that was similar to the one used by Healer Cooley, except that hers was a reddish colour while his was a pale beige. She pointed the stick at a glass vial that was sitting on the nightstand next to his bed.  Suddenly, the vial vibrated for a moment before it began shifting, changing colour and shape, elongating and expanding until it was no longer a glass vial, but a rusty-brown puppy that leapt from the nightstand into Harry’s lap and began licking his face energetically.  If Harry hadn’t seen it with his own eyes, he would never have believed it.

“That’s called a mineral to animal transfiguration,” explained Jaana to a stunned Harry as she changed the puppy back to a glass vial, “There are many types of transfigurations possible, and many other classes of spells that you will learn about, such as charms, jinxes, hexes, curses, et cetera.”

“How do you know I’ll be able to do all that?”

“Simple… because you’re a wizard, just like your father was a wizard like Ray here… and your mother was a witch, just like me.”

“How do you… did you know my parents?” asked Harry breathlessly, then his eyes widened even more as he said, “Wait… you’re a real witch?  You don’t look like one…”

“Yes, I am a ‘real’ witch, did you expect a warty nose and a black, pointy hat?  Well, I have the hat, but that’s besides the point… and all magicals know of your parents… and of you.  You’re the famous Harry Potter, ‘The Boy Who Lived.’  There have been books written about how you defeated ‘You-Know-Who’ when you were a babe…  There are stories and songs written about you, too.”

Harry sat on the bed in a daze, trying to take all this information in. ‘The Boy Who Lived?’ he thought, ‘Where have I heard that before?’

“I’ve got to head back to St. Mungo’s before I’m missed,” said Healer Cooley as he stepped towards the doorway, “I’ll stop by next week to check on the child.  I’ll respect your wishes and not tell anyone where you are, but you’re going to have to tell somebody sometime.  You know the Ministry’s in an uproar, and Dumbledore and the Wizengamot are beside themselves… I hope you know what you’re doing.”  Cooley looked back at Jaana for a moment and said, “We all miss you at the hospital… you were one of the brightest trainees to come along in a long time.  You would have made an excellent healer.”

“I’ll be careful, Ray,” said Jaana with a smile, “Thanks for everything.”

After the healer had left, Harry asked, “So there are books about me?  Like the one I saw in my cousin’s room?”

“I didn’t see a book about you in his room when I went there to collect your things,” said Jaana with an angry glint in her eye as she remembered the encounter with the boy’s relatives… and finding out that Harry had no ‘things’ to collect whatsoever, “why would those despicable muggles have a book about a wizard anyway?”

“I found a book there, a big one with a leather cover that was titled, ‘The Life of Harry James Potter.’  I didn’t know it at the time… I thought it was a prank that my cousin was going to play on me.”

“Well, you were holding a book when I found you in the nurse’s office at school, but… hey, how did you get in there anyway?  The school, and the office for that matter, was locked when we left that night.”

“I was in your office?” asked Harry with genuine surprise, “I have no idea how I got there.  Do you still have that book?  I’d like to read it.”

“Well, yes, I kept the book,” said Jaana as she walked to a nearby rolltop desk and picked up the book, “But it has nothing written in it… it’s entirely blank.”

She handed the book to Harry.

“It’s not blank, it says right here, ‘The Life of Harry James Potter’ right on the cover.”  Harry briefly leafed through the pages, seeing each sheet filled with heavily slanted handwriting, hand-drawn diagrams and maps, lists of strange words, and what looked like detailed cooking recipes, although a brief glance at some of the ingredients told him he wouldn’t want to eat anything that resulted from those instructions.

“That’s odd…” said Jaana as she watched over his shoulder while he read out loud a few short snippets from different pages in the book, “it looks completely blank to me.”

Harry flipped the pages back to see the very first page.  His mouth hung open wordlessly as he stared disbelievingly at the first words written in that book…

“The Life of Harry James Potter”

“Written by Harry James Potter”

-----~-----

6. The First Chapter

Disclaimer: I hold no rights to anything of the ‘Harry Potter’ universe.  I make no money writing about it… I just enjoy playing with the characters.

A/N:  I must apologize for the delay in getting this posted.  I could bore you all with the minutia in my life, but that would accomplish nothing.  With my health issues, and my obscene work schedule, the updates to this story will unfortunately be few and far between.  I have about 30 chapters planned out for this fic, but it’s just finding the time to write it all down that’s the problem.  I also apologize for not responding to all of the wonderful reviews you’ve been writing.  Just know that I read them all, and I appreciate every one of them.  I also found a beta reader for this fic, but I sent the chapter out a week ago, and have received nothing back, so this chapter is un-beta’ed, and I’ll probably be asking one of the others who have offered to read for me to beta.  Well, enough of my babbling, on with the show! (Word Count: 4319)

-----~-----

Chapter 6: The First Chapter

Saturday, June 4th, 1988 9:47 AM

Harry had been staring at the first page of the book in his hands for almost a half-minute.  His finger traced along the signature in the book and whispered breathily, “My father wrote this!”

“He did?” asked Jaana as she looked over his shoulder at, what was to her, a blank page, “How do you know?”

“He signed it.  He must have had the same name as me because it says right here… ‘Written by Harry James Potter.’”

“Harry, your father’s name was James Michael Potter… surely you know that!”

Harry tore his gaze away from the book for the first time since it was handed to him.  He looked into Jaana’s eyes and hopefully asked, “What was my mother’s name?”

Jaana’s own eyes narrowed as she asked, “You’re serious, aren’t you?  You don’t know your own parents’ names?”

“My relatives never talked about them, and I’d get in trouble if I ever asked anything about them,” Harry hesitantly answered with downcast eyes, “All I know is that my father was an unemployed ‘lay-about,’ and my mother was… well… I’m not allowed to say that word.  They only referred to my parents as ‘Them…’ among other things… they never told me their names.”

“Well,” began Jaana with an aggravated edge to her voice, “Your mother’s name was Lily.  She worked for St. Mungo’s Hospital as a Potions researcher, and your father was certainly no bum!  He had inherited the Silver Arrow Broomstick Company and headed up the company straight out of Hogwarts… he was the one who developed the Glidestream pattern for the straws in every modern broomstick… the man was brilliant at transfigurations!”

“Hogwarts?” asked Harry, “and broomsticks?”

“That’s the school where witches and wizards go to learn about magic.  You’ll be going there after you turn eleven, and flying broomsticks are the main mode of transportation in the wizarding community.  My mum owns a Silver Arrow, in fact.  Too bad the company closed down after your father… uh… well…”

Harry just nodded as his eyes returned to the book.  He thought to himself that maybe it was his grandfather who had written the book as he flipped the page to begin reading the handwritten entries, but Jaana interrupted him before he even got started.

“Do you mind if I take a closer look at that book?” she asked as she drew her wand again.

Harry couldn’t help but to smile.  It was so rare that anyone was actually polite to him that he handed her the book without question.

Jaana took the book and began casting every revealing spell that she knew, but nothing she tried seemed to work.  The pages remained blank to her.  She could detect the unmistakable presence of very strong magic, but that was about it.

“Where exactly did you find this book?” Jaana asked absently as she studied it.

Figuring that he was already in trouble with his uncle, Harry related the story of the excursion from his cupboard to his cousin’s second bedroom.  During his story, Jaana interrupted him repeatedly to ask questions, and with each answer he gave she seemed to get more and more agitated.  By the time he got to the part where his uncle began swinging the cricket bat, Jaana was angrily pacing the floor beside his bed, intently tapping her wand against her palm.

“Wait a mo,” she said as she walked to a nearby dresser and pulled out a worn sweatshirt from a drawer.  Harry recognized the shirt as the one he was wearing the previous night.

“I cleaned the blood from it… I was going to throw it out, but I didn’t want to toss away everything you owned.  Now I know why I couldn’t find any of your stuff in that wretched house… I never thought to look in the storage cupboard!”

Jaana held the shirt up to Harry.  Burned into the front of the shirt was a circle with the same weird characters he saw glowing on the floor of his cousin’s room.  She turned the sweatshirt inside-out so that the runes wouldn’t appear reversed and asked “Did this happen when you laid down on the circle?”

Harry remembered the searing pain from the circle as he threw himself on top of it and instinctively felt his chest with his hand.  Only then did he realize that the bandages that were wrapped around his chest the day before were gone, along with the terrible pain of his cracked ribs.  As he gingerly pressed his fingers alongside his chest, he asked, “My chest doesn’t hurt anymore! How did I get better so quickly?  Did you use magic?”

Jaana sat back down on the bed next to Harry.  She laid her hand softly on the side of his head and said, “Your uncle hurt you very badly.  I won’t go into details, but if I hadn’t found you when I did, you would have died.  As soon as I found you, I messaged the healers at St. Mungo’s, and then did what I could to help you until they got there.  You were in a magically induced sleep for a few weeks while they were healing you, but when they ended the spell to keep you asleep, you didn’t wake up… until today.  Right now, its June 4^th… you’ve been asleep for over three months... they were afraid that you’d never wake up.”

Jaana didn’t mention to Harry how she had took him from the hospital when she heard that, by order of the Chief Warlock of the Wizengamot, he was going to be sent to a muggle hospital as soon as he was awake, and then back to his wretched relatives.  She tried to explain Harry’s situation to the Ministry officials that were sent to St. Mungo’s, and they seemed genuinely sympathetic with her, but they had orders directly from the Dumbledore himself that the boy be returned to his relatives, and the Supreme Mugwump gets what the Supreme Mugwump wants.

“Over my dead body…” Jaana muttered to herself as she remembered the conversation, not realizing that she said it out loud while she studied the runes burned into Harry’s shirt.

Harry raised his eyes from the book and asked, “What was that?”

“Oh, nothing… just looking at these runes… runes weren’t my best subject at Hogwarts,” Jaana said quickly, then changed the subject and asked him, “you must be hungry… Are you in the mood for anything special?”

This question seemed to catch Harry off guard, because he was just looking at Jaana with a stumped expression.  After a moment, he said, “I don’t want you to go through any trouble just for me… whatever you’re having, I suppose.”

“Come now, there must be something you fancy?”

Harry thought for a few moments, then opened his mouth to say something, then seemed to think better of it.  After about half a minute of indecisiveness, Jaana sighed and said, “Well, I guess you shouldn’t have anything too heavy, since you just woke up… how about grilled cheese sandwiches and some tomato soup?”

When Harry smiled and nodded, Jaana gave him a wink and said, “Fine, then…”  She turned her head and called out to the room, “Glyph?”

A few moments later, Harry was startled by a slight ‘pop’ that came from right beside the bed.  He quickly turned his head and found himself face to face with a small, strange creature with greenish-gray skin, long, thin ears, and a very bulbous, protuberant nose that hung over it’s wide and elongated mouth.  Harry started and instinctively drew away from the small being and pulled the sheets that were covering him up so that half his face was hidden, with just his wide eyes staring at the small being.

The creature stepped towards the bed, and while placing her long-fingered hands on top of the mattress, she leaned towards Harry and said in a slow, squeaky voice, “So the young master Potter is awake now…”  The creature then turned to Jaana and said, “What can Glyph be doing for the mistress?”

“What…  I mean, who is that?” said Harry from behind the sheet in a surprised, shaky voice.

“I keep forgetting how little you know about the magical world,” said Jaana apologetically, “This is Glyph, one of Healer Cooley’s house elves.”  Jaana turned to the elf and said, “Could you please get Harry here some grilled cheese sandwiches and a bowl of tomato soup?”

“It will only take Glyph a few minutes, Mistress,” said the elf as she gave a polite bow, and then vanished with another ‘pop.’

“House elves are servants to some of the well-to-do wizard families.  This house belonged to Ray’s grandparents, and they left it to him when they died about twenty years ago.  The elf just came with the house.  Ray has never lived here, though… he has a flat in London close to the hospital.  He’s letting us stay here for the time being, at least until you’re better and we can find a more secure place to keep you.”

“You’re hiding me from my relatives?” asked Harry worriedly, “I really won’t have to go back there?”

“Harry, your uncle nearly killed you.  There are some people who think that you need to live with those wretched people, but I can’t, in good conscience, allow that to happen, and Ray agrees with me, which is why we’re here now.  Nobody really knows about this place.  He’s taking a big risk sheltering us like this, so we’ll have to find another place when you’re better.”  Jaana then gave Harry a critical look and asked, “Unless you want to go back there… I won’t hold you against your will, of course… and I can’t guarantee that I’d leave you there without performing an ‘extreme attitude adjustment’ on that… that… uncle of yours.  I just want you to know that you can stay with me as long as you like.  I won’t force you…”

The only answer she got was the only answer she needed… the largest grin she had yet seen on the boy.  At that moment, Glyph popped back into the room carrying a large silver tray with a half dozen sandwiches piled on top of it, along with a very large bowl that looked as if it held a gallon of soup.  There was also a large silver goblet filled with some pale orange liquid that turned out to be sweetened pumpkin juice.  Glyph summoned a bed table and placed the tray above Harry’s lap before wordlessly popping away again.

“How does she do that?” asked Harry of the house elf’s appearance and disappearance.

As Harry ate, Jaana explained about Apparition, and after describing the feeling one gets while Apparating, Harry excitedly said that he felt that same sensation while in his cousin’s bedroom.

“That’s what’s known as ‘accidental’ magic,” explained Jaana, “It usually manifests in young magicals during times of unusual stress.  That explains how you got into the locked school that night.  Has any other odd things happened to you… things that nobody could explain?”

Harry went through a short list of the strange occurrences that seemed to happen when he was either scared or pressured.  He never mentioned the punishments that he always received for things he thought he hadn’t done at all.  Jaana nodded thoughtfully and explained that accidental magic is just an involuntary defense mechanism ingrained in all magical children and was usually nothing to worry about.

“I know you’ve been asleep for a long time, but you still need to rest… you can read all about yourself later,” said Jaana as she placed the book back onto the desk, “Once you’re finished eating, just call for Glyph to take the tray away and then try to get some sleep.  I’ll check on you in a few hours.”

Jaana walked to the door, only pausing a moment to look back fondly at the small, skinny boy happily munching away on half of a sandwich before closing the door.

“Glyph?”

With a slight ‘pop,’ the small elf appeared, “What can Glyph be doing for the mistress?”

Jaana withdrew her wand from her pocket while saying, “Please keep an eye on the boy while I’m out.  I’m going to see my aunt Arabella.  I have more than a few questions for her about what she knew of Harry’s situation, and then I’m going to pay a certain obese muggle a little visit.”

“Certainly, Mistress.”

Meanwhile in the room, Harry had already pushed the tray aside and was trying to stand up, but since he was lying there idle for so long, he was having a rather difficult time trying to get his legs to work.  He had almost fallen the moment his feet touched the floor because his concentration was fixed solely on the book lying upon the desk.  He just couldn’t wait to read what this previously unheard of world knew of him.

Harry slid down from the bed and started crawling across the floor towards the desk, but in his single-minded determination to get to the book, he failed to notice the appearance of Glyph as she came through the door.   He was halfway across the room when he let out a startled yelp as he rose from off of the floor and was flipped over while being floated back to the bed.

“Young master is being bad!” scolded Glyph as she guided him with an extended finger, “Young master is being sick and must stay in bed!”

“I just wanted my book,” complained Harry.

“Master is still not finished with his food.  When master is done with his food, Glyph will get the master’s book for him, but master must be staying in bed!”

Harry reluctantly moved the bed table back over his lap and picked up another sandwich.  He sighed in resignation as he took a bite, but noticed the little creature still there, standing by his bed as she silently watched him eating with her big, hazel-coloured eyes.

“Would you like one?” asked Harry, thinking that she was staring at him because she was hungry.

The elf seemed to gawk at him for a moment before shaking off the shock and replying, “Oh, no… Glyph will be eating later in Glyph’s cupboard after the young master is seen after.”

Harry looked sympathetically at the elf and offhandedly said, “Oh, so they make you sleep in a cupboard, too?  Is that where I’ll sleep when I’m better?”

Again, the elf stared dumbly at him for a few moments and Harry was beginning to think himself quite stupid.  Glyph spoke with what Harry guessed to be a confused expression, “Master, cupboards is for storing things and for house elves… the young master will be sleeping here for as long as master likes.”

Harry Nodded as he looked around the room once more… his room!  He took a few more bites of a sandwich, but was becoming slightly unnerved at the constant stare of the elf standing next to his bed.  After a while, Harry was feeling quite self-conscious.

“I don’t mean to be rude or anything, but why are you staring at me?  Am I doing something wrong?”

“Oh, no, young master!  The mistress asked Glyph to be watching the young master, so Glyph is watching the young master.”

“Oh,” replied Harry.  After a few more minutes of the elf’s intense, silent stare, Harry asked the elf, “So, what do you do here, besides making soup and sandwiches… which are delicious, by the way.”

The elf bared her sharp, pointy teeth in a smile, which momentarily alarmed Harry until she said in her squeaky voice while bouncing on the balls of her flat, elongated feet, “Glyph is pleased that the young master is enjoying Glyph’s cooking!  As to what Glyph does, Glyph does what every house elf does.”

“I’m sorry, but I’ve never seen a house elf before,” said Harry, “You’re the first one I’ve ever seen… or even heard of.”  He was about to ask if she was a pet of the owner, but decided that it would be terribly rude if she wasn’t a pet.

Glyph appeared to look shocked at Harry’s statement, but he wasn’t quite sure with being so unused to the elf’s expressions.

“Master is a wizard and has never heard of house elves?”

“I was raised by… um… muddles?” answered Harry, trying and failing to remember what Jaana had mentioned that non-magical people were called.

“Glyph has never seen a muggle,” the elf said, “but Glyph does not leave the house often, either.”

“You stay in here all the time?”

“Glyph does what a house elf is supposed to do,” replied the elf as she took the nearly empty tray from the bed table and popped away.

Harry had just started to swing his legs off the side of the bed when Glyph popped back into the room.  Harry was starting to become familiar with the elf’s expressions because the look she was giving him could not be mistaken for anything but exasperation.

“The young master must not leave the bed!” scolded Glyph as she physically pushed his legs back under the covers, “Glyph told the master that Glyph would get the book for master when the food was done!”

Glyph padded over to the desk and retrieved the book for Harry, then stood off to the side while he eagerly opened the book and began reading.

‘If my calculations are accurate and my memory serves me correctly, you should find this book when you went to place your father’s invisibility cloak in your ‘secret compartment’ under the loose floorboard beneath your bed.  I have sent this back through time using a spell that Hermione had invented, and it should have arrived sometime just before your return from Hogwarts after your godfather, Sirius was killed.  Yes, I know all about Sirius, and the loose floorboard… I know everything that you know.  As you could see on the previous page, I, or should I say you, Harry James Potter, wrote this book.’

Harry paused and read the last paragraph twice.  He knew nothing of invisibility cloaks, secret compartments, and he certainly didn’t know that he had a godfather, alive or not!  He anxiously continued reading.

‘I understand that you probably doubt that this book was truly written by you, so I devoted the entire first chapter to chronicling your life from my earliest memories… things that I am certain only you know.  Hopefully, this will convince you that this book is genuine, and what I will write of the world after this point will convince you to change things for the better, for your future, left unaltered and unmanaged, will certainly turn out to be a grim place indeed.’

Harry turned the page and began reading.  As each page turned, his jaw became looser and his eyes became wider.  The book mentioned the time that Dudley cracked a vase in the Dursley’s living room and blamed him, It told of his very first beating from Vernon and the reason for it… when he was three he had innocently taken one of the dozens of Dudley’s candy canes from the Christmas tree in the living room.  He remembered that instance vividly because at the time he really didn’t understand that he wasn’t supposed to have any.  The more he read, the more he was amazed by the accuracy of what was written… until…

‘Then, when I was seven, there was the time when I got violently ill from eating some discarded food from the rubbish bin at school.  I had barely made it through classes, but managed to make it through my last class.  I thought I could make it home, but right before I arrived at the house, I accidentally soiled myself.  When I walked into the house smelling like an unflushed loo, Vernon dragged me into the back garden and washed me down with a hosepipe.  When he was through, he threw me back into my cupboard still soaking wet.  As you must remember, it was the middle of winter and very cold outside, and being wet and cold when I was put away, I ended up with pneumonia and almost died because it took them a week to believe I was really ill before sending me to a doctor.’

“Wait a minute,” said Harry to himself, “That’s not what happened!  I never made it home… I got sick while I was still in school!  And he never mentioned the beating he got over the hidden toast!”

Harry read back over the previous pages.  Everything else was accurate down to the letter… his loathing of being left with that odd old Mrs. Figg and her cats, the horrendous visits from his aunt Marge, the torment and ridicule in school… everything!  While concerned over the slight discrepancy, he continued reading.  It was the future that intrigued him most.

The book told of his future life in the Dursley household, his continued loneliness and abuse, and his miserable school life.  It told of his first introduction to the wizarding world by a half-giant named Rubeus Hagrid and his first trip to Diagon Alley where he got his wand, his owl, and first learned of his vault full of gold at the wizarding bank, Gringotts.  The book went on to describe his adventurous early years at Hogwarts, concentrating mostly on his two best friends, Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger.

‘Hmmm…’ thought Harry, ‘She must be the Hermione that he… err, I mean I, said created the time travel spell.  It’s odd that I would have a friend that’s a girl…’

Harry made it to the point in the chapter where he was just starting his fourth year of Hogwarts when he read something that had surprised him.  His supposed ‘best friend’ accused him of somehow entering his own name into a tournament while leaving Ron out of the plan.  Why would his best friend, one of his two only friends, think that he would do something like that behind his back just to make himself more rich and famous?  The same sort of thing happened when they discovered that his pet rat, Scabbers, was really the man that betrayed his parents’ whereabouts in his animagus form.

That didn’t sound like a very good ‘best friend’ to Harry.  In fact, this ‘Ron’ sounded to be a bit on the thick-headed side.  He glanced back through the chapter and noticed other instances where his ‘best friend’ acted a bit like a prat.  When he read that his other friend, Hermione, had believed him about the tournament right from the start, he wondered why his older self considered Ron the closer of the two.

His older self called Hermione ‘Kind, pretty, and very, very intelligent,’ and led him to believe that her knowledge and insights were virtually indispensable to him. There were many times in his life where he wished he had a bright friend to help him with his schoolwork… anyone to talk to about anything, and this ‘Hermione’ seemed to be just the type of friend he so desperately needed.  He wanted to meet this ‘Hermione.’  Maybe they could become friends before this magic school even started!

‘Wow!  A real friend… and a pretty girl, no less…’ Harry thought to himself excitedly, ‘How great would that be?’

Harry was roused from his daydreaming from a stern but kind voice, “You’re still awake?”

Jaana was standing in the doorway with her hands on her hips, trying to give him a scolding look but was failing dismally.  She couldn’t help but to be happy that he was finally awake after all those months.  She drew her wand and magically lifted the book from his hands.

“Rest now, read later,” said Jaana as she placed the book back on the desk.  She walked to his bed and placed an open vial of sky blue liquid in his hand, “Drink this, it will help you to sleep.”

Harry dutifully gulped down the liquid and handed the empty vial back to Jaana while giving her an innocent smile.  He had every intention of waiting until she left the room so that he could retrieve the irresistibly interesting book, but before he knew it, his eyes had glazed over and his lids became so heavy that he couldn’t keep them from closing.  A startlingly short moment later, he was fast asleep.

Jaana smiled at the sleeping boy, but then her eyes drifted over to the strange book and the smile faded from her lips.  There was something about that book that worried her, but there were very few wizards that she could think of that could possibly break the privacy enchantment on it.  She knew that it was wrong to even think of bypassing a privacy charm that was probably put there for a good reason, but she was incredibly curious… and only nineteen… and being a teenager herself, she let her curiosity get the better of her and picked up the book.

The most obvious choice was the headmaster of Hogwarts, but with what she had recently learned of his involvement in placing the ‘Hero of the Wizarding World’ in that horribly abusive household, and the fact that most of the wizarding law enforcement was currently looking for the boy, gave her more than enough reason to find someone more discreet to look at the book.  After a few moments thought, her smile returned.  If anyone could determine the protections on the book, it would be her former Head of House, who incidentally owed her more than a few favors.  If she asked, she was sure he would keep the subject of their discussion quiet.  With a last look at Harry, she stepped from the room, closed the door, and disappeared from the house with a quiet crack.

7. The Impossible Friendship

Disclaimer: I hold no rights to anything of the ‘Harry Potter’ universe.  I make no money writing about it… I just enjoy playing with the characters.

A/N:  I’ve taken the advice of a wise reviewer and decided not to use a beta reader.  Obviously, there will be some errors as I write this, so I’m counting on all of you keen readers to keep me straight.  If you see that I messed up somewhere, drop me a review and point out how clueless I am about my own story and I’ll fix it post-haste.  I had some spare time this week, so I was able to get this update out quicker than I normally would have.  I planned on putting something in between Harry’s birthday and the meeting with our favorite muggleborn witch, but decided it would best be told after the initial meeting.  Don’t be angry with me about the meeting… things will change by the time they go to Hogwarts.  Sit back and enjoy the show! (Word Count: 4772)

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Chapter 7: The Impossible Friendship

Saturday, June 4th, 1988 5:20 PM

“This is fascinating!” said the diminutive professor, “In all my years, I’ve never come across a more complex and detailed charm!  I’m sure that the people in the Department of Mysteries would love to get their hands on this!”

Filius Flitwick was standing on a stack of books and looking down at the tome resting on the desk before him while his young former student stood patiently nearby.  He had been working for over two hours with very little progress made in revealing what was written in the strange book.

“See?  I’ve been able get to the point where the ink that was used is revealed…” said Flitwick as he drew his wand over a page in the book.  For a brief moment, words appeared on the leaf, but even in the short time they were visible, it was obvious that the letters were scrambled, making the text impossible to comprehend, “but that just triggered an ingrained Confundus hex to the page… at least it appears to be a Confundus hex, but the properties of the magic are slightly different.  It doesn’t affect the reader, but the page itself.  If it were a true Confundus, even the person who was intended to read it would see the jumbled words.  I also believe that it’s keyed to a particular magical signature… the person would have to be holding the book in order to read it.  In other words, he couldn’t set the book down and read it without touching it.”

“I was looking over his shoulder when he was reading, and the pages still looked blank to me.”

“That’s not surprising, considering the level of magic on this book.  The security, privacy, and secrecy enchantments aren’t just overlapping, but magically entwined together, interwoven in such a way so that they reinforce each other.  I’ve determined that the purpose of the enchantments is to prevent anyone from reading the book other than the person who wrote it himself.”

“Could someone other than the author have put those spells on the book?” asked Jaana.

“No, the person writing the book had to have been the one to create the enchantments, of that I’m positive.”

“Could it have been accidental?  I mean, the only one who can read this is quite young… could he have done it himself without realizing…”

“Impossible!” exclaimed Flitwick, “This was most certainly done intentionally.”

Jaana looked down at the book and asked, “Well, is there anything dangerous about this book?”

“The book itself?  I don’t believe so.  From what I can tell, the magic is purely passive, but we have no way of knowing whether the information contained within is dangerous or not.”  Flitwick cast a critical eye at Jaana and said, “It could possibly help if you were to tell me who this curious book belongs to.  The magic involved here is quite advanced, and I’d love to discuss…”

“I have to go,” interrupted Jaana quickly as she scooped the book up from the desk, “Thank you for your time, Professor, and I appreciate that you will keep this under your hat.”

“Pity… pity…” sighed Flitwick, “Well, it was good to see you again, Miss Figg.  Do stop by for another visit when you have the chance.”

Flitwick was still looking at the door long after Jaana had already left.  With a resigned sigh, he plucked a roll of parchment from the pile on his desk and returned to grading the Charms essays that he was working on before Jaana’s unexpected arrival.

The busy Charms professor failed to notice the figure of Phineas Nigellus resting beneath a tree in the background of a picturesque landscape portrait on the wall behind his desk.  Once the former student had left, the painted figure rose from the grass and brushed the loose blades from his trousers.  He then calmly strode across the painting with a sly smile on his face, being careful to stay within the shadows of the dense trees before he disappeared off the edge.

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Sunday, July 31^st, 1988 9:01 AM

Harry grumbled as he took his pillow from beneath his head and placed it firmly over his face, but it did very little to dull the scratching and tapping sounds that had just roused him from his sleep.  He wasn’t sure what the noise was or where it was coming from, but it was Sunday, dammit!  It was his only day to sleep in without having to deal with the daily lessons he was getting from Jaana.

‘Tap, tap… scratch… tap tap tap…’

“Arrgh!” exclaimed Harry as he removed the pillow from over his face and sat up straight in his bed.

Harry looked over towards where the noise was originating from and saw a fat gray owl rapping and clawing insistently at his bedroom window.  The owl had a large parchment envelope tied to its leg.  Harry glanced at the clock and saw that it was a bit past nine in the morning, roughly two hours later than his usual waking time on Sundays.  He briefly wondered why Glyph didn’t wake him for breakfast as he climbed out from under the covers and walked towards the window.

As soon as the window was opened, the impatient owl hopped inside and lifted its burdened leg towards Harry.  Just as he was untying the string to retrieve the letter, a second owl lit on the window sill and also stuck its leg out in Harry’s direction.

“Wait a moment, girl, I’ll get that one after I… huh?”

Harry suddenly noticed that there were about a hundred owls of various colours and breeds perched upon the numerous branches of the old Elm tree that sat in the yard just outside of his bedroom window.  As if on cue, the parliament of owls alit from the branches of the tree and began swarming in through the now open window.

Harry let out a surprised yelp and fell backwards away from the opening as the steady stream of owls came through the window, dropped whatever they were carrying and swooped back out.  Whatever owls had their burdens attached to their legs all found a place to land in his bedroom and waited for him with their legs held out for him.

Harry didn’t know whether to be frightened or delighted.  He knew of owl post, but before this day he had yet to receive anything from anyone using this particular delivery method.  He quickly shook off his shock and began moving from owl to owl, relieving each of their burdens in turn.  As soon as he untied an envelope from a particular bird, the owl would immediately take off and zoom out through the window.

An hour later, Harry was still untying the cords from owl’s legs and tossing whatever they were delivering into an ever growing pile upon his bed.  The stack of letters and packages was growing so large that some were sliding from the pile onto the floor, and still there were new owls arriving nearly as quickly as the older ones were being released.

“Well, someone’s starting their birthday off right!” came a cheerful voice from the doorway.  Harry quickly spun around, causing the owl who had landed on his shoulder to flap his wings agitatedly as he waited for Harry to relieve him of his letter.  Standing in the open doorway was Jaana, who had one hand placed cockily on her hip and her other arm resting upon the jamb.

“It’s… it’s my birthday?” asked Harry as he wiped the sweat from his brow, “How did you know?  I never told you… I never told anyone!”

“Oh, come on!” said Jaana with a smile, “Everyone knows your birthday!  Surely, you must be used to this by now,” she said as she waved her hand towards the ever-growing pile of letters, cards, and gifts on and around his bed.

Harry was still fumbling with a cord around an owl’s leg as he answered, “Well, no… I never got any birthday gifts before.”

Jaana sighed and said, “It’s, ‘I have never gotten any gifts… wait… you’ve never gotten any birthday presents before?  Ever?”

Harry shook his head and said, “No cards or letters, either.  My cousin always got loads on his birthday, but my relatives treated my birthday like any other day… and this is the first owl post I’ve ever received, too… it’s quite exciting, really and… and…”

Harry paused when he saw the shocked look on Jaana’s face.  For a moment, he thought he was in trouble when she quickly walked towards him with an odd, almost angry look on her face.  He stiffened as she wrapped her arms around him in what turned out to be a big hug.  He knew he wasn’t in trouble when he heard her let out a quiet sob as she tightly held him.

“It was never a big deal,” lied Harry, “I never really cared that I never got any birthday or Christmas presents.  For the longest time, I never even knew I was supposed to get any until I heard some kids talking about their presents at school.  I just thought the Dursleys were being nice to Dudley.”

Jaana instantly knew that Dumbledore had magically re-directed the boy’s owl post from his muggle household.  That could be the only explanation for him never getting any post at all throughout the years.  She pulled back and wiped her glistening eyes on her shirtsleeve and said, “Now I know why you never answered any of the letters I sent to you on your birthdays… well, you’re not with the Dursleys any more.  You’re with someone who cares about you, and you’re going to have the best birthday that anyone has ever had!”

Harry couldn’t stop the smile that broke out on his face, but it quickly disappeared as the owl on his shoulder impatiently nipped at his ear.

Jaana laughed and said, “It looks like we’ll be spending the rest of the morning sorting out all of this!”

At noontime Jaana had tried to talk Harry into leaving the pile of letters for a while to have lunch, but he was so engrossed with his first real taste of a truly happy birthday that she had to settle for Glyph bringing them a platter of sandwiches and pumpkin juice while they sorted through the correspondence.  Harry still couldn’t get over the fact that people he never even met were sending him cards and presents.

Even after the first onslaught of owls had been relieved of their deliveries, there was a steady trickle of new owls throughout the early afternoon as Harry and Jaana sorted out his mail.  It was a little after two in the afternoon when they had finally separated his post into three piles… cards from an adoring wizarding population wishing him a happy birthday, letters from an adoring wizarding population wishing him a happy birthday, and gifts from an adoring wizarding population wishing him a happy birthday.

“Here’s one from the gamekeeper at Hogwarts!” exclaimed Jaana as she handed a poorly handwritten card to Harry, “He’s a bit scary, but a really kind soul… and here’s one from…”

Harry took the card and saw the name on the card, ‘Rubeus Hagrid,’ but then noticed the change in Jaana’s expression and asked, “From…?”

Jaana briefly thought about hiding the letter away and destroying it later, but she knew that she couldn’t protect the boy from the harsh realities that came with being ‘Harry Potter.’  With an apologetic look on her face, she said, “Well… this is from Azkaban, the Wizarding prison.  It’s from the man who betrayed your pa…”

“Sirius!” exclaimed Harry as he quickly snatched the letter from Jaana’s hands.

“Harry, he’s…”

“Innocent!” exclaimed Harry, interrupting whatever Jaana was going to say about his godfather.

As Harry opened the letter, a wave of guilt overcame him.  If truth be told, he had forgotten all about the fact that he had a godfather who was wrongly imprisoned… it was only mentioned once in the beginning of the book he was studying, and there was so much more in the book that seemed more important.

“Harry, no matter what he says in that letter, you must remember that he was working for ‘He Who Must Not Be Named…’ He’s an evil man who…”

“NO!” exclaimed Harry vehemently, “He wasn’t the one who told the Dark Lord where I was, it was Peter Pettigrew!”

“Peter Pettigrew is dead, Harry,” said Jaana in a soft voice as she tried to calm Harry down, “Black was the one who killed him.”

“Okay,” said Harry calmly as he set Sirius’s letter aside and silently returned to the card from Hagrid.

Jaana studied Harry for a few moments, wondering what was going through his mind when he so abruptly dropped the subject, but he seemed to content with reading the other cards and letters that he had received from the other admirers… or he was simply ignoring her.  Jaana mentally shrugged it off and picked up another envelope and opened it for him.

“Ooh, this one is from a girl, and I think she really likes you…” giggled Jaana, “She says she already has the flowers picked out for your wedding!”

Harry’s eyes widened as he repeated, “Wedding?”

Jaana barely maintained her serious expression as she said, “Yes!  White carnations along with pink roses… Oh, and she already has the names of your children picked out!”

In a panic, Harry snatched the letter away from Jaana, but quickly found out that that what she was telling him was true… the girl sending the letter really had picked out the date for the wedding, the flowers, their children’s names, and even where they were going to live.  Harry scanned down to the bottom of the letter and read the girl’s name, ‘Ginerva Weasley.’  He instantly recognized the name of his supposed ‘future’ wife.

A cloud passed over Harry’s eyes as he read the name, which didn’t go unnoticed by Jaana.  The only thought that passed through Harry’s head as he read the name was how his older self was betrayed by that woman who supposedly loved him.

“What’s wrong?  Getting cold feet already?” asked Jaana with a slight laugh in her voice, although she was guessing that it was something else entirely that had the boy spooked.

“She’s six years old and has a wedding planned?  She sounds a bit of a nutter to me,” said Harry casually as he tossed the letter onto the rubbish pile.  He smiled as he considered that phrasing… the ‘trash’ pile… ‘how very fitting,’ he thought to himself.

It was nearly five o’clock when they finally managed to sort through the post from all of Harry’s well-wishers.  Harry couldn’t help but to think how jealous Dudley would be if he saw the huge pile of sweets and toys that Harry had received… probably more than all the toys Dudley had received in his entire life, and that was saying something.

“Your birthday isn’t over yet,” said Jaana with a smile as she waved her wand and drew a huge, colourfully wrapped package from thin air and hovered it in front of Harry, “There’s still one present for you to open.”

Without hesitating, Harry wrapped Jaana in a tight hug, almost causing her to drop the bulky package, “I knew you wouldn’t forget.”

“Wait until you open it,” whispered Jaana playfully.  She really, really didn’t want to give Harry this particular present, but with his daily pleading and her own conscience working against her common sense, she had finally given in.  It’s not as if breaking yet another wizarding law would get her into any more trouble than she was already in.  It wasn’t really ‘breaking’ the law, but bending it quite a bit.  She had made the decision a few weeks earlier, but figured that his birthday would be the best time to spring the surprise.

Harry finished tearing the wrapping paper from the large, deep box.  He quickly lifted the lid, looked inside, and yelled, “YES!”

Inside of the box was a premium number 2, cast iron cauldron, along with a wide variety of potions ingredients that easily surpassed the standard potions kit that the first-year Hogwarts students were required to obtain.

For the past month Harry had been begging Jaana to train him in magic, but with the constant monitoring of magical energy emissions performed by the Ministry since Harry’s disappearance, the performance of magic by underage wizards was much more readily detectable.  She couldn’t take the chance of getting him a wand, which was what he really wanted, so she did the next best thing.

Even in their ‘technically’ abandoned magical house, magical activity was being closely monitored, as it was in all registered magical houses.  This change in Ministry policy had caused an uproar in the pureblood magical community.  The original intent was to detect and recover Harry Potter.  The unintentional effect was much more widespread and catastrophic to the pureblooded magical community, due to the fact that underage magic was now meticulously monitored inside of pureblood homes as well as muggleborn households, compromising the inherent advantage the pureblood children had over their muggleborn counterparts when it came to familiarity with magic.

The pureblood parents could no longer covertly train their children to make it appear that they were more magically adept than the ‘inferior’ classes of magicals.  With the ingrained magical advantage removed, the new students entering Hogwarts would be on more of an equal footing as far as practical magical experience goes.  The purebloods still had the advantage of ‘knowing’ about magic, but the lack of practical experience would ultimately make a marked impact on the future of the wizarding world.

-----~-----

Monday, September 19th, 1988 12:27 PM

Harry watched nervously as he observed the trio of girls playing jump rope in the schoolyard.  He reached under his jacket for the seventeenth time to make sure that the package was still safely tucked beneath his clothing.  He knew he shouldn’t be anxious, but the thought of finally meeting the person that was going to be his best friend was sending his nerves into chaos.

He had been watching the other children since they were let out for lunch.  He narrowed his choices down to just a few girls who were playing in the schoolyard.  The book described Hermione as an attractive girl with thick, curly brown hair, bright, intense brown eyes, and a poised and sophisticated, yet elegant demeanor about her.

A short, blonde girl was swinging one end of the rope while a rather plump, auburn-haired girl twirled the other.  Jumping in the middle was a very attractive girl who fit his older self’s description perfectly.  She had long, flowing brown hair that bounced playfully with every jump, a long, narrow face with full red lips, gleaming brown eyes and an absolutely adorable button nose.  They were all wearing the standard uniform for that public school, a warm maroon jumper covering a plain white, button-down shirt along with the standard knee-length, plaid skirt, knee stockings and mary-janes.  He was sure that this pretty, brown-haired girl was the one destined to be his best friend.

He stood up from the wall he was leaning on and walked over to the playing girls in what he hoped was a ‘cool’ manner.  Harry waited a few moments until he caught the attention of the pretty, rope-skipping, brown-haired girl and confidently asked, “Hi, are you Hermione Granger?”

The reaction was immediate.

The short, thin blonde girl seemed to forget that she was holding the end of a jump rope as she placed both of her hands over her mouth in a futile attempt to stop the gasp that escaped her throat.  The plump, auburn-haired girl didn’t drop her end of the rope, but she did freeze in position, causing the other, newly-released, plastic-coated end of the jump rope to whip wildly upwards, catching the stunned brown-haired girl square in the mouth.  The girl didn’t seem to immediately notice the split lip she had just received, mainly because her ankles had become entangled in the slackened rope, which summarily caused her to fall forwards onto the pavement.  The pretty, brown-haired girl let out a scream of agony as both her knees became skinned and the palms of her hands became scraped from the contact with the hard pavement of the schoolyard.

The short blonde was the first to recover her senses as she removed a hand from over her mouth, pointed a threatening finger at Harry and said through her fingers, “How dare you!”

The chubby, auburn-haired girl was staring at Harry with an open-mouthed glare as the girl on the ground rolled over and placed her bleeding hands on her bleeding knees.  The brown haired girl said through gritted teeth, “I am certainly not that stuck-up harpy!  What on earth made you think that I was that socially retarded minger with delusions of adequacy? I’ve a right mind to kick you in the yarbles, you wanker!”

With that the two other girls helped the foul-mouthed, brown-haired girl up from the ground and began walking the heavily limping student towards the school.  The short blonde looked back at Harry and sent him a rude, two-fingered hand gesture before they disappeared into the doorway.

By that time a small crowd of curious spectators had accumulated around the commotion.  A younger boy who had heard the entire exchange walked up to Harry and said, “The girl you’re looking for is over there.”

The boy was pointing to the far corner of the schoolyard where a single student was sitting at a picnic table with her back turned towards the other playing students.  Now that he had noticed her, he could see that she did indeed have quite a lot of long, messy brown hair bunched around her shoulders, forced down around her collar by the short, black stocking cap she was wearing.  Harry politely thanked the boy and began walking towards the girl.

“You’re really going to talk to her, mate?” said the boy, not really as a question but as a slightly incredulous statement.

Harry paused, looked back and asked, “Why shouldn’t I?”

The boy shrugged and said, “Hey, it’s your funeral.”

As Harry neared the solitary figure, he saw that she wasn’t exactly what you’d call ‘thin.’  Her thickness certainly couldn’t be blamed on the oversized jumper she was wearing. He also noticed through the visible tangled mass of hair, a thin metal strap that was wrapped around the back of her head.

When he walked up to the girl, she apparently heard his approaching footsteps because he saw her shoulders tense up and her back stiffen rigidly.  Harry made to circle around the table, intending to sit on the opposite bench, when the girl growled out in a snide, derisive tone, “What do you want?”

Harry turned to face her.  He had been practicing what he was going to say to her for over a month, but when he looked at her face, every thought he had in his head seemed to leak out of his ears.

The first thing he noticed, and it was impossible to miss, was the purpose of the silvery band that was around the back of her wild, tangled hair.  It was a large metal retainer, wrapped tightly around her head and affixed firmly to her very buck teeth.  The complexion on her puffy pink cheeks seemed irritated and oily, and there were indentations along the sides of her face from where the retainer rubbed against her skin up until it disappeared under her cap.  She also had thick, unkempt eyebrows that almost joined above the bridge of her nose.  Harry would have never guessed that this was the ‘pretty’ best friend that his older self had referred to.

Her brown eyes were narrowed dangerously as she looked everywhere but at Harry.  Hesitantly, he spoke, “Hi, Hermione Granger?  I’m Harry Po…”

“What do they have planned thish time?” the girl interrupted rudely, slamming the opened book she was reading down on the table as she scanned the area.  It was apparent that the large, cumbersome retainer was making her slur her speech.  The metal and elastics that adorned her teeth seemed to draw his focus onto her mouth as she spoke, which seemed to annoy the girl even more.

“P-planned?” stammered Harry nervously, “Nothing, I suppose, I just wanted to…”

“I shaw you talking with Kate Shpooner and her two gormlessh, fluffed-up tartsh.  Did they run out of berksh in this shchool and had to shend out for shomeone new to torture me?”

“No one sent me over, I came because…”

“I know, I know… it’sh the shame thing every day.  Well, you can jusht shave it for shomeone elsh.  I’ve honeshtly had enough pranksh pulled on me to lasht a lifetime.  Jusht because I’m shmarter than the lot of you combined ish no reashon to harassh me on a daily bashish.”

The girl then looked directly at him for the first time and said, “Lisshen, I’d hate to have you kicked out of shchool on shuch a nish day.  You sheem like a nish enough bloke… jusht walk away and I won’t tell a teasher how you shtuck your hand up my shkirt and pulled down my knickersh.”

“Wait a minute, I didn’t…”

“And I’m not going to shtand up and give you the opportunity to do it!” she said in a dangerous hiss,  “That’sh been done too many timesh before, and I’m wishe to it all… sho jusht walk away…”

The girl hastily picked up her book and began to actively ignore the stunned boy.  Harry could see that she was keeping a suspicious eye on him as she pretended to read.  Harry stood there in shock for a few moments before he reached under his jumper and pulled out a plainly wrapped package and set it down on the table beside her.

“Happy birthday,” Harry simply said before he turned and morosely walked towards the gate that led from the schoolyard.

Hermione kept her eyes on the retreating back of the strange boy who she had just rudely sent away.  She was still looking at the gate long after the boy had disappeared beyond it.  She dropped her eyes to the package lying on the table beside her.  It was wrapped in plain brown paper and tied together with a string.  Tucked beneath the string was a yellowed parchment envelope with the words, ‘Happy Birthday, Hermione’ written on it in light blue ink.

Hermione’s brows knit together as she pondered the strange package.  It was roughly the size and shape of a rather large book.  Anyone that knew her would know that a book would be a simply irresistible temptation to her, but she has had way too many cruel tricks played upon her to seriously think that there was a simple book wrapped within the paper.  She gingerly poked at the package with a pencil, almost expecting it to explode or something.

Just as the pencil made contact with the package, the bell that was mounted on the wall just over her head rang, causing her to comically jump in alarm.  She heard a few laughs from behind her, telling her that some of the other students had been watching the exchange she had with the odd, skinny boy.

The bell, of course, was the first warning bell announcing the end of the lunch period.  Hermione waited until most of the other children in the schoolyard had entered the building before she tucked the book she was reading back into her book bag, stood up from the picnic table, and then picked up the package that the boy had left for her.

She walked to the entrance to the school.  Just beside the door was a rubbish bin.

‘I’m no fool!’ she thought to herself.

She held the curious package out over the bin, ready to drop it in, but she paused.

With a sigh, she placed the package in her bookbag and entered the school.

‘Yes, I am a fool when it comes to books.’

She would wait until she got home to have one of her parents open the package.  That way she’d have witnesses that would actually stick up for her if something happened.

Just before she closed the door, she glanced across the schoolyard and looked critically at the gate.

‘He said his name was Harry…’ she thought to herself as she let the door close and made her way to her first afternoon lesson.

-----~-----

8. A Lightening and a Darkening

Disclaimer: No, I do not own anything of the ‘Harry Potter’ universe, nor do I make any money from playing with the characters.

A/N: I have no idea how I found time to write this.  Large quantities of either alcohol or coffee… or both, given my hectic work/time-off schedule.  I’ll refrain from commenting on what this chapter implies… I’m sure many of you will see the foreshadowing of both Harry’s and Hermione’s forthcoming personality development.  Trust me when I say that some future event will give Harry a much-needed ‘wake-up call.’  You’ll see! (Word Count: 3799)

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Chapter 8: A Lightening and a Darkening

Saturday, October 1^st, 1988  6:03 PM

Hermione Granger wasn’t a vain person.  She seldom, if ever, cared what other people thought of her.  She was used to the pranks, the snide remarks, and the jealousy of her fellow classmates over the unerringly superior grades she always managed to achieve through her hard work and tenacity.

She had never thought about her ‘social standing’ amongst her peers at school.  All she had ever known was the omnipresent feeling that she was different than everyone around her… somewhat better than her peers, who seemed more concerned with ‘who likes who’ or ‘who has better stuff’ than what was truly important… namely, their studies.

Then that ‘boy’ appeared.

She had heard through the grapevine… albeit much later than all of the other students… well, she accidentally overheard the other girls talking about him while sitting in the girl’s loo at school… that the boy who had visited her on that day was some sort of ‘hottie…’ whatever that meant…

It was true that he had given her a birthday present… even though it was a weird fictional book about an old Scottish castle that was created for the sole purpose of being a school for magic.  It was true, the reading was interesting, insightful, and well presented, but it was still fantasy… but something about it… something about the whole circumstance… something…

“Mother?” called out Hermione as she approached the parlor where her parents usually resided after work.

“She’th in the thtudy upthtairth,” replied her father with a slight but noticeable lisp.  The man was sitting in the recliner before their recently purchased wide, projection-screen telly, watching his favorite re-run of ‘Monty Python’s Flying Circus.’

For the briefest instant, and for the first time that she could remember, Hermione distinctively noticed her father’s severe overbite and his lisping speech, and for the first time in her life, she internally cursed the genetic code that was passed to her from him that subjected her to the monstrosity that was her retainer.

At that moment, her mother appeared at the top of the stairs and said, “Hullo, Hunny-Bunny… what’s the Phrenetic Variable to a Quadratic Surd?”

“Twishe the shquare root of the originating Polythrentic Quentry,” replied Hermione in an exasperated huff, “Thish ish jusht what I mean!  Othersh shee me ash an animated adding machine!”

“Don’t be silly, Nilly…” retorted her mother playfully, “an adding machine couldn’t possibly differentiate between the phase differential within the Standard Deviation of the Non-Tequectonic and the Sub-transquential shift in…

“I want to loosh shome weight,” said Hermione determinably.

Her mother froze mid-step near the bottom of the stairs and her father tore his eyes away from the telly for the first time that morning.

“Why would you want thomething like that, pumpkin?” asked her father, “You aren’t fat, you’re jutht healthy…”

“Yesh, I am fat!” replied Hermione adamantly, “and thish retainer ish making me the laughing shtock of the whole shchool!”

Her parents shared a knowing look, then her mother smiled at her sympathetically and said, “Listen, it’s not how you look on the outside, but what kind of person you are on the inside… if you want to make true friends, you have to wait until someone gets to know you for you…

Hermione had the card that came along with the strange birthday present clutched within her hand as she stood defiantly before her parents, “It’sh very difficult to allow shomeone to get to know ‘the real me’ when they’re conshtantly pulling pranksh on me!  Nobody ish closhe to me becaushe nobody wantsh to get closhe to me!”

“Nobody, huh?” said her mother with a sly smile, “Well, there’s at least one who seems to like you… how many times have you read that Pigwarts book now?  It seems to me that was a nice, thoughtful gift for you.”

Hermione couldn’t tell, but both of her parents noticed the slight flush of pink that graced their daughter’s cheeks.

“That wash probably a mishtake,” said Hermione with a hint of sadness in her voice, “I don’t know who he ish, and I haven’t sheen him shince my birthday.”

Her mother grinned knowingly and said, “But you’re hoping to see him again, and that’s why you want to lose some weight and get rid of that retainer, am I right?”

Even Hermione could now tell that she was blushing.  She turned embarrassedly away and didn’t bother to answer the obvious question.

“Well, you’re supposed to wear the retainer for another year…”

Mrs. Granger couldn’t miss the despairing look that washed across her daughter’s face.  She impishly paused for a moment before continuing, “but I suppose we could fit you with simple braces… it will take a bit longer to correct your overbite, but at least it will be a bit less obvious.”

Hermione blinked a few times, hardly believing that her parents were actually willing to sacrifice what they took to be the fastest route to her dental health if favor of aesthetic appearances.  Her surprised look magnified as her mother added…

“And if you’re so adamant about shedding some of your baby fat, then starting tomorrow I’ll have a diet set up for all of us… Lord knows I could stand to lose an inch or two from my hips, and your father’s love handles could use a bit of skimming.”

Mr. Granger was about to voice some sort of complaint, but his mouth snapped shut at the warning glare his wife sent him.  The Granger matriarch was momentarily surprised by the sudden hug that was given by her excited daughter.  She watched the young girl bounce up the stairs towards her bedroom in a better mood than she had seen in a very long time.

As soon as they heard Hermione’s bedroom door click shut, Mr. Granger rather testily commented, “Ithn’t she a tad young to be worried about her appearanth?”

Mrs. Granger looked to her now grumpy husband and said, “She likes him.”

“She’th only nine yearth old…”

“and she’s much more mature than her years,” injected his wife.  Mrs Granger sighed and said, “You know how cruel children can be to people who appear or sound different, don’t you, dear?”

Mr. Granger’s normally passive expression suddenly contorted into a pained grimace as his own memories of the teasing he endured as a child came to his mind.  That was answer enough.

“Whoever that boy is, he has made a very devoted friend, whether he realized it or not,” commented Mrs. Granger, “I do hope she meets him again… if he can bring about this much of a change in Hermione from a single encounter, I’m sure he could be instrumental in finally bringing her out of her shell.”

Mr. Granger nodded as he said, “I’ll bring her into the thurgery tomorrow and get the proper measurementh to fit a thet of bratheth for her.  I’ll order up a thet of thothe new graphite-compothite fittingth.  Being white, they won’t be tho notitheable…” and with a return of his grimace, he added, “At leatht with thothe, they can’t teathe her with my old nickname, ‘tinthel-teeth.’”

Mrs. Granger smiled and nodded in approval as she headed towards the kitchen to prepare their dinner.  She knew the day would come where her daughter would begin to fret over her appearance… she just wished it wasn’t so soon… it made her feel older than her thirty-one years.

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Sunday, October 16th, 1988 11:53 AM

“I’m at my wit’s end!” said Jaana, almost in tears, “I just don’t know what to do about him!”

“You say that all of this started about a month ago?” asked Cooley in his thick Jamaican accent as he looked out through the window at the young boy meditating on the grass beneath the elm tree in the back yard.

“Since the day he took off to Merlin-knows-where for over three hours.  I was so angry with him for disappearing like that, but the look on his face when he returned… he looked so… so lost…  I have no idea where he went, and he refused to tell me.  I don’t know what happened to him, but it’s like he lost his pet or something… but…” Jaana let out a tired sigh and muttered, “…doesn’t have a pet, and he really doesn’t have any friends, besides Glyph and me.  You know he can’t be seen by anyone.”

“How was he acting before then?”

“He was happy enough, or so I thought.  All through August he was doing well with all the lessons I’ve been giving him.  Maybe I pushed him too hard… expected too much from him.”

“Nonsense,” said Cooley, “If you have been following the schedule in the books I gave you, he should be receiving the same level of education as any wizard his age.”

Jaana remained silent for a moment, looking guiltily away from her former healer trainer.

Cooley’s eyes narrowed and he leaned towards her, “What have you been up to, Jaana?”

“Well… I might have added a few things to what the books suggested.”

“Such as…?”

“Um… some basic spell theory, incantation pronunciation, some rudimentary training in runes… a bit of wand manipulation… and…”

“Good heavens, woman!” barked Cooley in astonishment, “You haven’t given the child a wand, have you?”

“Of course not!” snapped Jaana, “He practices with a stick.”

“I see… and what else?”

Jaana mumbled something as she looked at her shoes.  She glanced up at his piercing hazel eyes and then sighed, “Potions… I’ve been training him in potions, too.”

“You do mean that you’ve been training him in recognizing the quality of ingredients, reagent properties, methods of stirring, cauldron materials… Potions Theory, right?”

“Well… um… Yes, well… since before his birthday… then I bought him a potions kit for a gift, and began…”

“Are you daft, woman?” whispered Cooley intensely, although he was sure nobody was around to hear them, “You have the child brewing already?”

“He wanted me to teach him actual magic!” defended Jaana, “He’s been begging me for a wand since I took him in… I had to do something!  I know I can’t teach him practical spells… but I do remember what it was like when I was his age.  I knew I was responsible enough to learn magic discreetly, but mum and dad never let me.  You know potion brewing can’t be tracked or detected, and he seems more than mature enough to handle the responsibility… and he’s Harry Potter!  You know that they’re going to expect ‘The Boy Who Lived’ to be some sort of prodigy.  If he shows up at Hogwarts no better than a muggle, he’s going to be mocked and ridiculed by the other students… and one certain Potions Professor… I just thought…”

Ray Cooley sighed as he said, “You Ravenclaws… always assuming that others can keep up with the workload you place upon yourselves.  No wonder the child is stressed.”

“But that’s just it!  He’s not stressed!  He’s been picking up what I’ve been showing him with no trouble at all.  Just last week, I explained a complex theory on the multiple attraction charm to him, and the next morning I saw him practicing the incantation with his stick… using the correct manipulations!”

“So the boy is a quick study?” asked Cooley with a knowing nod.

“But I hadn’t taught the wand movements to him yet!  It’s as if he just knew how to do it!”

Cooley paused in thought and his eyes returned to the boy sitting in the back yard.  It took him a moment to realize that Harry was no longer sitting in the fallen leaves under the elm tree, but was sitting in the middle of the fenced-in flower bed several meters to the right.  He mentally shrugged and he was about to turn back to Jaana to say something when he saw Harry vanish.

“What the…” exclaimed Cooley as his eyes scanned the expansive back yard.  It took him a few seconds to find the boy who was now in the same meditative sitting position, but was now on top of the gardening shed on the far side of the fenced in garden.

“What?  What is it?” Jaana asked quickly as she heard the curious exclamation.

“Look at this, Jaana!” said Cooley in an accusing tone, “Have you been teaching him this, too?”

Jaana stepped to the window and followed Cooley’s stare to where Harry was sitting on the shed’s roof.

“How did he get up… oh my!”

Once again, Harry had disappeared.  Jaana’s eyes frantically scanned the area as she practically screamed in panic, “He’s gone!  He’s been taken!  I’ve got to…”

“There,” said Cooley calmly as he pointed towards the grove of apple trees a few hundred meters away.

Jaana had to squint to see Harry’s tiny form sitting motionlessly under one of the bare apple trees in the distance.  An instant later, Harry disappeared again and silently reappeared just outside of the window, back under the elm tree where he had started.

“He’s… he’s Apparating!” yelled Jaana angrily as she fumbled with the window lock.  In her panic, she totally forgot that she was a witch, “He’s going to be the death of me yet!  He’s going to splinch himself and get us all caught!”

Cooley just smiled and drew his wand, unlocking and opening the window with a twist, swish, and flick.

“Harry!” yelled Jaana through the now opened window, “Don’t you dare move, young man!”

Harry’s eyes focused and he looked up to the open window.  About ten seconds later, the back door flew open and a very upset Jaana stormed through the doorway.

As Jaana neared him, Harry instinctively cowered back and covered his head protectively with his arms.  Jaana stopped short, the anger falling from her face and being replaced with a look of distress.

“Oh, no… no, Harry… I’m not going to hit you!”

Jaana walked the last few steps, knelt down beside him and wrapped Harry in a hug.  Her breath caught as she felt the boy flinch as she touched him.

Jaana felt the wetness building under her eyelids as she felt his body trembling in her arms.  In a calm voice, she whispered to him, “Harry, no matter what you do or how angry I may seem, I’d never, ever hit you!”

“W-what did I do wrong?” asked Harry haltingly.

“You were just Apparating around the yard!” said Jaana concernedly, “I don’t know how you learned to Apparate, but it’s very, very dangerous!  If you splinch yourself, the Ministry will know right away and send a reversal squad out to find you… and you know what will happen if the Ministry finds out where you are…”

“But… I… I wasn’t Apparating…” defended Harry.

Jaana pulled back a little to look at Harry’s face and patiently said, “We were watching you through the window.  We saw you Apparating… I saw you move from the roof of the shed over to the orchard, and then to under this tree.”

“I wasn’t Apparating…” repeated Harry, sounding a little more relaxed as he explained matter-of-factly, “I was Shifting.  There is a difference, you know.”

“And what difference would that be?” asked Cooley, who had just emerged from the doorway and overheard the last bit of the conversation.

Harry paused, seemingly thinking about the answer, and then said, “Well, I don’t know much about Apparating… I’ve only done it twice, and both times accidentally…  When you Apparate, you force yourself into another location.  When you Shift, you just let yourself be where you want to go… it’s hard to explain…”

“And where did you hear about this ‘Shifting?’” asked Cooley.

“In my book!” stated Harry proudly, “It’s got loads of information on magic… even more than the books that…”  Harry suddenly went silent as he realized what he had just said.

A look of realization appeared on Jaana’s face as she glanced at Cooley.  Harry had told her earlier that he was reading his life’s story in the book and never bothered to question him again about the book’s content.  She had assumed, given the apparent size of the book, that it only contained information about his life.  Now she knew how he was getting the gist of what she had been teaching him so quickly, and seemed to know how to do some things even before she began teaching him about them.  The book must contain some knowledge of advanced magic… maybe even Dark magic.  She had never heard of ‘Shifting,’ and it was apparent that Cooley had no knowledge of it, either.

Jaana instantly became worried, and by the concerned look she saw on Cooley’s face, it was clear that he was just as much so.

“Tell me, little man…” said Cooley to Harry in a placating tone, “what has this book of yours been teaching you other than this ‘Shifting?’

Harry was young, but he wasn’t stupid.  He knew what he had let slip, and he certainly noticed the odd glances the adults were sending each other.  He was afraid that they would take the book from him if he told them something they didn’t want to hear… and that was something that he surely didn’t want to happen.  In the few short months that he had been in possession of the book, he had learned what the future held for him… as well as the entire world.  His young mind didn’t quite grasp the importance, the responsibility, or the danger involved in everything that should be done to avoid the path that the book had revealed… he just knew that his older self had tasked him to change the future, and had sent the tools he needed to do it.  He couldn’t allow those tools to be taken from him.  He needed to learn all he could from the book.  He needed a convincing lie, and pondered that thought for the briefest moment before realizing that lying was something he just couldn’t do to Jaana.

Without hesitation, Harry silently vanished.

Both Jaana and Cooley jumped in surprise at Harry’s sudden disappearance.  The most surprising thing about it was that it was completely silent, almost as if he went invisible instead of Apparating.  An instant later, Harry reappeared, sitting complacently in the exact same spot where he was before.  He saw Jaana’s eyes narrow.

“What did you just do?” asked Jaana suspiciously, even though she knew exactly what the sneaky young wizard had done.

“I’m sorry,” said Harry solemnly, “I kinda know what you want to do, so I hid it where you’ll never find it.”

A cocky smile appeared on Jaana’s face as she said in a nonchalant tone, “Oh, you put it in the secret compartment of the toy box in your room… You do realize that I’m the one who bought it for you, don’t you?

Harry paled and his eyes widened.  Before he could even think, Jaana vanished with a resounding snap, reappearing a moment later with Harry’s book in her hands.

Harry reached out for the book in her arms, but she just shook her head and said, “I’m not trying to punish you… I just want to make sure that the information in this book won’t get us caught.  I’ve explained to you before that if our location is discovered, you’ll be sent back to your uncle… is that something you really want?”

That thought made Harry visibly pause, something which Jaana could readily see in the boy’s expression.

“If so, I’ll bring you there right now and leave you on his doorstep,” continued Jaana with a knowing look.  She knew that she was manipulating the boy, and was feeling every bit as though she were Harry’s older sister.

When Harry dropped his arms submissively, Jaana’s voice softened as she said, “Look, I really do respect your privacy, but I also have to make sure you’re kept safe.  I don’t know what happened to you last month when you went off on your little adventure, but you haven’t been the same since you returned.  Maybe if you told me where you went… what happened or who you saw… maybe I could help…  I’m really not a wicked witch, you know, and you know that I’m on your side, no matter what… and I’m not all that old…  I do understand a lot of what you’re going through.”

Harry remained silent, taking on the brooding manner he had adopted over the past month.  Jaana’s worried expression returned as she glanced inquisitively at the older healer.

Cooley looked between the two and thought for a moment before he whispered something into Jaana’s ear.

Jaana sighed, and after a moment in her own thoughts, she said to Harry, “Listen, I don’t really want to keep this book from you… I only worry that it might contain some dangerous information.  I’ll make a deal with you…”

Harry looked up with a depressed frown marring his youthful features to indicate he was listening.

“I’ll hang onto the book for you, and whenever you want to read it, I’ll bring it out for you, but you have to read it aloud to me.  This way, you can still read all about yourself, and I can use it as a tool to help your vocabulary and reading skills… is that alright with you?”

Harry didn’t like that ‘deal’ at all, but he couldn’t immediately think of a way around it.  He reluctantly nodded.

“Good,” said Jaana in a relieved breath, “and another thing… no more ‘Shifting’ until I can determine if it’s safe… and that the Ministry can’t detect it.  It would be a disaster if they found either of us.”

Harry nodded once again and said, “I’m tired.  I’d like to take a nap.”

“But lunch is almost …”

The words hadn’t even left Jaana’s mouth as Harry silently vanished from the yard.  An angry flush instantly appeared on Jaana’s face, but then a small, apologetic voice came from the opened bedroom window on the second floor, “Sorry… I forgot… ‘No Shifting.’”

A smile appeared on Cooley’s face as he softly said to Jaana in a sigh, “Boys will be boys…”

“Well, that boy’s going to be the death of me yet…” lamented Jaana tiredly, “I think I’m getting gray hairs!”

Cooley let out a deep laugh as he guided the harried young with back into the house, saying mirthfully, “I think a cuppa Irish is just what you need.”

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9. Uncovering the Past’s Future

Disclaimer: I do not own, nor do I make any claim to, the ‘Harry Potter’ universe.  I claim the plot and whatever original characters I choose to create.

A/N:  Here’s another installment for you.  Once again, I’d like to thank all of the people who have been faithfully reviewing this story.  My biggest regret is not having the time to respond to them all, but you should know that I read and appreciate every one of them.  It seems that with every chapter I write, there are more and more of you who are questioning Jaana’s ability to be a good guardian… well, this chapter will add more fuel to that particular fire! ^_^;  I try to look at it from her side…  she’s now the guardian of one of the most important people in the wizarding world, she gave up her job and her private life to help Harry, and she has the constant threat of being discovered hanging over her head… of course she’s going to be a bit overprotective at times… wouldn’t you be?  ^_^  (Word Count: 3951)

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Chapter 9: Uncovering the Past’s Future

Wednesday, November 30th, 1988 8:03 PM

When Harry first began reading the book to her, he had started at the place that he had already made it to.  Upon hearing just a few pages of magical techniques and theories… most of which Jaana barely understood herself… she had Harry start again at the beginning.  Harry didn’t deem to mind reading about his earlier years again, although he did have to pause from time to time when he made it to the more distressing parts that he remembered.

Harry was sitting on the floor before the fireplace with the book he was reading from in his lap.  Jaana was sitting in the overstuffed chair watching over the young boy and raptly listening to every word.  Over the previous months, Jaana quickly learned that the book, which initially appeared to only have a few hundred hand-written pages, actually contained thousands upon thousands of pages which were magically compressed into the binding.

Jaana also learned that the book was not just a biography of ‘The Boy Who Lived,’ but a complete chronicle of the future of the wizarding world that was sent back through time by Harry Potter, to Harry Potter.  This had caused her more than a few nights of sleeplessness and tears.

There were many parts of the ongoing story where Jaana internally questioned what was actually happening.  Harry’s early years seemed to be documented accurately… according to Harry himself… except for a few instances.  The first major sticking point was Harry’s visit to the London Zoo and the encounter where he unintentionally freed the boa constrictor.  It certainly gave his cousin a fright, but it supposedly occurred when Harry was ten years old and not six.  Virtually everything else was accurate until the day that she met ‘The Boy Who Lived.’  It took a few weeks of reading, but Jaana eventually heard all about Harry’s years at Hogwarts and the misadventures that he and his friends experienced there.

The book had mentioned nothing at all of Jaana so far.  She knew enough about Time Magic to realize that the coming events in Harry’s life had already been altered… how much so was still to be seen.  Given this little fact, she had been warring with herself whether or not to start training Harry in magic… real magic, and not just theory.  She knew her best subject during her years at Hogwarts was Charms and not Defense, but that didn’t mean she was a slouch, either.  She wasn’t a Ravenclaw for nothing.

Jaana sat silently, just nursing a glass of Elfin Sugarbrandy while Harry continued to read from the book.

“After Voldemort’s second return, we began naming the wars that resulted from his endeavors.  What was known as ‘The First War’ came to be called ‘The Rise’ instead.  Of course, that war had ended the moment I got my scar.  With his first return at the end of my forth year at Hogwarts, the battle was called ‘The Purity War.’  Muggleborns and Half-bloods were persecuted horribly, and the lucky ones were simply treated like slaves or forcibly ejected from the wizarding world… the unlucky ones were killed outright, although the public was never really made aware of that fact during the war.  Only afterwards was the public made truly aware of the atrocities that occurred.  It was during the Purity War that Voldemort discovered that his horcruxes were being destroyed.  Just before the final battle, he created a seventh horcrux and hid it with much more care than his first six.  We had all thought that he was finally gone for good…  We were wrong.”

“It took sixteen years for Voldemort to return to a body with the help of Draco Malfoy.  The resulting war was dubbed ‘The Purge.’  The war started with the destruction of the Hogwarts Express as it was en route to the school, killing all of the children on board, including what I thought were my own children.  No one had noticed that there were very few pureblood children on board the train, and those that were on board were considered to be ‘blood traitors.’  The war escalated with the widespread elimination of muggleborn children who were registered with the ministry and Hogwarts.  The magical community didn’t seem very concerned until the children of mixed-blood parents started turning up dead.  When the Minister for Magic’s daughter, who had married into a half-blood family, was found murdered, the wizarding government finally decided to take action… but by then, it was much too late.”

“It took seven years for me to track down Voldemort and eliminate him, but by then, the magical society was seriously depleted and people were beginning to panic.  The old traditions of forced betrothment and arranged marriages were becoming more commonplace as the months and years passed.  Laws were hastily enacted, forcing witches of childbearing years to produce as many offspring as they physically could to make up for the dwindling number of magicals.  Inbreeding was soon rampant within the older pureblood families, causing a startling number of birth defects, still-born deliveries, and a staggeringly high number of squib infants.”

This caused a black market to develop, dealing in kidnapped magical babies that were procured for the British purebloods who could afford them, and also young witches that had been siezed from foreign countries and sold into sex slavery to the older pureblood families.  The person who profited most from the black market commerce was none other than Draco Malfoy.  He was the one who controlled the trade while hidden behind the scenes, as it was his family’s money that created and fueled this horrendous new facet of the wizarding economy… and virtually all of the profit was going into magical research to find a way to return Voldemort’s wandering soul to a body.”

“The degrading lives that witches were forced to live ultimately led to a serious divide between witches and wizards… that divide was capitalized upon with Voldemort’s next return.  Again, Draco Malfoy was instrumental in bringing the Dark Lord back to the world… this time in a woman’s body.”

“The female Voldemort stirred up the already boiling pot, setting witches against wizards and starting the ‘War of the Sexes.’  The witches initially had the advantage, as the wizards were reluctant to attack the ones who would bear their heirs.  The witches, led by the Dark Lady, had no such moral reservations.  The War of the Sexes was the shortest war, lasting only a year, but during that time the magical population was nearly destroyed.  By the time the Dark Lady was defeated, the British magical population numbered in the low thousands.  It was also near the end of this war where the muggles became fully aware of the existence of the wizarding world with the murder of the Prime Minister and the Royal Family by a rogue group of witches.”

The tensions between magicals and the muggles rapidly deteriorated into open hostility when Voldemort returned next.  ‘The Muggle War’ had begun almost as soon as the ‘War of the Sexes’ had ended.  This would become the longest war of them all, lasting almost fifty years.  The wars quickly spread to nearly every country in the world as the muggles became increasingly distrustful of the magicals.  Voldemort thought to use the muggles against themselves, creating discord between the European muggle governments.  Intermittent wars flared between muggle Britain and the rest of Europe. Literally millions of lives were lost on all sides, not to mention the complete destruction of many historical sites throughout the world.”

“The war finally ended when Voldemort’s stronghold on the island of Skara Brae was attacked by the desperate muggles.  They used a small device called a Californium Tactical Phase Bomb delivered by a satellite launched by the North American Consolidated City-States.  Voldemort, along with the entire island and a large hunk of the mainland, was summarily vaporized.  This was the only time that I hadn’t personally put an end to the reborn Dark Lord’s life.”

“Over thirty years of peace ensued, with the muggles believing that all of the magicals were dead, and the relatively few magicals that remained in the world weren’t too keen on taking on the muggles again, especially when they found out what kind of weaponry the muggles would use if they were pressed hard enough.  The peace was shattered when Voldemort managed to return again, this time remaining hidden and secretly infiltrating the African Union’s Space Operations Center.  The satellite-borne assault lasted less than two hours, but the destruction caused by the space-based mass-driver weaponry left much of the world covered in glassy, smoking craters.  The satellites were eventually destroyed by the Koreans when they dispatched one of their Corvette-class space interceptors from their space station to destroy the weapons, but the damage was already done.”

With the complete destruction of the world’s Ministries and the muggle government centers, it was a simple task for Voldemort to recruit an army out of the remaining magicals.  This war was simply known as ‘The Winter,’ as the climate changes caused by the massive amounts of dust in the atmosphere…”

“That’s enough for tonight, Harry,” said Jaana as she rubbed her temples, “It’s getting late, and I still have to set your lessons up for tomorrow.”

Harry nodded, carefully closed the book, and stood up from the floor, saying tiredly, “Good night.”

Harry gave Jaana a hug and she kissed him lightly on the cheek.  As Harry walked to the door he glanced back at Jaana, who simply nodded and gave him a rather unsure smile.  He closed the door to the den and stood outside for a few moments, thinking about what he had just read.  He was about to turn around and re-enter the den to ask Jaana a question when he heard a muffled sob through the closed door.

She was crying again.

Harry silently cracked the door open just in time to see Jaana standing at the wet bar.  He could see the tears rolling down her face as her shaking hands tried to refill her glass of sugarbrandy.  By the time she had managed to fill the glass, there was nearly as much brandy on the bar as there was in the glass.  Jaana held up the nearly empty bottle up to the light, shrugged her shoulders, and then raised the trembling bottle to her lips where she proceeded to drain the last dregs from it.

Harry sighed and quietly closed the door again.  He hung his head and stepped towards the stairs that led to the second floor of the manor and his bed that was awaiting him there.  He’d just have to wait until morning to ask her what ‘forced betrothals’ and ‘arranged marriages’ were about.

-----~-----

Saturday, December 24th, 1988 10:33 PM

A brisk wind swept along the street and caused the figure walking along the dark sidewalk to bundle his heavy coat more tightly around him.  When the figure stepped into the halo of a streetlamp, the small, brightly coloured package he was carrying could easily be seen tucked under his arm.  The young boy would glance at the numbers on the gates of each of the large houses that he passed.  All of the houses along the street were widely spaced, and each had nearly identical, tall wrought-iron fences surrounding their spacious yards.

The boy suddenly stopped in front of a set of massive gates.  From within his pocket, he pulled a page torn from a Maidstone telephone directory.  He glanced at the page, then up to the number on the front pillar.  The boy nodded to himself as he shoved the paper back into his pocket.  He carefully looked up and down the deserted street as he ducked into the shadows away from the lamp posts lining the street.  All of the windows in the house at 1173 Arcacia Road were dark, except for one window that seemed to shimmer in red, green, and gold from the Christmas tree that could just barely be seen through the white lace curtains.

He let out a nervous sigh as he sat down on the frosty sidewalk.  A look of peace washed over his face for a few moments before he silently winked out of sight, reappearing a moment later sitting in the shadowed bushes that were located just before the window where the twinkling lights were.  He remained still for a few moments, straining his ears to detect any sounds from within the house.  When he was reasonably sure that everyone in the house was asleep, he cautiously stood up and peeked into the window.

He found himself smiling as he looked into the comfortable parlor that was cheerily decorated for the Christmas season.  Holly boughs were strung along the walls surrounding the mantle of a large fireplace, tied in place by festive red ribbons.  In the far corner of the room, just beyond the large, brown leather couch that was positioned in front of the fireplace, stood a tall Christmas tree, adorned with shimmering garland, tiny silver bells and glass bulbs, and a vast array of twinkling, multi-coloured lights that stretched from it’s base all the way up to the lighted silver star at the very top.

He could just see the vast assortment of gaily wrapped packages that were nestled beneath the tree.  The boy couldn’t help but to think how jealous his cousin would be if he saw that the child of this particular house had nearly twice as many presents as he usually received for Christmas.  Of course, he couldn’t help feeling his own slight pang of jealousy… in all of his past Christmases with the Dursleys, he had never once received any presents at all.

He quickly shook off those thoughts and concentrated on the task at hand.  He had his own presents this year… and wanted to make sure he got those presents by being back in his bed before he was discovered.

He relaxed himself again as he focused on an open area of the floor beside the tree.  An instant later, he was standing inside of the warm room right next to the sofa.  He took the package from under his arm and looked at the tag that was affixed to the ribbon, ‘Happy Christmas, Hermione – From Harry.’

He carefully laid the fragile gift amongst the other presents under the tree.

“Happy Christmas,” he softly said with a smile, but the smile instantly dropped from his face when he heard a sleepy voice from behind him say, “What?  Huh?”

Harry spun around in a panic.  There on the sofa, wrapped in a thick down comforter, was a young girl, her wide, terrified brown eyes staring into his.  For the briefest instant, he wondered who this cute girl was, and it took a heartbeat for him to realize it, but the girl laying there had to be Hermione… without the monstrosity that was her retainer.  The difference in her appearance was astounding.  He opened his mouth to speak, but he heard her draw in a quick, deep breath.  He knew what was coming next.

Sure enough, a loud, piercing scream echoed throughout the room, which was immediately followed by a vociferous cry of, “Burglar!  Burglar in the house!”

Harry heard the sound of feet hitting the floor in the rooms above.

“No, no, no… you don’t understand!” he tried to explain frantically, but was cut off by another shrill scream from the terrified girl.

Panic gripped Harry’s chest.  He had to get out of there quickly, but when he tried to Shift himself, he found that he was much too scared to even hope to do it properly.  There was only one thing to do… try to purposefully Apparate… something he had never successfully done before.

‘Destination… determination… deliberation…’ he chanted to himself while picturing his bedroom in his mind.  The first attempt was a total failure, only making him seem to be trying to dance as he spun awkwardly on the spot.  He heard a set of heavy footsteps bounding down some nearby stairs, greatly adding to the panic he was already feeling.  He could feel the wetness building under his eyelids as he closed them tightly and concentrated.

‘Destination… determination… deliberation…’

Harry didn’t get to see the sudden look of recognition that washed across the girl’s face.

-----~-----

An earsplitting crack resounded throughout the room, sounding like a gunshot to the young girl on the sofa, causing her to jump and fall from the couch in alarm.  She desperately untangled herself from the large comforter just as her father entered the room carrying a golf club.

“Where ith the blighter!” said Mr. Granger angrily as his eyes searched the room.  Seeing no one other than his daughter, he rushed over to her, picked her up from the floor and hugged her tightly.  He was about to ask again when he noticed the strange look on his daughter’s face.  She didn’t appear scared… she seemed… happy?

“He was here…” said Hermione breathlessly as her eyes scanned the room, “that boy, Harry… I think he left something under the tree…”

“Where ith he?  How did he get in here?”

“I… I don’t know… I just woke up and saw him next to the tree… then I fell off the couch… and then he was just… gone… and that noise…”

Hermione walked to the tree and looked amongst the packages there.  It was easy to spot the new addition… she had been anxiously studying the packages for days.  She carefully lifted the present and read the card.

“It was him, see?  It says, ‘From Harry.’”

Hermione looked the package over carefully while her father was checking the windows for any signs of forced entry.

Mrs. Granger appeared in the doorway saying, “The police are on their way… What happened?  I thought I heard a gunshot!”

“I don’t know what the noise was, but it wasn’t a gun,” replied Hermione, “It was that boy, Harry.  He was here, and he left this for me.”

“I don’t know how he got in… or how he got by me to get out… I’m going to check the retht of the houthe…” said Mr. Granger as he glanced out the window at the flashing red lights in front of the gate to the property, “and talk to the polithe… it’th good to know that they can get here tho quickly.”

As her father left the room, Hermione held the package out towards her mother and nervously asked, “Can you… can you open this for me?”

Mrs. Granger sat heavily on the sofa, trying to get her heart-rate under control.  She looked to her daughter and said, “There was nothing wrong with his last present to you… why don’t you open this one yourself?”

Hermione gave the gift an unsure glance before she closed her eyes and nodded resolutely.  She cautiously untied the bright ribbon and meticulously unfolded each seam of the wrapping paper, being careful not to tear it.  Beneath the paper was a plain, white cardboard box.

Inside was a delicate cherry wood box with a lid that had a wide crystal pane set into it, appearing to be a very expensive looking jewelry box.  There were small, elegant symbols etched along the edges of the glass and inlaid with a very fine golden thread, creating a graceful border where it was set into the wooden lid.  She could see through the rose-tinted glass that the interior of the box appeared to glow with a soft, pink light, but she couldn’t tell exactly where the illumination was coming from.

When she lifted the lid, she couldn’t stop the gasp of surprise that escaped her as a light, tinkling melody began playing, and within the glass of the lid, a small, translucent figure that looked something like a tiny winged fairy began flitting and dancing around in time with the music.  It was almost like watching a small television screen, but neither she nor her mother could figure out how the image was displayed within the crystal portion of the lid.  Upon closer inspection of the box, they couldn’t even find where the batteries were stored, and there didn’t seem to be any instructions either.

Before she knew it, Hermione found that she was replaying some of her happiest memories in her mind as she listened to the haunting, melodic tune that the box was playing.  She looked at her mother, only to find that she was staring dreamily across the room and wearing a rather silly grin.

Several minutes passed before Hermione realized that she had been standing there motionless while listening to the music from the box.  She carefully closed the lid, halting the tune and causing the illuminated dancing fairy to disappear.  Both her and her mother blinked a few times as they each came out of their vivid but pleasant daydreams.

“It’s beautiful…” whispered Hermione.

“What a wonderful gift,” said Mrs. Granger softly, “I wonder where he got such a thing?”

Hermione picked up the small card that was attached to the gift and flipped it over, but the only writing on it was ‘Happy Christmas, Hermione – From Harry.’

“I’ve checked all of the doorth and windowth… they’re all locked from the inthide, and the alarm is thtill active,” said Mr. Granger as he entered the room, “I’ve thent the polithe away, but they thaid they’ll thet an extra patrol in thith neighborhood… what’th that you have there, Punkin?”

“That boy left this here for me,” replied Hermione as she opened the lid to the box again, “It’s a music box.”

The same light, cheery tune began playing again and the three Grangers stood transfixed as they listened.

None of the muggles in the room noticed the two Disillusioned wizards who were watching them from the doorway, nor did they hear the whispered incantation that gently put them to sleep.

“Well, technically, this is a magical household… the girl’s a witch,” said one of the wizards, a rather large black man with a bald head and a thick, golden hoop earring as he cancelled the spell on himself.

“She hasn’t even got her Hogwarts letter yet… she doesn’t even know she’s a witch,” said the other wizard, a stocky, older man with short, sandy brown hair, widely spaced brown eyes, and a deeply lined face.

“Still, she is a witch,” said the larger wizard.

“Well, it’s clear that she wasn’t the one Apparating… the only question is whether to leave that magical artifact in their possession.”

“You know the law as well as I do…”

The older wizard nodded and said, “So we take it and Obliviate them?”

“…but to take a Christmas present away from a little girl… it just wouldn’t feel right,” said the large, black wizard as he approached the sleeping family.  He reached down and took the still-playing music box out of the young witch’s hands.  He turned it over while drawing out his wand.  With a well thought spell, he made the box appear as if it had a small battery compartment, complete with, what he hoped could pass for, a pair of cells within it.

“This’ll be enough to fool them… as long as they don’t look too closely at it,” said the larger man as he placed the box back into Hermione’s hands and levitated the sleeping residents onto the sofa, “Let’s get going, we still have to locate the destination of that Apparition.”

A moment later, the two wizards were gone, leaving the Grangers to wake up a few minutes later, none the wiser the wizards’ little visit.

-----~-----

10. An Odd New Friend

Disclaimer: I own nothing of the ‘Harry Potter’ universe. I make no money writing any of this stuff.

(Word Count: 3837)

-----~-----

Chapter 10: An Odd New Friend

Saturday, December 24th, 1988 11:14 PM

Jaana was having a very odd dream… of course, most of her dreams over the previous few months have been very odd.

This particular dream placed her back in Hogwarts sometime during her sixth year.  She was running through the halls, trying to get to her Charms class, but she couldn’t remember where the classroom was.  Panic was starting to set in, as she knew she was late and she didn’t want to be responsible for losing any house points.

She found herself rushing down one of the moving staircases, but it suddenly stopped mid-swing.  She turned around to intending to climb back up to the landing to find another route, but was surprised to find an entrance to the dungeons at the top of the stairs.  Being a dream, she thought this to be perfectly normal.

After a short jog through the dank dungeon passages, she finally came to an area that she recognized.  She could even see the stone stairs at the end of the hallway that would lead up from the Potions corridor that she was currently in.  She had only taken a few hurried steps when the door to the Potions classroom opened and the Potions professor stepped out into the hallway right in front of her, causing her to stop short to avoid running right into him.

“Out wandering the halls after curfew, are you?” uttered Snape contemptuously, but wearing the slightest of smiles… obviously relishing the thought of docking Ravenclaw a few house points.

“I… I was just on my way…”

“And you, Mr. Barrows… looking for a broom closet for a midnight snog with your girlfriend?” continued Snape with his sinister smile growing wider.

Jaana glanced behind her and saw her seventh-year Gryffindor boyfriend, Michael Barrows, standing right behind her.  She felt a flush wash over her face as she looked into his eyes… she hadn’t seen him since he broke up with her just before his graduation from Hogwarts.  He had said that he couldn’t wait for her to finish her last year, as he didn’t want a long-distance relationship.

She suddenly realized that they were standing in a small broom cupboard, one that she distinctively remembered utilizing quite often in their after-hours rendezvous.  She found herself kissing her boyfriend, feeling his hands traveling up her sided under her school jumper, unmistakably making their way up to her chest.  She felt a longing, a need for him to take her… something that she had never before allowed, but now she felt that she was mature enough to bring their relationship to the next level.

She removed her lips from his, dragging them across his rough cheek and finding the soft skin of his neck.  She was about to tell him that she was ready, but he ended up speaking first.

“Jaana, get up,” said Michael, but his voice sounded much lower than she remembered… and very oddly accented.  She thought the question strange, as she was already standing.

She felt Snape grab her shoulder from behind as he said in a similarly deep and accented voice, “Wake up, woman, we’re in trouble!”

Jaana jumped in alarm as she awoke to the incessant shaking of her shoulder.  She opened her eyes to see Raymond Cooley standing beside her bed.

“The Apparition ward was triggered a few minutes ago,” said Cooley urgently, “I got here as fast as I could.”

“Harry!” exclaimed Jaana as she jumped out of her bed, not realizing that she was dressed only in a rather flimsy nightgown and a pair of knickers.  She let out an embarrassed, “Eep!” as she hastily grabbed for her robe that was hanging on the bedpost.

“Never mind that, woman!” said Cooley urgently as he grabbed her hand and began pulling her from the room and towards Harry’s bedroom down the hall.  Jaana had just managed to pull her robe over her shoulders when they reached Harry’s door.

“Gather up whatever things of his that you can,” said Cooley hurriedly as he wrenched open the door, “I’ll take the boy and…”

Jaana could see for herself why Cooley went silent.  Harry’s bed was quite empty, although a bit rumpled from when she had tucked him in a little more than an hour earlier.

Jaana’s blood ran cold.

“I thought you said that the new wards would prevent anyone from Apparating into here!” hissed Jaana accusingly, “It must be the Ministry!  How could they have found out where he was?”

“Nobody got through the ward,” said Cooley as he opened the cupboard door looking for Harry, “Whoever attempted to Apparate into the house got bounced out… very roughly, I might add.  That’s why we need to move.  If anyone is trying to get in here, that means that someone found you out… unless…”

Jaana looked up from the floor where she was checking under Harry’s bed.  She saw his thoughtful expression and suddenly realized what he was thinking.

“You think that Harry had left and tried to get back in?”

“If he has, then we had better find him quickly.  I can’t imagine he’d be in very good shape if he did try to Apparate in here… I didn’t even know he could Apparate.”

“I only began training him last week…” said Jaana worriedly, “he hasn’t managed to do it yet.”

“Well, let’s make sure he isn’t here in the house,” Cooley said to Jaana before he called out, “Glyph?  Barrow?”

With two nearly identical ‘pops,’ two house elves appeared in the room.

“Do either of you know where Harry is?” asked Cooley as Jaana ran into the adjoining bathroom to see if Harry was there.

“No, Master,” came the simultaneous replies from the two elves.

“Quickly, check the house and see if you can find him.  Report back to me when you find him, or if he isn’t here in the house.”

Both of the elves gave a slight bow as they popped away.  Cooley could hear the random noises of the elves’ Apparitions as they systematically searched the rooms.  Not ten seconds had passed when they both appeared before Cooley.

“Glyph and Barrow is not finding the young Master Harry in the house, Master,” reported Glyph.

“Glyph, check the garden and the orchard behind the house.  Barrow, search the pasture and the woods beyond the front gates.  Come get me if you find him.”

Cooley turned to Jaana who, by that time, was sitting on Harry’s bed with her face in her hands.

“Come on, woman,” said Cooley softly, “Let’s go check around the stables.  If he did try to Apparate into the ward, he’ll be needing us.”

“I don’t know if I can do this anymore, Ray,” said Jaana in a cracking voice, “What was I thinking, taking in a child and believing that I could protect him?  I thought I was doing the right thing when I saw how those wretched muggles were abusing him, but now… now I think I’ve bitten off more than I can chew…”

“No time for that nonsense, girl!” said Cooley firmly, hoping to pull the young woman out of the self-censuring mood she was hurling herself into, “We need to… ”

Cooley’s hand flew to his neckline and grasped the thick beaded necklace he was wearing and said, “Damn it… not again!”

“What?” asked Jaana as she quickly stood from the bed.

“Hurry, gather what you can, we have to leave!” said Cooley urgently, “The ward was banged again, by two this time.  Whoever they are, they’re persistent!”

With a wave of her wand, Harry’s room became a flurry of activity as various items and articles of clothing began flying from the dressers and the cupboard towards a trunk that slid from the foot of Harry’s bed to the center of the room.  Within moments, the trunk was fully packed and shrunk to the size of a matchbox, which Jaana scooped from the floor and shoved into the pocket of her robe.

I’ll have my stuff packed in a moment,” said Jaana as she rushed from the room.  She paused just outside the bedroom door and called back to Cooley, “The presents!  Go get the presents under the tree!”

Cooley nodded and rushed down to the parlor where the Christmas tree was standing.  He transfigured a throw pillow that was resting on the nearby sofa into a large bag, then magically gathered all of the presents and guided them into it.  After that was shrunk down and placed in his pocket, he turned to see Jaana enter the parlor through the doorway.

“I’ve got everything,” said Jaana breathlessly, let’s go.”

Just then, a small pop announced the arrival of one of the house elves.  The elf seemed panicked as he squeaked out, “Barrow is not finding Master Harry, but Barrow is seeing two Ministry wizards coming from the pasture.”

“Lordy, I knew it,” said Cooley in a sigh, “Go back to searching for the boy.  If you find him, bring him to the bungalow, and let Glyph know… neither of you are allowed back into this house until I say so, understood?”

“Yes, master,” replied the elf before he popped away on his mission.

“We’ve got to hurry,” said Cooley, “if Harry’s out there, the elves will find him, but we have to go now.”

Jaana was shaking uncontrollably as she silently nodded and followed Cooley from the room.  They rushed to the front of the house towards the front door.  The moment the door was opened, Cooley gasped and Jaana let out a startled scream as their eyes spotted the figure on the doorstep.

-----~-----

Saturday, December 24th, 1988 11:14 PM

Harry could immediately tell that something was wrong… very wrong.  He had Apparated twice before in his life, once while being chased by his cousin and his gang at school, the other was to escape the beating that his uncle was inflicting upon him back in Dudley’s second bedroom.  While he didn’t remember the second instance, he clearly remembered the first.  At the time, he had no idea how he had managed to appear on the school’s roof, but he recalled that whatever had occurred was certainly uncomfortable, but not painful at all.

What Harry was now experiencing could in no way be described as ‘painless.’  His head felt like a balloon was expanding inside of it and squeezing his brain towards his face, every bone in his body felt as though it had been broken in numerous places, he could actually feel his internal organs squirming and seething as if they were trying to rearrange themselves in his body, and to top it all off, he found himself lying in about an inch and a half of wet, freezing slush and snow.

He made only one attempt to move and discovered that it was an unimaginably bad idea.  He couldn’t even lift his face, which was partially immersed in the slush.  With every labored breath he took, he could feel a bit of icy slush enter his left nostril, but he could do nothing about it in the condition he was in.

He could, however, open his right eye, but all he could see was an expansive winter landscape.  The clouds that had dumped all of the snow had moved on the previous day, leaving the sky dotted with stars and a meanest crescent of a moon that hardly cast any light at all.  All around him he could see wisps of foggy mist rising up from the clumps of snow, creating eerie, ghostlike shapes that hovered close to the ground in the cold but humid air.  He knew that the wispy fog was quite common during the cold winter months in England.

Somewhere in the distance, he could just see the pinpricks of light given off by some lampposts that presumably lined a road.  He could also see the shape of a distant, large house silhouetted against the night sky.  With the extreme pain and disorientation he was feeling, it took a few moments for him to realize that the structure was actually The Gables, Healer Cooley’s ancestral home that he had been staying in these past few months.

What he couldn’t figure out was how he came to be lying in a field well outside of the house when he should have appeared inside of his bedroom.  Nothing in the training that Jaana had been giving him had mentioned that anything like this could happen in a failed Apparition attempt… the worst that could happen would be to splinch one’s self…

A feeling of terror washed over the young boy as he vainly attempted to take inventory of all of his body parts, but he was in so much pain that it seemed impossible for him to tell if he was missing any bits of himself…

Another thought suddenly struck him… if he did manage to splinch himself, which seemed to him to be a distinct possibility given his current incapacitation, that would mean that the Ministry’s Accidental Magic Reversal Squad would soon arrive.

The panic that he had felt back in the Granger house returned in full force as he tried once again to move, but it seemed even more unlikely that he would succeed this time than with his last attempt.  The deep breath he drew as he tried to move caused a fresh batch of slushy snow to enter his sinuses, intensifying the pain he was feeling in the front of his head and giving him the worst case of ‘brain freeze’ he ever had in his life.  He was so agitated that he didn’t even think to try Shifting.

As he lay there, he could barely feel the wetness of the melting snow beneath him quickly soaking into his clothes.  The pain was beginning to slowly ebb, being replaced by a bone-numbing cold that seemed just as bad.  After a few minutes, he couldn’t feel the side of his face that was mired in the slush.  He felt an odd sleepiness creep over his entire being, and suddenly felt that taking a nice nap wouldn’t be a bad thing… maybe he’d wake up in a nice, warm bed…

Harry’s eyes began to get very heavy as he fought to keep his lids open.  He could just barely see the strange wisps of mist that seemed to dance around him as his vision continued to get blurrier by the moment.  Then he noticed something that suddenly brought his eyes into focus and made his breath hitch once again.

One of the strands of foggy mist that was hovering near to him seemed to gradually coalesce and formed into a small, roughly humanoid shape.  At first, he thought he was hallucinating, or maybe dreaming, but the tiny figure solidified right before his face.

Harry found himself looking into a pair of white, pupilless eyes that seemed to be regarding him curiously.  The small creature looked somewhat like a fairy, with wild, flowing white hair, a very pale, flat face, the tiniest bump of a nose, and a pointy chin supporting a small, thin-lipped mouth.  The creature’s foot-long body was obviously female, seeing that it was completely unclothed, and had a pair of dainty white wings on its back that had the shape and texture of snowflakes.

Harry opened his mouth to speak to the tiny creature, intending to say ‘hello,’ but all he managed to do was to let out a hoarse gurgle.  The sound seemed to startle the slight creature, who immediately jumped and flitted away from him, evaporating back into a foggy mist that remained hovering a few feet away.

Harry laid still for a few tense moments before the wispy vapor resumed the shape of the tiny creature, who remained well away from the scary human child, but was still watching him obvious curiosity.

The creature flitted in a little closer to Harry and said something to him that he couldn’t hope to understand.  Her voice sounded to him like tiny shards of glass tinkling against each other.  The creature looked at him expectantly, but when Harry made no reply, the creature spoke again, this time in a high-pitched squeaking that did sound like some sort of lilting words this time, but nothing he could understand.

Harry’s eyes pleaded with the creature as he just managed to softly croak out a feeble, “Help me…”

The creature hovered a bit closer to him, cocked her head curiously to the side, and then said in a barely-audible peep, “Help me…”

“Yes…” said Harry weakly.

“Yes…” repeated the tiny creature with a beaming smile.

Harry’s heart sank as he realized that the creature was only repeating what he was saying and didn’t understand what he was trying to tell her.

The little creature must have noticed the disheartened look on what she could see of Harry’s face because she looked at him critically for a moment before she inched closer to him.

Harry’s eyes followed her as she flitted closely above the side of his head.  She then did something that he certainly didn’t expect.  She bent forward and blew a slight puff of breath into his exposed ear.

At first, Harry felt a slight tingling in his ear, but almost immediately the tingling became a stinging, and then an electric sensation coursed through his head, nearly eclipsing the pounding headache that he already had.  He clenched his eyes tightly against the pain, but as soon as it came, it passed, leaving him with a slightly euphoric, dizzy sensation that spread throughout his body.

Harry quickly discovered that, while he was still in pain, and he still couldn’t move, he didn’t feel nearly as cold as he had the moment before.  His eyes were still clenched shut when he heard a light, airy voice ask, “Who are you?”

Harry opened his eyes and saw the small creature fluttering just a few inches from his face and staring inquisitively into his eyes.  If he hadn’t been in such a miserable condition, he would have been embarrassed at seeing a tiny, naked woman that was so near to him that he could see every detail of her thin, pale body.

Harry was just about to try to answer when an unusually loud duet of bangs sounded from nearby and echoed across the countryside.

“Bloody Hell!” bellowed a deep, unfamiliar male voice that sounded as though it were only a few yards away.

When the tiny creature saw Harry’s eyes widen in alarm, she quickly flitted up to Harry’s head, grabbed a fistful of his hair, which in reality was only a few strands, and faded back into a wispy mist.

At the same time, Harry felt the strangest sensation he had ever experienced in his life.  All the pain and stiffness he was feeling throughout his body vanished.  He couldn’t feel his soaking wet clothes, or even the slushy ground that had been supporting his weight.  He suddenly became aware that he could move, but when he tried to push himself up from the ground, he found that he had no arms.  It took him a moment to also realize that he had no legs or body, either.

“Be very still,” whispered the airy voice from somewhere very near to him.

Despite the panic he felt at discovering that he had no corporeal form at all, he obeyed the whispered voice and remained motionless.  Harry took a moment to survey his surroundings, and was very much surprised that he could see the surrounding area as though it were broad daylight, although everything seemed to be in shades of pale and gray, with no discernable colors at all.

He then noticed two forms slowly rising from the snowy ground just a few meters away.  They were two men, one short, hefty man with short hair, and the other a much larger and darker man with no hair at all.

“Apparition ward…” said the shorter man needlessly as he sat up and held his head in his hands.

The larger man rose unsteadily to his feet as he said, “No… really?  I hadn’t noticed.”

The smaller man glared at his partner while saying, “We did get the location right, didn’t we?”

“Yes, but who in their right mind would purposely Apparate into a ward?  Surely, he knew the ward was there.”

The shorter man finally got to his feet with a pained groan.  He looked around, and, just for a moment, Harry could have sworn that the man looked directly at him.

“Over there,” the larger man said, pointing towards The Gables.

“Let’s pay the owners a little visit, shall we?”

The two men began walking slowly towards the house in the distance, each massaging their aching muscles and joints, obviously affected by their encounter with the anti-Apparition ward.

“I’ve got to get to that house before them… to warn them…” whispered Harry.  He was surprised to find that his voice has an airy, almost ghostly quality to it.  He wasn’t even sure he said anything until he heard a soft reply.

“Let us go, then.”

Harry felt his being drift lazily over the ground, as if he were a leaf being blown across the ground by a gentle wind.  After a few seconds he felt himself accelerating uncomfortably, continually moving more swiftly until it felt like he was being pushed along by a hurricane rather than a breeze.  It only took a few seconds for him to cover the distance to the house, stopping when he reached the front door.”

“Thank you, it was kind of you to help me,” said Harry to whatever it was that brought him home.

“Help me…?” repeated the voice questioningly, “Help me… Yes… I understand.”

Harry wondered what the being meant by ‘understanding’ him until he heard the sound of hurried footsteps from inside of the house.

“I will help you,” said the ethereal voice as Harry felt himself coalesce and solidify.  A moment later, he found himself lying on the doorstep of the mansion… with all of the pain and stiffness he had felt a minute before while back in the pasture.

The door to the house opened and he heard a startled gasp followed by a muffled scream that he instantly recognized as Jaana’s.  Harry then felt himself being painfully lifted from the ground by a pair of strong arms.

“What have you been up to, little man?” he heard Healer Cooley ask.

With no small effort, Harry managed to croak out, “Wizards… coming…”

“Yes, I see them,” said Cooley quietly, “We’ll have a look at you as soon as we’re away from here.”

For a few moments he felt his body being painfully jostled as he was carried along the house in the opposite direction from where the strange wizards were coming.  Feeling that he was finally in safe hands, he allowed the exhaustion he had been feeling to overcome him and he fell into a deep sleep.

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11. Harry’s First Christmas

Disclaimer: I own nothing of the ‘Harry Potter’ universe. I make no money writing any of this stuff.

A/N:  Wow… for the first time ever I’ve received more reviews from FFdotNet than from my home at Portkey.   Hmmm… curious…  Ah, well… this chapter has the aftermath of Harry’s marginally successful trip to give Hermione her Christmas present.  After this chapter, there’ll be a big jump in time, so you’ll get to see some of what Harry is learning from the Book.  As always, sit back and enjoy! (Word Count: 3809)

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Chapter 11: Harry’s First Christmas

Sunday, December 25th, 1988 8:52 AM

“I understand, Ray.  Really, I do.”

“I just feel badly about leaving you on your own like this.  I know that you planned to come here in a few months, but this place isn’t quite ready to be lived in yet.”

“Well, we don’t have much of a choice, now do we?” said Jaana resignedly, “At least now I’ll be here all the time, so I’ll be able finish it that much quicker… as long as our money holds out.”

“Don’t worry about the money, I’ve put a bit extra in your account over in Keflavik, and the rest of the materials should be arriving from Portugal by floo by the week’s end.  Oh, and the Evergrow will be in the city tomorrow morning, along with the boundary stakes.”

When Jaana opened her mouth to complain about his giving them even more money, he just raised his hands and said, “Don’t even think about it!  I have more Galleons than I know what to do with, and I can’t think of a better way to spend it than to help you and Harry.  Now, I’ve got to get back to England and deal with the mess that I’m sure is waiting there for me.”

“I’m really sorry I got you dragged into this… if you didn’t let us stay…”

“Say no more, Jaana.  Having ‘Harry Potter’ living under my roof is something I can tell my grandkids about…” said Cooley with a laugh in his voice, “when I get around to having kids of my own, that is.”

Harry opened his eyes just in time to see Jaana giving Cooley a kiss on the cheek before she said, “You’re already like a father to me.”

“Hey, now! I’m only thirty-six!” complained Cooley in an affronted voice, “Don’t be saying things like that, woman… you’ll give me a complex!”

“Still, thank you for everything you’ve done for us,” said Jaana gratefully.

“It has been my pleasure.  I’ll send an owl as soon as it’s safe to do so.  Remember, don’t send a thing to anyone back there until you hear from me.  Now make sure you give the boy those potions as soon as he awakens.  I’m sure he’s going to have quite the headache when he comes around.”

“I will… thanks again.”

Cooley left the room and a few moments later, a sharp crack was heard as he Apparated away.  Jaana turned around and was surprised to find that Harry was propped up on one elbow and looking curiously around the small, sparsely-furnished and completely unfamiliar room from his bed.

Jaana quickly made her way to Harry’s side, picked up one of the three potion vials on the nightstand and asked, “How are you feeling, Harry?”

Harry’s eyes slowly focused on Jaana.  He pulled his covers more securely around himself as he answered, “I’m okay…  I feel a bit cold, though.”

He saw Jaana looking back at him in surprise.  She put the potion back on the nightstand and gently placed a hand on his forehead as she asked, “You’re okay?  Are you sure?”

Harry thought about that.  He recalled the pain that he was in before he fell asleep, but realized that he actually did feel fine, except for a weird, deep-seated chill that seemed to sit within his chest.  He then wondered if he had been asleep for months again, just like after the beating he got from his uncle.  His eyes landed on the nearby window where he saw that there was a light frost glazing the glass and traces of snow lining each pane.  It was still winter, so he couldn’t have been sleeping that long.

Still, Harry was a child, so naturally his first and foremost concern was voiced immediately.  He worriedly looked back to Jaana and asked, “Did I miss Christmas?”

Jaana seemed to sigh in relief as a smile crossed her face, “No, Harry, you didn’t miss Christmas…”

Harry couldn’t stop the broad grin from lighting up his face.  Jaana, upon seeing his youthful exuberance, matched Harry’s grin with one of her own, but her smile disappeared just as quickly as it came as she continued, “but we do have some things to talk about before we get to presents and such… like why you left The Gables and why you tried to Apparate back?  We told you about the anti-Apparition ward last week… and the Ministry tracked your under-aged and unlicensed Apparition back to the Gables, you know.  We were nearly caught… and it’s a wonder that you didn’t splinch yourself!”

When Jaana mentioned the Ministry, he suddenly remembered seeing the two men appear in the pasture… and he remembered the little creature that helped him.  He casually glanced around the room while trying to look contrite, hoping to catch a glimpse of the tiny being.  He felt a little disappointed when he didn’t readily detect any misty presence in the warm room.  He would have liked to thank the little creature who prevented him from being seen by the Ministry.

Harry glanced at Jaana, and then sighed as he averted his eyes again.  He just couldn’t lie to the girl who was taking such good care of him.

“I… I took a present that I bought to Hermione Granger,” confessed Harry ruefully.

“You… you what?” asked Jaana incredulously, “How did you even know where she is?  How did you get there?  Wait… a present?  What present are you talking about?  Harry, that was an incredibly foolish thing to do!”

“I had to try,” mumbled Harry morosely, “She’s supposed to be my friend, so I thought if I gave her some presents, she might start to like me sooner so that I’d have a friend sooner…”

“Presents?” asked Jaana with narrowed eyes, “As in the plural sense… more than one?  Is that where you had disappeared to back in September?”

Harry had a pained look on his face as he nodded, “I gave her the copy of Hogwarts: A History that you bought for me for her birthday, and I bought a music box for her for Christmas… when we were in Diagon Alley last month while you were getting the potions supplies.  While you were busy with the witch behind the counter I went next door and bought the music box in the window with some of the allowance I’ve been saving.  I just felt that I had to try something… I’ve been kinda lonely…”  Harry raised his head and quickly amended, “Not that I don’t like being with you, you understand… it’s just… it feels like you’re my family, not my friend… there are just some things that you can talk about with a friend that you can’t talk about with your family… at least I think that’s the way it’s supposed to be… I’ve seen other kids with friends, but I’ve never really had one myself, and I just wanted to have one that I can trust… well, that I think I can trust… and there’s no one else to talk to about anything…”

Jaana listened as Harry rambled on, feeling the tightness building in her throat and a wetness seeping behind her eyelids.  That was the first time Harry had referred to her as his family.

“Do you really feel that way?” asked Jaana as she took one of Harry’s hands.

“Well, I suppose I don’t actually need a friend, knowing the trouble that I’m in with the government… I just thought it would be nice to have someone my own age that I could…”

“No,” interrupted Jaana, “I mean about me being your family?”

Harry thought for a moment before he carefully said, “You’re the way that I always thought a mother or a big sister would be.  The only family I ever knew was when I was with my aunt and uncle, but I knew it wasn’t right because I’d hear other kids talking about their families and how they treated them.  I always dreamed that there was someone else in my family that would show up one day and take me away.  When you took me in, I was afraid at first that it was only a dream, but after a while, It felt like I really was in a proper family. You hug me when I need it, scold me when I deserve it… and you never hit me or make me feel like I’m worthless…” A strange look washed over Harry’s face as he hesitantly asked, “Is… is that love?”

A realization suddenly struck Jaana.  Now that she had thought about it, she had never really told Harry that she loved him.  She knew that she did… they had become so close during the past year that she had a hard time remembering what her life was like before she became the unofficial guardian of ‘The Boy Who Lived,’ even though she didn’t really see him as such anymore… to her, he was just Harry Potter, the boy who needed someone to help him out of a dangerous environment… someone who needed her…

Jaana squeezed his hand and said, “Yes, love is that, and much, much more.  It’s a very hard feeling to describe, but I do know one thing… I know that I love you, and I’m sure that there’s nothing in this world that could change that.”

Jaana was shocked when she saw Harry’s face fall into what looked like a sad frown.  She wondered why he was reacting like that until Harry tossed the covers from over himself, sprang from the bed and threw his arms around the older witch.  An instant later, he was sobbing heavily into her nightshirt and tightly gripping onto her as if his life was depending upon it.  Of course, her anger over what he had done was long gone.

“I love you, too,” said Harry between hiccups.

Jaana hugged Harry in return, unable to hold her own tears in check.  She gently patted his back for a moment, but as soon as she felt the icy chill that was seeping through the back of his pajamas, she stiffened slightly and a small gasp escaped her.

“Harry!  You are cold!  Back into bed!  Now!”

Harry couldn’t help but to smile tearfully as he climbed back onto the mattress and pulled the covers over himself.

“Now you stay right there and I’ll go fix us a pot of tea…” said Jaana as she hurried towards the door while muttering to herself, “that is, if I can find the teapot… and the mugs… and the tea… and Merlin knows if there’s any sugar in this ruddy place…”

As soon as the door had closed, Harry laid back on the bed.  He was trying to contain the sporadic sniffle that escaped him when he suddenly took a deep, involuntary breath that felt almost painful.  The breath was forcefully expelled, and with it came a faint, wispy vapor that hung before his face for only a moment before it quickly glided towards the window next to his bed and affixed itself to one of the cold glass panes.  An instant later, the entire pane was coated with a thick layer of frost, and Harry could have sworn he heard a faint, high-pitched sigh of relief.

At the same moment that the mist had left his lungs, the icy cold that had been gripping his chest disappeared almost completely, with just a slight, chilly feeling left behind.

After shaking off the initial shock, Harry leaned towards the window and hesitantly asked, “Are you okay?”

“What did you say, Harry?” came Jaana’s voice from just outside the room.

“Oh… nothing,” Harry called out before turning back to the window and asking in a whisper, “You were inside me?”

A faint pair of white, pupil-less eyes appeared in the frost as a tinkling, yet tired sounding voice answered softly, “Yes, inside… was too warm… I lost myself…”

Harry really didn’t understand the statement.  He glanced back at the door, then turned around and quietly asked, “What are you?”

“I am Wynmae.”

“What’s a ‘Wynmae?’ asked Harry curiously.  He had never heard of anything called a ‘Wynmae’ in any of his books on magical creatures.

There was a slight pause before the answer came, “Wynmae is Wynmae… what are you?”

Harry had to pause himself as he thought about that answer.  He remembered how the creature wasn’t very adept at the English language, although he did realize that he could still understand her strange tongue.

“Is Wynmae your name?”

“Name…?” asked the creature affixed to the window, “Yes, name… I am Wynmae… you are…?”

“Harry,” he whispered to the frosted glass.

“Harry… Yes, now Harry is Wynmae, Wynmae is Harry.  Wynmae had to leave Wynmae in Harry… We are now one… bonded?”

“What do you mean?” asked Harry in surprise.

Harry was startled by the voice that came from behind him.  “What do I mean about what?” asked Jaana as she stepped into the room levitating a tray which held a teapot, two cups, and a plate that was laden with chocolate chip biscuits.

“Oh, umm… I was just thinking aloud,” said Harry with a guilty look on his face.

Jaana paused a moment and gave him a critical look before she stepped up to his bed and wordlessly placed the tray upon the nearby nightstand next to the potion bottles that Cooley had left.  She poured tea into each of the cups and handed one to Harry before picking up her own cup and sat upon a chair that was set near the bed

“Okay,” began Jaana, “Why didn’t you tell me where you were going and what you were doing?”

There was a long pause before Harry meekly answered, “I was afraid that you wouldn’t let me go… that you’d think I was being silly.”

“Well, popping off on your own with no one to protect you isn’t silly, it’s dangerous.  If you would have told me what you were doing, I would have come along to help keep you out of trouble.  I know that I’m strict with you, but that’s only because I care about you… and don’t think that don’t understand how you feel… I get lonely sometimes, too.  I mean, you know that I don’t have much of a social life.”

When she saw Harry nod gloomily, she quickly amended, “It’s not just because of you, so don’t go blaming yourself.  I had a pretty bad break-up in my last relationship, and I’ve been a bit hesitant to climb back on that particular broomstick, if you know what I mean… but that’s a story for another day, if ever.  So what happened when you went to give her the present?”

Harry explained how he found Hermione’s address by using a muggle telephone directory.  He knew from what his older self had written that her parents were dentists and had a practice in the town of Maidstone, and the medical section in the directory listed the dental surgeries and the proprietors’ names.  Since there were only two Grangers listed in Maidstone, and only one of those matched the dentists’ names, he figured that must be her house.  He went on to describe what happened inside of the house, how he planned to just leave the gift under the tree, but was surprised by Hermione who was sleeping on the sofa, and how he was so panicked about being discovered that he couldn’t calm himself enough to Shift away.

“So you tried to Apparate?” questioned Jaana while shaking her head in disbelief.

“It was the only thing I could think of…” defended Harry, “she was yelling out ‘burglar!’ and I heard her father running down the stairs… I… I was scared… and embarrassed… now she not only thinks I’m prone to playing pranks on her, she also thinks I’m a criminal!” then Harry added with a resigned sigh, “She’ll never like me now.”

“You played a prank on her?” asked Jaana in surprise.

“No, but she thought I was going to when I gave her the book.  I was watching her from outside the wall of her school after I gave it to her,” he then added dejectedly, “I thought that I saw her toss it in the rubbish without even opening it.”

The reason for Harry’s depressed mood all through October now became clear to her.  No wonder he was so down after he returned.  Jaana kindly patted his shoulder and handed him another biscuit as she said, “Don’t worry too much about it right now.  She’s still young, and you never know… maybe she still needs a few more years to become the same person that your older self had met when you start school in a few years.  Maybe it’s not such a good idea to rush it.  Maybe we’ll make some new friends here before we go back to England.”

Harry’s head spun around to look out the window at the snowy landscape, and once again noticed the one heavily frosted pane of glass.  He looked away quickly as to not draw attention to the odd pane and asked, “We’re not in England?  Where are we?”

Jaana smiled and simply said, “Iceland.”

“Iceland?”

“The Figg family has owned this plot of property west of Reykjavík here for generations, back when it was a territory of Denmark.  None of us ever built anything here, so this place is listed as undeveloped.  Ray and I have been secretly constructing this place for months, and we’re pretty sure that nobody in Britain knows anything about it… besides my Auntie Arabella, but I doubt she even remembers that we own this property.  All of the materials for this house have been brought in from Greenland, and the magical fixtures are from Portugal, so there isn’t a ‘paper trail’ for anyone to follow, if they were so inclined.  For all intents and purposes, we’ve just disappeared from the British map… and since the magical community here is totally independent, there’s no ministry to contend with…”

Jaana gave Harry a knowing smile as she drew her wand and summoned a colourfully wrapped package from the next room.  She deftly caught the small package in one hand and held it out to him as she continued, “hence, there’s no provisions for underage magic here, although it still must be kept secret from the muggles.”

Harry took the package and ripped open the wrapping paper.  Inside was a long, thin wooden box.  Harry slowly lifted the lid and discovered, resting within the velvet-lined interior, a pale, intricately carved wand.

“Happy Christmas, Harry,” said Jaana with a grin, “It’s apple wood with a Dragon Heartstring core.  I know that it’s not perfectly suited to you, but it should be good enough to start training you in real magic and not just the theory.”

“When do we start?” asked Harry excitedly.

Jaana thought for a moment before saying, “I was going to begin with the spells from the first year’s book that Hogwarts requires, but now I think we should concentrate on one subject at a time.  Hogwarts has a tendency to overload students with multiple subjects because they have to cram in all aspects of magic in only seven years.  Do you have any preference on which subject you want to start with?  As you know, Charms is the easiest…”

“Transfiguration,” said Harry firmly, “My book says it’s the thing I’m best at.”

“Are you sure?  Transfiguration is the most difficult sphere to learn, and it takes the longest to really get the hang of.  It’s also rather dangerous, so there’ll be no fooling around if you decide that that’s what you want.  Are you sure that you don’t want to start with Charms?”

Harry remembered reading ahead in his book about the variations of standard transfiguration spells and was very anxious to try them out.  Charms, while very useful, and even necessary to some of the more advanced variations of spells listed in his book, just seemed somewhat boring to him.  The training in Transfiguration would also make Charms that much easier to learn once they got around to it.

“I’d really like to start with Transfiguration,” said Harry with finality.

“Alright, then,” said Jaana with a smile, “TransFig it is.  I have to go into Reykjavík tomorrow to pick up a few things to make the property a bit more comfortable for us, so we’ll start your training after Boxing Day.”

Harry could hardly believe it.  He was actually going to do magic… real magic!  He was already going over everything he could remember from his book in his mind.  He must have had a distant look on his face because he barely heard Jaana clear her throat to get his attention.

Jaana wore a serious expression as she said, “I know you’re excited about the prospect of doing magic, but there’s something much more important that you have to take care of right now and it cannot possibly wait a moment longer.”

Harry’s smile dropped into an unsure frown.  He was wondering what he possibly had to do when he saw her stand up while drawing her wand.

“Accio sack!” said Jaana, and a moment later a large cloth bag zoomed in through the open doorway and into Jaana’s free hand.

“You haven’t forgotten already, have you?” asked Jaana in a rather stern voice.

Harry was looking at her worriedly as she opened the sack and waved her wand over the opening.

“Happy Christmas!” giggled Jaana as a steady stream of brightly wrapped packages flew out from inside of the bag.  Each gift magically expanded to their original size before they landed all around Harry on his bed.

Harry looked up at Jaana with a surprised grin.  For a minute, he had indeed forgotten that it was Christmas.  When the last gift landed at the foot of his bed, he clambered over the massive pile of gifts and pulled Jaana into a fierce hug.

“Happy Christmas!” he returned, “I love you.”

Jaana returned the hug whole-heartedly, “I love you, too.”

A long moment later, Harry squirmed out of her embrace and began tearing into the stacks of gifts strewn all over his bed.  He couldn’t help but to think of how jealous his cousin would be if he could see the stack of presents that was easily double of what Dudley usually received. This was certainly Harry’s best Christmas ever.

12. Innocence Lost

Disclaimer: I do not own, nor do I make any claim to, the ‘Harry Potter’ universe. I claim the plot and whatever original characters I chose to create.

A/N: Yes, I know this chapter is very short, but I really couldn’t add anything more without having it seem forced… or leaving it in a cliffhanger.  You must appreciate the fact that I got this written and posted in record time, too. ^_^  If you read the description of this story from the main menu, then you know what this chapter portends.  I heartily thank everyone who has reviewed… every review is read and appreciated, even though I haven’t had the time to respond to all of them… I will say, however, that FFdotNet is still submitting more reviews than PK… It still surprises me. (Word Count: 3116)

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Chapter 12: Innocence Lost

From The Life of Harry James Potter – Excerpt from Chapter 112: Advanced Offensive Transfiguration

There is so much you can do to attack an opponent using combinations of the most basic of spells.  For example, I remember one of the first lessons we had back in McGonagall’s class… changing a matchstick into a needle.  It seemed impossible at first, but soon we were able to perform the transfiguration without even thinking about it.  How can a needle be used as a weapon, besides poking an opponent in the eye with it?  Read on…

Mutatio - Basic vegetable to mineral transfiguration… wood into steel. Compact, quick and simple.  Once the basic spell is mastered, nearly any organic matter that is roughly the size of a matchstick can be converted into a needle.  As a fifth year student, this process should be child’s play to you. Multifluus Mutatio is a bit trickier, but can easily be mastered with practice and will change dozens, or even hundreds of matchsticks into needles.

Depulso - The Banishing charm that you learned is used to force matter away from you, just as the Summoning charm is used to draw matter towards you.  Another basic, third-year spell.  The fourth-year variant, the Multifluus Depulso, achieves the same thing, except that it banishes many identical things at once.

Then we have the Enlarging charm, Engorgio - used to proportionally increase the size and mass of objects.  Yet another third year charm, and with practice, can affect many objects at one time.

You might ask how these three distinctly dissimilar spells could be used effectively in an offensive capacity?  The answer is simpler than you might think.

These three spells have the same magical ‘frequency.’  This is known during your time, but what isn’t yet known is that spells of the same frequency can be combined and cast at the same time by using a specific combination of the various incantations.

If you were to throw a handful of matchsticks - or pine needles, or any similar organic matter - into the air and then incant, ‘Muldepultagio,’ the spell would first send the relatively light matchsticks away from you at an extremely high velocity, then immediately transform the banished matter into needles, and at the same time increase their proportional size and mass, yet retaining their initial velocity.  Naturally, the end result would be a hail of steel javelins moving faster than the eye can see.  Quick, silent, and most assuredly deadly.

Of course, the incantation is presented here for reference... as I have stressed many times before that all of these spells should be cast non-verbally, both to invoke the element of surprise, and to keep any surviving opponents within earshot from learning the incantation.  These techniques won’t be fully explored and developed for many years from your time. (It’s a shame that they don’t teach non-verbal casting in the first year… it makes it so much easier to learn.)

There are many combinations of basic spells that can be combined to devastating effect.  The most useful ones I will list for you here…

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Saturday, May 27th, 1989 6:23 PM

“Depulso!”

“Accio!”

“Depulso!”

“Accio!”

The grapefruit-sized rock sailed swiftly through the air.  Before it even touched the snow and ice covered ground some thirty feet away, it suddenly reversed course and zoomed back towards the small boy who was wielding an apple wood wand.  The rock sailed through the air at an alarming speed and it seemed that it would surely strike the boy squarely in his chest.

“Depulso!”

The rock reversed direction again as if it had bounced off of a wall just a few inches in front of the boy.  Although the rock was mere inches from his body, the boy didn’t flinch… he didn’t even blink as he cast the banishing spell.

Not only was he practicing the spells, but he was also training to keep his fear and panic under control… he didn’t want to live through the embarrassment and helplessness that he had experienced the past December which almost got himself, as well as his guardian and their benefactor, apprehended by the British Ministry of Magic.

He had just recast the summoning spell when Jaana stuck her head out through the window, “Harry!  Come on in, it’s time to eat,”

“Coming!” Harry called over his shoulder, but not taking his eyes from the speedily approaching rock.  He waited until it was only a few feet away when he tried the banishing spell wordlessly.  He flicked his wand and concentrated, but the rock was completely unaffected.  It hit Harry in the chest with a sickening ‘thud’ that laid him flat onto his back and knocked the wind from his lungs.

With a pained groan, Harry sat up and gingerly opened the zipper of the heavy jacket he was wearing.  He pulled down the front of his shirt and casually inspected the rapidly darkening contusion forming amidst the other black, brown and purple bruises caused by his previously unsuccessful attempts at non-verbal magic that day.  He could tell that the last hit cracked one of his ribs.

He considered the pain an incentive to get the spell right.

Harry glanced back towards the house to make sure Jaana hadn’t seen what happened before he breathlessly wheezed out, “Wynmae?”

A hitherto unnoticed misty vapor drifted up from a nearby clump of snow on the ground.  It swirled and condensed into a tiny, fluttering, fairy-like creature that flitted up to hover before Harry’s face.

“Again?” Wynmae asked in her slight, chiming voice.

“Please,” he answered gratefully.

The little creature smiled just before it resumed its misty form.  Harry closed his eyes and, with no small amount of effort, breathed in deeply and inhaled the floating mist.  Harry involuntarily shuddered for a moment as the icy vapor snaked its way into his lungs.  The cold almost instantly numbed his chest, which rendered him unable to breathe for a few moments.

Harry felt as though he were about to pass out from lack of oxygen when he suddenly and forcefully breathed out, expelling the foggy vapor which immediately reformed into the tiny winged creature that fluttered happily before his face.  He felt the warmth returning to his body as he opened his eyes and smiled.

“Better?” squeaked Wynmae.

“Yes,” replied Harry, obviously breathing much easier, “Thank you very much.  I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

Wynmae gave Harry a dainty bow before she performed a back-flip and dove back towards the clump of snow where she resumed her foggy form which remained drifting eerily over the frosty ground.

Harry dusted the snow off from his damp trousers and headed back to the house.  He had been practicing non-stop since lunchtime and found that he was famished.

As he entered the doorway, Jaana was just setting a crock of lamb stew onto the table.

“Hurry up and eat.  I’ve got Miss Hansdottir coming in a few hours to watch you while I’m out with Jon to that new pub down the road.  I expect you to be on your best behavior for her, and remember… no magic!”

Harry nodded with an ambiguous frown as he sat heavily into his chair and shoved a spoonful of stew into his mouth.  He really didn’t like the man that Jaana had been seeing for the past few weeks.  He wasn’t jealous… he just had the feeling that this guy, one that he had never even met, wasn’t quite right for Jaana.  Still, he kept his opinion to himself… there wasn’t anything he could do about it, anyway.

Jaana sighed tiredly and said to him, “I know you don’t trust him, but he’s been okay so far, and I’ll only be out for a few hours.  We’re going to that new pub on the west side, and I’ll be back before ten.

Harry shrugged and ate some more of his stew.  He knew what loneliness could do to people.  She was twenty-one, and this ‘Jon Jonsson’ was the first man that she’d taken even a passing interest in since he’s been with her.  He’d accept it for now, but he didn’t have to like it… and he didn’t.

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Sunday, May 28th, 1989 1:47 AM

‘Thump!’

Harry’s eyes opened.  He was lying on his bed with his blankets pulled high around his neck to ward off the nighttime chill.  He lifted his sleepy head and looked around the room.  He let out a tired breath through his nose, rolled over on his side, and closed his eyes.

‘Thump-thump’

His eyes opened once more and he sat up on his bed.  He looked over to his clock on the nightstand and saw the floating digital numbers, 1:48 AM.

‘What’s she doing, puttering around the house at this time of night?’ Harry thought to himself.  He was just about to settle back into his warm pillow when he heard a sharp crack, a muffled yelp, and something distantly clattering on the floor.

Harry threw off his covers and quickly took his wand from the drawer of his nightstand where he had kept it since before the old spinster, Miss Hansdottir, had arrived.  He tucked his wand up into the sleeve of his pajamas and crept out of his room.

He looked in the doorway opposite his room and saw Miss Hansdottir sleeping heavily in the library’s overstuffed chair.  He then heard the sound of movement and a pained moan coming from the lower level.

Harry moved as silently as he could towards the open stairway leading down to the living room that took up most of the first floor.  He could hear the faint murmuring of a male voice wafting up the stairway as he moved closer to the landing.

Harry craned his neck around the support post at the top of the stairs and saw Jaana sprawled out on the large sofa in the middle of the room with a rather husky, sandy-haired man standing over her.  In the dim light cast by the dying embers in the fireplace, he could tell that the man’s trousers and pants were pulled down around his knees and that Jaana’s skirt was pulled up above her waist.

Harry looked at the scene in a kind of shocked surrealism… he kind of knew what sex was, but he would never have guessed that Jaana would be so promiscuous… especially after the very long-winded ‘talk’ that she gave him about the importance of sex and ‘not giving it away’ until marriage.

Harry’s face burned with embarrassment, and he was about to turn away and go back to his room when he noticed that the front door was left wide open.  As his eyes became more accustomed to the dim light of the room, he saw the wooden hat stand that was usually beside the front door lying broken on the floor next to the sofa.

He then noticed something that made his blood run cold and caused his wand to slide from his sleeve into his hand.  He saw Jaana’s head lolling down off the end of the sofa with her eyes closed… and there was a trickle of blood running down her cheek from the side of her mouth.

As Harry crept silently down the stairs, he found that could hear what the very drunk man was saying…

“…I don’t take ‘no,’ you teasing wench… You’ll thank me for this in the morning, you will…  This will teach you to lead a fellow on, you tart…”

Somehow, he knew the man was muttering in Icelandic, but could also understand what he was saying, thanks to the magic that Wynmae had used on him months before.  He also understood what was about to happen to Jaana.  By the time he had reached the bottom of the stairs, Harry’s face was still an expressionless stone mask

Later on, Harry wouldn’t remember very much of happened in the following minutes.  He just walked towards the sofa with a kind of tunnel vision focused directly on the man who was standing over his semi-conscious guardian, obviously preparing to do something unspeakable to her.

Jon Jonsson looked up in bleary-eyed surprise when he noticed the young boy approaching.

“What’s this?” slurred Jonsson, “The bitch has a kid?  Go back to bed and leave your mother to me… wha?”

All Harry could feel was the numbing cold that was rapidly spreading throughout his body as he lifted his wand and began casting spells at the unfortunate muggle.  He concentrated on the man’s shirt and cast the strongest Depulso he could manage.  The surprised man, dragged along by his own shirt, flew away from the sofa and landed on the floor some ten feet away.

Harry used a simple stunning spell to quietly incapacitate the man, and then he closed his eyes and silently called for his friend.  A moment later, the familiar, wispy fog drifted into the room and solidified into the little Wynmae, who glanced down at the petrified muggle, and then looked expectantly at Harry with her wide, pupil-less eyes.

Harry looked down at Jonsson and used a spell that he remembered seeing in his book, a spell that was developed during ‘The War of the Sexes’ that was originally designed to throw the witches off-guard during battles… a spell that completely vanished all clothing from a person.  As most witches tend to be almost criminally modest about their bodies and having values that were common centuries before, the spell was usually devastatingly effective at making the witches instinctively cover their nakedness with their arms and leaving them momentarily defenseless.

Harry wasn’t using the spell to embarrass the drunken man.

Harry looked up at Wynmae and softly said in a calm, neutral voice, “Please bring him to Langjokull Glacier for me.”

Wynmae smiled cheerfully at Harry and nodded in understanding before she flitted down to the floor and grabbed hold of one of Jonsson’s fingers.  Harry saw the pair evaporate into a wispy mist.  He silently watched as the foggy vapor that was both Wynmae and Jon Jonsson quickly disappeared out through the still opened front door.

Harry then went to the kitchen to retrieve a damp cloth and carefully wiped the drying blood from Jaana’s cheek and her split lip.  The stoic look on his face only faltered for a moment when he smelled a faint odor of alcohol coming from his guardian.  After checking to make sure she had no further injuries, he struggled a few moments as he replaced her knickers into their proper position and smoothed her long skirt back down over her legs.  Harry was very thankful that he was able to intervene before Jonsson was able to violate her.

Harry walked to the open door and looked at the two sets of footprints leading from a Jeep that was parked out on the road in front of the house.  He saw that the smaller set of prints seemed to be dragged most of the way across the ground from the vehicle.

He went back into the house, carefully removed Jaana’s shoes from her feet and put them on his own.  He walked out towards the road and stood before the Jeep.

It took him a while, but he managed to dismantle the vehicle entirely, using basic transfigurations to change bits of the vehicle into clumps of ice and rock, and then banishing them to different places all along the road.  Nothing was left except the faint tire marks in the hard-packed surface of the road, which he efficiently scoured to make them look much older than they actually were.  With a solemn, impassive nod to himself, he walked back to the house. As he went, he used his wand to transfigure the snow, ice and earth, erasing the original footprints completely, leaving just his own, in Jaana’s shoes, tracing the path from the road to the door.

Harry quietly closed the door, repaired the hat stand and righted it up beside the doorway.  With a last look at Jaana, Harry climbed back up the stairs and, after checking to ensure Miss Hansdottir was still asleep and in the same position as before, returned to his room where he climbed back under his covers and immediately fell asleep.

-----~-----

Sunday, May 28th, 1989 12:52 PM

“Honestly, I only had two drinks!” defended Jaana tearfully.

“Well, it doesn’t matter,” said Miss Hansdottir with a matronly edge to her voice, “I waited up until nearly midnight before I fell asleep.  It’s a good thing the boy didn’t see you when you came in… whatever time that was!”

“I still don’t understand what happened,” cried Jaana, “The last thing I remember was Jon bringing me the second drink and then having a dance with him… everything after that is a blur.”

“Well, if you’re to be behaving like this, I don’t think I’ll be watching the boy again… good day to you, Miss Figg!”

Harry waited until the front door had slammed shut and he heard Jaana settle back into the sofa with a pained, halting sigh.  Once he was sure the old bat had gone, he heavily treaded down the stairs.

“Jaana?” said Harry hesitantly as he reached the bottom of the stairs.

Jaana looked embarrassedly away from where Harry was standing, but he managed to catch a glimpse of her swollen lip and the bruise on her cheek.  She picked up a small ice pack and placed it against the side of her face as she quickly said, “It’s about time you came down.  Breakfast is in the kitchen, and when you’re done you can read your book for a while… I put it out for you on the table.  No lessons today… you can practice this week’s lessons in the yard again.”

Harry nodded, although he knew she couldn’t see it and headed towards the kitchen.  Before he disappeared through the door, he looked worriedly back at his guardian who had, by then, settled back into the cushions of the couch and was almost asleep again.

Jaana never saw the satisfied smirk that flashed across Harry’s lips as he headed for the stove to retrieve his lukewarm eggs, bangers and mash.

He never mentioned the episode to a living soul.

13. As Ye Sow…

Disclaimer: I own nothing of the ‘Harry Potter’ universe. I make no money writing this stuff.

A/N: Here we go… What kind of Karma is our Harry collecting from this chapter?  You’ll just have to read to find out.  As the saying goes… ‘How d’ya like me now?’ ^_^; (Word Count: 4365)

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Chapter 13: As Ye Sow…

From The Life of Harry James Potter – Excerpt from Chapter 73: The Major Players in the Wizard Wars.

By far, the most notorious Death Eater was Lucius Malfoy.  Until his death in 2022, he was the major financier of Riddle’s cause.  The Galleons he slipped to countless businesses and Ministry officials were the catalyst for virtually all of the hardships suffered by the supposed ‘underclasses’ of wizarding society.  His influence decidedly shaped the attitudes of the controlling pureblood elite, making my job as ‘the boy who lived’ exponentially harder.

Lucius was never overt in his ministrations, he preferred to just set things into motion and then sit back and watch the chaos, ready to jump in to claim responsibility for ‘cleaning things up’ if events didn’t go exactly as he planned.  The event that perfectly demonstrated this tactic of his was when he slipped the diary horcrux to Ginny Weasley.  Not only did he nearly succeed in returning Tom Riddle to a body two years earlier than he eventually did, but cemented the idea of me being Ginny’s ‘knight in shining armour.’

From that point in time, Ginny was solely focused on being ‘Mrs. Harry Potter.’  Eventually, she got her wish, but as with most things in life, if you get what you wish for, it may not turn out to be what you really wanted.  As the years passed, she became less interested in being the wife of ‘the famous Harry Potter’ and more interested in what lay beyond our marital bed.  That interest eventually found sanctuary in the arms of Draco.

Draco had everyone convinced of his reluctance to serve Tom Riddle… even Dumbledore was fooled.

I, for one, never trusted him…  my suspicions turned out to be right on the money, and his actions cost me the family I had always wanted, and the life of the woman that I thought I had loved.  I had never really recovered from Ginny’s treacherous infidelity, nor the fact that her children weren’t actually mine, but my worst enemy’s.

Yes, Lucius had taught Draco well…

-----~-----

Thursday, June 15th, 1989 8:09 AM

Harry awoke with a groan and climbed out of bed.  With his eyes barely open. He crossed the room and headed for the bathroom to prepare for the day’s training.  As he passed by the window between his bed and the bathroom door, he caught a slight movement out of the corner of his eye and stopped in his tracks.  He turned his head and caught sight of something that he wished he didn’t see.

On a small, rocky mound of earth in the back yard sat Jaana with her head resting in the palms of her hands as she stared out to the horizon.  She had been distant and pensive for the past three weeks… the time since the incident with Jonsson.

The muggle police had been by a few days after the incident investigating the disappearance of a Jon Jonsson, as Jonsson had been last seen leaving the tavern with Jaana.  When Jaana explained what she remembered of the night, which was barely anything at all except for being in the tavern and then waking up at home on the sofa, Harry noticed both of the officers giving Jaana a sympathetic grimace.  The officers then mentioned, off the record, of course, that there had been previous complaints filed against Jonsson… apparently he had the habit of drugging young ladies and having his way with them.  The victims, usually tourists who had only come to Iceland for short wilderness vacations, would never stay in the small country long enough to have any charges carried through.

Jaana’s complexion became paler as the officers explained Jonsson’s history.  She had told them that she didn’t think that she was assaulted, but really wasn’t sure.  She didn’t feel as though she had been violated… although she had never had sex before, she assumed that she could tell if anything had happened.

Of course, Harry knew that the man was mostly unsuccessful in his attempt to rape Jaana.  When he threw Jonsson across the room, the man’s bits were as soft as a grape, most likely due to how drunk the man was.  Still, Jonsson had made a good show of it at the time.

After briefly inspecting the area, the police left… leaving Harry to comfort his badly shaken guardian.

Harry wished he could tell Jaana what he knew of the attack.  Seeing her in her depressed state was tearing at his heart, but he really couldn’t tell her about what he had done.  He still didn’t know what prompted him to do what he did… something came over him at the time, something that made his actions seem logical and rational… Jonsson deserved what he got.  Even now, he knew he would do the same thing over again if the same situation arose.  Jaana was all he had, and he couldn’t bear the thought of her being harmed in any way.  He couldn’t lose her… not now.

Harry spent a few more moments looking out at Jaana sitting there with her lost expression.  He sighed and then continued his trek to the bathroom.

-----~-----

Sunday, July 2nd, 1989 3:16 AM

Harry sat on a stool with his chin resting on his folded arms, which were in turn resting on the tabletop in front of a steaming cauldron.  Harry had his tired eyes fixed on a small hourglass whose sand was just about depleted.

He had been working on this potion for nearly a month.  In just a few minutes, it would finally be ready.

As the last few grains fell from the top chamber, Harry stood from the stool, grabbed a cloth, and lifted the cauldron from the fire.  He hefted up the small cauldron and immersed it in a pail of ice water, causing a cloud of hissing steam to billow up from within it.

Harry fanned the steam away with his hand as he looked closely at the liquid in the cauldron.  He watched as the thin, watery liquid rapidly changed from a translucent ruby red to an opaque, pale pink.  The liquid then condensed into an uneven lump of pink goo that sat on the bottom of the now cool cauldron.

Harry reached in and picked up the substance, placed it on a clean spot on the table, and began rolling it into a long, thin stick that appeared to have a rubbery quality to it.  He picked up a silver knife and began cutting the substance into twenty, inch-long pieces.

After a quick reference to a page of parchment that was lying nearby, a page he had copied out of his book without Jaana’s knowledge, he nodded to himself as he reached for a wooden rack that contained four small vials of different coloured liquid.  He picked up the first vial containing Essence of Camphor and placed a drop on five of the pieces.  Upon contact, each of the five pieces turned white.  He took the white pieces, wrapped them in specially prepared grape skins, and then placed them into a small bag marked ‘dispel.’

Harry repeated the process with the remaining three vials of Essence of Myrrh, Essence of Cherry Blossom, and Essence of Galangal, the results of which he placed in bags marked F, Y, and O, respectively.

Harry took a few minutes to clean his equipment before he doused the lights and headed back to his bedroom.  He placed the bags deep into a corner of his trunk and climbed into bed where he sat there staring out of his window at the deep blue sky.  The sun was still just under the horizon where it had been all night, but soon it would peek above the distant mountains.

He was now ready.  He had everything he needed to put his plan into motion.  This was the week he would right a plethora of wrongs.

-----~-----

Sunday, July 2nd, 1989 8:45 AM

Harry rose from his bed and walked over to his desk.  On the desktop was a recent copy of Britain’s Daily Prophet.  The paper was folded so that page three was on top.

His eyes focused on an article that praised the efforts of the benevolent Lucius Malfoy who had just made a sizable donation to the newly enacted ‘Equal Start’ plan, a program that supposedly helps children of pureblood families ‘catch up’ with their muggleborn counterparts.  The argument was that muggleborn children were receiving a ‘formal, publicly financed education’ while magical children were forced to be home-schooled, causing an unfair advantage in favor of the muggleborns.  Of course, it was never mentioned that the muggleborn children were not receiving any magical tutoring, something that this new program would supply to pureblood children.

Harry knew that this was in response to the increased surveillance by the Ministry on all magical households, so any advantage that the Malfoy patriarch could supply to the pureblood community, especially his own son, would be pursued with vigor.  He would do anything to make ‘real’ wizards and witches seem more adept at magic.

It had just so happened that Mr. Malfoy would be making a personal appearance that day at 9:00 AM for the opening of the new school that was located in muggle London near Diagon Alley.

Harry planned on being there, too.

It was time to set things in motion.  He opened a drawer and withdrew a parchment envelope that had the name, ‘Sirius Black’ inked upon it.  He walked across the room and opened his window.  With just a thought, he summoned Wynmae who was playing down by the glacial stream that bordered the property.  An instant later, the little creature was fluttering just outside of his window.

“Are you sure that it’s not too far for you to travel?” asked Harry, “It will be a lot warmer there than it is here.”

Wynmae giggled and said, “Not too far, and not too warm.  Plenty of cold water to help Wynmae.”

“Okay,” whispered Harry, “just remember that you can’t be seen by anyone… leave the letter for him to find and get out of there, and watch out for the dementors…”

“The Old Ones will not bother Wynmae,” chimed the little creature as she reached for the envelope, “Wynmae will be back very soon.”

As soon as Wynmae touched the envelope, it dissolved into a wispy vapor along with the little creature.  Harry watched as the foggy mist swept across the dimly lit landscape and disappeared to the southeast.  He closed his window and waited.

A few minutes later, he heard Jaana’s light footsteps pass his door and disappear down the stairs.  When he heard the front door close and the telltale crack of Apparition, he knew that Jaana had left for her monthly shopping trip which would end with her having lunch with Healer Cooley.  He knew that he had well over four hours until she returned home.

Harry reached under his bed and pulled out a cloth sack that contained a variety of different clothing.  He pulled out a small sky-blue sundress, a lacy white shirt, a small pair of girl’s underwear, a pair of long white stockings and a pair of black leather shoes.  He then opened his trunk and pulled out three wrapped pieces of goo from the bags marked ‘dispel,’ ‘O,’ and ‘F.’

Harry quickly got undressed and placed his clothes into a small knapsack.  He unwrapped the pale yellow ‘F’ piece and looked at it with distaste before he popped it into his mouth and began to quickly chew.  A few disgusting moments later, he swallowed hard and waited.

A minute passed with no effect whatsoever, and he was beginning to think he had made a mistake in the brewing process when he felt an uncomfortable tingling begin in his belly that quickly spread throughout his body.

The change only took a few painful moments, but after the tingling had passed, he turned and looked at himself in his mirror.

Looking back at him was, what appeared to be, a very small girl, perhaps six years old, with long, black hair, thin, spindly arms and legs, and a rather thin, featureless body… well, it appeared featureless to him as he found himself staring at the place where at least one prominent feature had been just a minute before.

He shook himself out of his shock and quickly dressed in the girl’s clothing he had set out for himself, stuffed his wand, the ‘O’ piece, and the ‘dispel’ piece into the bag that contained his normal clothes as well as a larger set, a small metal cage, and a muggle tape recorder.  He slung the lot over his shoulder as he took another quick look in the mirror to make sure his scar was covered by the lengthened bangs of his hair before he soundlessly vanished from the room.

-----~-----

Sunday, July 2nd, 1989 9:57 AM

Lucius Malfoy was feeling quite pleased with himself.  Being a respected member of the Hogwarts Board of Governors, and counting on the fact that nearly all of the other members were woefully misinformed of the true nature of muggle education, it was very easy for him to convince the entire board to support his plan to provide underage magical training to pureblood children.  With the support of the entire board, it was assured that the Oversight Committee of the Ministry’s Department of Magical Education would approve the establishment of the new training facility.

Those fools are so gullible…

He had just left the new facility and was walking down the sidewalk towards Diagon Alley when he noticed a small girl wearing a sky-blue sundress leaning against the wall of a building and crying piteously.

Normally, he would pass by the urchin with hardly a glance, but paused when he recognized that the girl had attended the opening ceremony for the school he had just left.  As he approached the girl, he could tell that she was a magical child, and since she was at the ceremony, she was more than likely a pureblood.

He almost… almost… stopped and asked the girl what the trouble was.  He fully intended to stroll past the girl when she looked up at him with her teary green eyes.  They immediately widened in recognition.

“Mister Malfoy, sir!” pleaded the girl, “Can you help me?”

Lucius easily detected the refined quality behind her cracking voice… she was certainly a pureblood.  Still, he opened his mouth to inform the whelp that he had neither the time nor the inclination to assist her when the girl spoke again.

“The muggles, sir!” said the girl in a squeaky, panicked voice, “They grabbed my sister and dragged her in there!  I heard her scream!”

Lucius looked down into the shadowed alley that the young girl was pointing to.  He saw nothing, and was about to scoff at the dark-haired girl when he heard the clang of a rubbish bin and a muffled cry of pain.  He heard the girl behind him let out a frightened whimper, and decided that a bit of authorized ‘muggle hunting’ could do nothing but improve his standing in the magical community.

Lucius drew his wand and whispered to the girl behind him, “Wait here, I’ll get to the bottom of this.”

Lucius entered the shadows of the alley, but before he made it even ten feet in, he felt a series of sudden, sharp pains pepper his back.  Even when he looked down at himself and saw the dozen thin, pointy metal shards sticking out through the front of his robes, he still had no idea what had just happened.  He turned his surprised face around and saw the little girl standing just a few feet behind him… with a blank, emotionless expression on her face and an apple wood wand in her hand.  As his vision faded, he could have sworn that the little girl’s face was covered with frost, and the breath that was escaping her nostrils came out in vaporous clouds, as if it were the middle of winter.

That was the last thing Lucius Malfoy would ever see.

The little girl stepped over his lifeless body and walked further down the alley to where she had hidden the tape recorder that was still emitting the sounds of a struggle.

Just as she clicked the machine off, a blonde, middle-aged woman stepped into the entrance of the alley.  The woman looked down in horror at the lifeless body.

“Lucius?” she asked fearfully as she stepped closer to the body.  The woman looked up and saw the young, dark-haired girl standing in the middle of the alley a few meters beyond where Lucius was lying.  The child looked back at her with cold, impassive eyes and silently vanished from sight.

-----~-----

Sunday, July 2nd, 1989 10:08 AM

Harry faded into existence in central Devon in a grassy clearing amidst a copse of birch trees at the base of a hill.  He had scouted out the area a few days earlier, and found it was the easiest place to begin his search for the one that had caused both him and his older self a lifetime of misery… he still had about two more hours before Jaana returned, and from this place he had about a thirty minute walk to where he could find his quarry.  There was one final thing he had to take care of this day before he returned home to Iceland.

He had just begun his trek when he heard a very loud explosion come from up the hill just beyond the trees behind him.

He didn’t even flinch at the loud noise.  He instinctively crouched down, and then rolled across the ground to his left behind the cover of a wide bush.  He came to his feet again with his wand in his hand and in a defensive posture, but the only thing he could see was a cloud of black smoke rising from beyond the trees up the hill.

Harry quickly and cautiously navigated through the woods until he came to the area at the hill’s very crest.  There stood a tall tower made of dark stone looming against the cloudy, late-morning sky.  Out through one of the broken lower windows poured a billowing black smoke.  Through the crackling fire that was burning inside, he could hear the cries of a young girl.

Instinct kicked in once again and he raced up to the tower’s front door.  He entered the lower level and paused for only a moment at the sight of all of the bizarre oddities that covered every inch of the walls and were scattered throughout the room.  There were a series of glass display cases that held, among other things, fragments of petrified animal parts and incomplete skeletons of creatures he couldn’t readily identify.  There were clipped articles about odd creatures that were accompanied by blurry, unfocused pictures of whatever the articles were about.

Amidst all of the cluttered displays, he noticed a relatively clear moving photograph of a creature that he immediately recognized… it was of a being that looked very much like Wynmae.  He was about to move towards that display case when he heard the girl’s pitiful cry coming from the next room and he remembered why he was there.

Harry rushed across the room to the door that was next to a tall spiral staircase.  When he opened the door, he immediately started choking from the wall of black, foul-smelling smoke that poured out through the doorway.

“Hello?” Harry called into the smoky room between his coughs, “Are you all right?”

There was no answer save for the sound of the small girl’s crying.  Harry cautiously entered the room, but he couldn’t immediately see anything through the thick smoke.  As the smoke began to clear, he could just make out a figure kneeling in front of a motionless form lying on the floor.

Harry carefully stepped closer and asked, “What happened?”

The kneeling form slowly turned her face towards Harry and he could see that a good portion of the small girl’s long blonde hair had been singed away and that her tear-stained face was coated in the same black soot that covered everything in the room.

The girl’s wide, protuberant eyes lingered on Harry for a few seconds before they drifted back down to the figure lying on the floor.

“M-my mother… dead…” whispered the girl in a halting voice.

Harry looked around the smoke filled room and saw that the fire from the burning table on the far side of the room was beginning to spread to the curtains and other nearby pieces of furniture.

Harry laid his hand on the girl’s shoulder and calmly said, “We have to get out of here… the fire…”

“No!” screamed the girl as she threw herself onto the still smouldering form of her mother.

Harry grabbed the girl and tried to pull her away, but found he didn’t have the strength to even budge her.  He suddenly remembered that he was still in the body of a very young girl.  He quickly reached into his pack and pulled out the wrapped piece of goo that came from the bag labeled, ‘dispel,’ peeled off the leaf wrapper, and popped the white, clay-like substance into his mouth and began to chew.

It took a minute after swallowing the goo for him to feel the effects of the prior piece wearing off.  He felt his body enlarging when he suddenly realized that he was still in the sundress that was quickly becoming four or five sizes too small for his nearly nine-year-old body, but he didn’t have time to change.  The fire was quickly spreading and the room was beginning to rapidly fill with smoke once again.

In his original, larger body, he was easily able to pull the young girl away from the lifeless body of her mother.  He dragged the kicking and screaming girl from the room and outside into the tower’s front yard.

Still panting from the exertion, he told the distraught girl, “Stay here, I’ll try to get her out.”

She looked back at him with a confused expression, obviously trying to figure out where the small girl went and where this boy in a skin-tight, girl’s dress came from.

Harry rushed back into the smoky tower and navigated through the junk towards the burning room.  He would try to get the mother’s body out, but he knew that it would be nearly impossible for him, and he wouldn’t risk his life for a corpse.  If it got too bad in there, he would abandon the body… but he had to at least try.

Harry kept close to the floor as he crawled inside of the burning room.  He felt his way to the body of the girl’s mother, grabbed hold of her charred robe and tried to drag the body towards the door.  The rapidly building smoke burned his throat and made it difficult for him to breathe.  Just as he decided it was a lost cause and he should get out while he could he heard something that made him freeze in place… a low, pained moan that came from the body he was dragging.

The woman wasn’t dead.

Adrenaline coursed through Harry’s veins as he began frantically pulling the woman across the floor, but he knew his energy was quickly draining away along with his strength.

There was only one thing he could think of to do.  He reached into his backpack once again and drew out the last piece of goo that had been labeled ‘O,’ unwrapped it and popped it into his mouth.

By the time the substance took effect, his eyes were burning badly and his throat was nearly closed against the smoke that permeated the burning room.  He could feel bits of smouldering cinders falling against his exposed skin, as the tiny dress he was wearing had ripped away at the seams when his body took on its new shape.

Harry scooped the stricken woman up into his arms and sprinted out of the room and outside into the fresh air.

He laid the woman down on the grass and began choking in as much clean air as he could as the young girl ran up and collapsed on her mother.

“Get help,” choked out Harry, “She’s not dead.”

The girl looked up at him with shock clearly etched on her face.  He wondered why she was just staring at him until he looked down at himself and saw that he had the body of an adult… a completely naked adult, save for a few shards of blue sundress and a now very restrictive backpack.

Harry shrugged off the backpack, reached in, and pulled out a large pair of trousers.  He slipped them on and was just buttoning the waist when he heard voices approaching from down the hill.

“Help is coming,” Harry said to the young girl who was staring back at him with wide eyes, “I have to go.  I can’t be discovered here.”

“Who are you really?  I saw you change right before my eyes…you’re not a girl, and you’re not an adult… are you a Mandrogan Chameleon?”

Harry wasn’t quite sure he knew what a Mandrogan Chameleon was, but he was sure that he wasn’t one of them.

“I’m just a boy.  My name’s Harry.”

“My name is Luna.  Will you come back to visit me?” asked the little girl.

Harry looked closely at the soot covered girl for what seemed like the first time.  He could almost see the loneliness in her eyes.  He could tell that she was yet another child who was virtually friendless.

“I’ll visit you soon…” said Harry as he looked over his shoulder towards the approaching voices, “I must go now.”

With that, Harry silently faded from sight and returned to Iceland.  He would have to postpone his quest to steal the rat from the Weasley family, but vowed to himself that he would get the traitorous rodent very, very soon.

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