A/N: Sorry it is taking so long to get these chapters up. I am spreading myself too thin I think, but here it is. And I will take this off of pause.
The Morning After
Harry woke up alone some time after, face down on the floor. A scant pool of blood mixed with drool stained his otherwise pristine carpet. His face hurt some, but not nearly as much as it should have for a punch that had rendered him unconscious. He looked around, expecting his assailant to still be there, in his room, but found it to be completely bare. He pushed up off the floor, standing, and grabbed the metal baseball bat from his closet. He didn't think twice, just ran into his living room, wielding the bat and screaming like a banshee. The living room was empty.
"What the hell is going on?" Harry asked aloud as he stood there, holding the bat in his boxer shorts. He looked around his small apartment to find that it was completely ransacked. It was an apparent robbery, he thought, and blind panic welled up in him. Harry ran back to his bedroom and felt his stomach fall to the floor. The picture of the black dog had been snatched from the wall and thrown aside. The frame had cracked upon impact with the closet door. The safe door hung limply from one miniscule hinge. Everything inside of Harry's safe was gone.
Harry rushed to the bathroom and was sick, his sides heaving and aching before he was through. It was gone, all of it. Harry mentally checked off everything he had kept in there: the picture, his important papers, and the key to his vault at the wizarding bank, his cloak, and his wand. The last two hurt the most. The cloak had been his father, and the only life line that Harry had to the man that had fathered him. The wand, the famous Elder Wand, made him a wizard.
"Brit? You in `ere?" David called as he stood in the doorway to the apartment. Harry didn't want to see anyone, but knew that he would have at least attest that he was still alive.
"Yeah, back here," Harry called as he walked back towards the living room. He felt ill at ease at the thought that his wand was gone.
"What'n the `ell is goin' on?" David asked as his eyes surveyed the destruction. Harry looked down at his watch. More than five hours had passed between his attack and his reviving.
"I think I need to call the police," Harry muttered as he hopelessly looked around for his telephone. David pulled his cell phone out of his pocket and shoved it into Harry's hand.
"I wouldn't touch nothin' until the cops come," David said as he remained in the doorway. Harry nodded and summoned the police using David's cell phone.
By the time the police left, Harry felt spent. At David's request, Harry had called in sick to the mine. After the report was made, and pictures were taken, Harry was left alone to deal with the mess. Harry sunk onto the floor rather uselessly, his back against the door, as he surveyed his once cluttered but untainted apartment. Harry sighed and stood, his face twisted unpleasantly.
"I can't believe that someone broke in here to steal my wand," Harry growled as he gathered the books that were closest to him. He was angry, but not that meaningless anger that sometimes plagued the other miners who were dissatisfied about the way that their lives were going. This was a more direct anger at his permanent loss of his wand, and of his wizard-hood. He would have cried if it weren't for the fact that he hadn't cried since the war.
Harry managed to right most of the wrong in his living room and went to work scrubbing the kitchen by hand, a task he had perfected during his youth spent with his aunt. He made a face and didn't understand the point of completely upending his life if the robber or robbers, as it may have been, knew about the safe. They should have and could have just strolled into Harry's room and made off with the contents of the safe. He or they or whatever had been in his room.
`I can't believe I was laid out in one punch,' Harry growled and he began to scrub harder. Harry looked up at the door suspiciously as he heard a knock. Glancing at the baseball bat now resting against the bookshelf, Harry stood and headed to greet the knocker with extreme prejudice.
"Yes?" Harry asked rudely as he opened the door widely. Before him stood a young woman he was vaguely familiar with, probably from the mailbox or something.
"Betsy told me that you had a nasty little break in," the woman said as she entered the apartment, her arms burdened with a heavy paper sack. She placed it on top of the counter and began unloading food. Harry frowned at her confused, but moved to close the door. Before he could close it, though, Betsy and another woman entered the apartment.
"Brit, dear, go and relax," Betsy said warmly. "We'll finish cleaning and put on a stew for you."
"Who are they?" Harry asked quietly as he guided Betsy away from the pushy woman with the paper bag and the quiet, more timid young woman.
"Where are my manners? This is Mrs. Chistery, she lives on the third floor," Betsy introduced. The pushy woman smiled lustily and shook Harry's hand. He could see up close that she was not a pretty woman. "This is my friend from college, The University of Arts and Movement, come to stay a spell with me as we say. Brit this is Quinn Rouse."
"Pleasure to meet you both formally," Harry muttered. The younger woman, Quinn, nodded and took a bag and headed towards the back of the apartment, Harry's room. Harry followed her, still unable to feel at ease with people in his room. Not after the unknown person or people had invaded his room and knocked him unconscious.
"You must be feeling vulnerable and raped," Quinn murmured as she stood in his bedroom door way. She headed toward the window and kneeled down, pulling a rag and a small bottle. She went to work cleaning the blood.
"How did you know that there was blood there?" Harry asked suspiciously as the young woman cleared away the small stain.
"David told Betsy you looked as if someone hit you," Quinn said quietly as she frowned at him. "You have blood on your shirt, and the walls are thin. I heard you had been in the bedroom when you were hit."
"Sorry," Harry mumbled as he touched the splintered wood of the frame. "I am just a little jumpy and suspicious."
"Naturally," Quinn said as she forced a smile and began to pick up various things up off the floor. Quinn lifted the book Harry had been reading just a short time before the attack. "I never took you as a fairy tale kind of guy."
"We just met," Harry said as he took the book away from her quickly.
"Of course, yes, but from the brief encounter, still, you don't take me as the type to read fairy tales," Quinn said as Harry carried the book over to his dresser. He looked in disbelief as he placed the book on the smooth surface.
"I don't believe it!" Harry breathed and Quinn came to his side quickly.
"What?" Quinn asked as she looked at the scratches in the surface of the dresser. The scratches read: Go HOME, Harry, or ELSE! "Brit, who is Harry?"
However, it wasn't the threatening message scratched into the wood of his dresser that had him gasping in awe like an excited child. It was the seemingly unimportant piece of wood resting beside it: his wand, the Elder Wand, untouched and undamaged. Harry reached for wand first but Quinn's fingers closed on it quicker and she held it rather unrefined and unpolished in manner.
"What a queer thing to find left in the apartment," Quinn whispered, not to Harry so much as herself. She turned to look at Harry with curiosity as she turned the thing over in her hand.
"That is mine," Harry said as he tried to maintain a nonchalant sort of way about him. He didn't want to raise any suspicions about him and the nature of his relationship with the bit of wood.
"That, I don't doubt, as it is in your apartment," Quinn said as she still handled the piece of ornately carved wood. She smiled as her fingers caressed the tiny carved bird. "It is a beautifully old piece of wood, I would dare say."
"Thank you," Harry said. He was getting antsy as she still molested and raped the secrets of the wood. Harry shook his head, unnoticed by Quinn.
`She is just admiring it as art, not as a wand,' Harry urged himself as he fought to control the blind panic that seemed to restoring itself in his chest. Quinn handed it back to Harry, and he fought not to hug the wand in front of her.
"Well, I must get back to cleaning," Quinn said brightly as she straightened the book on the dresser.
Harry thanked the women an hour or so later as he let them out of the apartment. There was the rich, warm smell of a stew in the crock pot that Betsy had started for him, and the apartment was spotless. Except for the safe and the frame and of course the missing things from the safe, it looked like the apartment had never been broken into. Harry took his wand, which was never going to leave his person again and headed toward the bedroom. He pulled the curtains tight and fixed the safe and the picture with a flick of his wand.
Harry went to the dresser and tried to erase the writing but with no avail. Giving up, Harry tucked his wand into his pocket and grabbed the book. He thought about reading it in his bedroom, but thought that it was too weird and like before. A bowl of hot stew in front of him, Harry tucked into the table and opened the book.
The prince had misinterpreted the message the owl gave him, for the owl was an enchanted owl that could not speak but could write. The message had meant to be a summons of sorts, but the message had been distorted and the owl was murdered. This was all unknown to the prince, who read the message as a threat once he awoke from his forced slumber, unaffected by the slumber except for a busted lip.
Harry's fingers went to his tender lip and shook his head. This was the stupidest thing that he had ever thought of. It was coincidence, plain and simple. The vague story could have been interpreted in just about anyone's situation; especially if you were as suspicious and bored as Harry had been as of lately. Harry laughed at himself again, and read on.
Little did the prince know that there was a friend among him, there to help him return to his kingdom and to his previous glory. The prince had been unaware, but it would become evident soon. He was to attend a feast in his adopted kingdom, a feast being held in his honor. This Sunday night.
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