A/N: A short little note at the start, if you'll bear with me…

I wrote the first half of this story in a fever after HBP. Then I got a new writing job, and it went away. When DH was released, I was reluctant to go back to it. Mostly, because I knew I'd get accused of outright stealing themes and events from the book. But that's not true. I feel gratified that I was able to carry on the story from HBP in ways that Jo Rowling herself did so magnificently in DH, and everything from chapter 12 onward is written post-DH, and I'm making a conscious effort to stick to the notes I made and not piggyback on a work I can't hope to compete with.

This story is my own effort, and I will claim only the inspiration J.K's beautiful world has given myself, and so many others. Harry Potter, and all related characters are hers alone…

Harry Potter

And the Secret of the Scar

Chapter One – An Unexpected Plea

The door in front of him was locked. Ivy hung from the walls, creeping down the sides and venturing right across the portal so it covered the entire door like a giant green spider web. Weeds jutted from between the broken flagstones leading up to the door, and ugly, twisting thorn bushes flourished across the dappled, unkempt yard.

The moon was obscured behind thick, angry clouds that loomed low over the land and a tangle of fog dripped in across the yard, searching between the twisted, gnarled trees and creating their own dense patches of shadow. The house, in short, was creepy. Like something out of an old horror movie, everything in stark, dull hues that screamed a sense of ominous foreboding.

But the boy felt no fear. Indeed, now that he faced the barred door he felt his heart beat faster as a sense of excitement started slowly pulsing through his veins. His cheeks flushed and a thin mist escaped between his teeth as he exhaled rapidly.

He was here, and the locked door would not be a problem. He curled his fingers tight around the wand in his right hand and pointed it at the lock.

"Alohomora."

He barely whispered the spell but immediately he heard a click as the lock slid back. He gripped the heavy iron handle and twisted it, opening the door wide. It creaked, obviously, but he wasn't worrying about making any noise. There was nobody in the house, he was sure of that, and the old manor was far enough away from the village across the valley that he was certain he wouldn't be detected. He pushed through the door and entered a huge, hulking kitchen. It smelled of old ammonia and neglect. A film of grime covered the floor and squelched against his trainers when he stepped on the linoleum. It was dark in the kitchen and again the boy raised his wand and muttered an incantation.

"Lumos."

A beam of light flared at the end of his wand and he used it like an old fashioned torch, illuminating the walls until he saw the door leading off the kitchen into the rest of the house. He didn't linger. He crossed through the kitchen and through the other door into a hallway. There was the front door, off to the side, flanked by high, grimy windows and across from it a set of stairs leading to the upper floors. He crossed the stone-flagged entranceway and mounted the stairs, taking his time, climbing steadily. He reached a small landing and immediately turned to his right, facing a long narrow passage. He moved swiftly, hurrying down the passage to a door at the end, which stood slightly ajar.

He pushed through and stepped into a small living room. For a second, just as he crossed the door, he'd expected… something. A fire crackling in the grate and… someone… sitting in the stuffy armchair facing the fireplace. But there was nobody there. The grate was empty and cold as the chair. He felt a tinge of disappointment.

It would have been so much easier if the person he was expecting had been there, waiting for him. No more searching, no more waiting, no more doubt as to the outcome of the battle they both knew must come. But he shrugged it off. He'd known he wouldn't be here. He would have sensed a presence at least, he was sure.

He took the opportunity to scan the room. There was another chair, this one made of wood and pocked with holes. Termites had taken up residence. His imagination could hear their grubby little jaws ripping through the soft wood. The carpet on the floor was worn and tattered, the curtains on the windows heavy with dust. He turned to the wall opposite the window. It was bare except for a single photograph, framed in tarnished silver. The photo had been taken in this very room. He recognised the fireplace. It was obviously very old. It showed a dapper, handsome man with a shock of full, grey hair and an equally handsome old woman. Both were sitting in comfortable, high-backed wing chairs and looking all austere for the camera. Standing between them, his long, delicate hands curled on the back of the chairs, was a younger man. His features were just as delicate, almost moulded. He had black hair and a winning smile.

The picture was a little depressing, and without knowing why he reached up and lifted it off the hook pegged to the wall. He set it, face-down on the ground and stepped back, now facing the blank wall. In the corner, near the ceiling, a fat spider scurried along its web then stopped, it's eight gleaming eyes watching the intruder intently. He held up the wand again.

"Nox," he muttered, and the light at the end of the wand flickered out.

He stood in the darkness for long moments, listening to the soft rustling of the wind outside. Then:

"Flagrate!"

A jet of fire seared from the end of the wand, ripping apart the darkness that had only just settled. He moved deliberately along the wall, drawing the wand up and down until it seemed the entire room might catch alight. But it did not. He extinguished the fire still erupting from the tip of the wand and stepped back, a grim, fierce expression on his face. The heat from the wall forced him to step back, almost all the way across the room and a thin film of sweat coated his face. But he was satisfied. He'd done what he'd intended.

It would draw attention. The fiery red light would be spotted, even all the way across the valley and it would not go out. Not even when the fire brigade came and unleashed their jets of freezing foam. The message would remain. His message to his prey:

"I'M COMING FOR YOU, TOM!"

And he laughed. The sound was high-pitched and tinged with a slight hint of madness. He was shocked to hear the laugh coming from his own mouth, but he couldn't stop. He laughed, and laughed, and laughed… until the peculiar scar on his forehead flashed with a white-hot burst of pain, and the laugh turned into a scream.

Many miles away, a young man named Harry Potter was still screaming when he jerked awake so roughly that he got tangled up in his sheets and fell out of bed. He landed with a painful thud on the floor and for a second he just lay there, panting. He reached up tentatively and rubbed the lightning-bolt shaped scar on his forehead. It was throbbing, as though someone had set an electric current running through it.

This wasn't the first time he'd dreamed something so vivid, only to be woken up by his scar flaring with pain. Indeed, three years ago, he'd dreamt about that same house he'd visited in his dream tonight, though, at that time, he hadn't known where it was. But Harry knew now. That was the Riddle House. The once-stately manor that belonged to Lord Voldemort's family. The house where Voldemort had murdered his father and grandparents… the people in the photograph…

The dream had been so clear. He could still feel the heat of the flames as they stretched towards him, threatening to scorch his face…

Harry heard footsteps out in the hallway and hurried to his feet. Had his scream woken his aunt and uncle? If it had, Harry knew he was in for a tongue-lashing. Uncle Vernon would probably curse and blame 'all that infernal noise' on Harry's snowy owl, Hedwig. It wouldn't make any bit of difference for Harry to point out that Hedwig wasn't even here. She'd been gone for two days, delivering a letter. So Harry flung himself back into bed, hurriedly rearranging the covers and, within seconds, he was pretending to be asleep. There was a knock at the door. Quick, soft, almost-shy raps against the wood, as though the person doing the knocking didn't really want to be heard. Harry was startled. His uncle Vernon, and even his aunt Petunia, had never bothered knocking before. They tended to barge straight in on those rare occasions when they decided to stomach the sight of Harry.

Harry had lived with his aunt and uncle, and their overgrown son, Dudley, ever since the death of his own parents some sixteen years previously. Harry was never what one might call a welcome guest in the Dursley home. Shameful intruder, or loathed interloper maybe… but never welcome. At the best of times the Dursleys treated Harry like he didn't exist, and at the worst of times with a cold contempt. Harry was as happy about staying with the Dursleys as they were about having him.

But Harry knew it would all be over soon. He had less than a month to go until his seventeenth birthday when, in his world, he would come of age and be legally allowed to live on his own. Harry's world, was the wizarding world, and it was as far removed from the manicured, picket fence suburbia of Privet Drive (where the Dursleys lived) as it was possible to get. Harry had promised his old headmaster, Albus Dumbledore, that he would stay at Privet Drive until he came of age, and Harry was determined to uphold that promise – no matter how unhappy it made him or his aunt and uncle. But once he turned seventeen, he would leave and never come back.

The knock came again. Against his better judgement, Harry sat up in bed and stared at the door.

"Come in."

The door creaked open and the looming figure of Dudley Dursley appeared in the doorway. Harry often thought that a wizard meeting Dudley for the first time would think that he'd had an engorgement charm placed on him, but this wasn't the case. Dudley's massive bulk came from eating anything, from the full stock of the pantry to plastic wrapping ever since his pudgy little fingers had first been able to grasp an ice-cream tub. His cousin's floppy blonde hair was longer than Harry had ever known it, drooping over his watery blue eyes and though still massive by anybody's standards, he was leaner now – with the kind of bulk more in keeping with a pro wrestler, rather than a sumo wrestler. This, Harry knew, was down to his continued obsession with boxing. Dudley was now the inter-county junior middleweight boxing champion. Harry had seen the trophy his first day back at Privet Drive. The trophy was hard to miss. Uncle Vernon had bought a special display case and stuck it right in the entrance hall so that it was the first thing anyone saw when they came through the front door. So proud were the Dursleys of their son's undoubted talent for inflicting pain on others that Harry was sure they would have displayed the trophy on the front lawn if they weren't terrified that the gilted monstrosity would get stolen.

Dudley shuffled into the room and an alarm went off in the back of Harry's mind. It was the way his cousin moved, it was – wrong. When he was younger, the best Dudley could manage was a waddle. But recently he'd developed the characteristic swagger of the biggest bully in the playground. Now though, his shoulders were drooped and he skirted across the space like he was afraid and he seemed… smaller, somehow.

"What do you want?" demanded Harry, shortly, not bothering to hide the annoyance in his voice.

Whatever his cousin's size, Harry had long since ceased to be afraid of him. Harry could safely say that Dudley was one of the least terrifying obstacles he'd ever faced. At the top of the list came things like a giant three-headed dog, affectionately known as 'Fluffy', a massive fire-breathing dragon hailing from Hungary and, of course, Voldemort. Always Voldemort. Besides, Harry was no longer the puny shrimp Dudley used to practise his uppercut on. He'd grown a fair bit this past year, and also broadened out across the shoulders as he crept ever steadily towards manhood. A fact he hadn't fully appreciated at school, but one that came fully home to him when he returned to Privet Drive to discover that he was as tall as Dudley for the first time in his life. It had been quite a shock. Indeed, Harry couldn't guess who was more shocked, himself or Dudley.

But Dudley didn't look shocked now, he wasn't even looking menacing or mean which would be normal for Dudley. Instead, he looked nervous and apprehensive and he kept wringing his hands together, his eyes flicking into the dark corners of the room as though expecting to find some lurking monster standing in the shadows.

"Well, if you're not going to answer me, at least switch on the light," said Harry. Dudley did so, carefully closing the door first. When he turned back to Harry he seemed more sure of himself, as though the light gave him comfort.

"Need to talk to you," said Dudley.

"Oh great, thanks for filling me in. Never would have guessed that on my own," said Harry.

Harry didn't know why he was being so short with his cousin, except that the sheer oddness of the situation, of Dudley's manner, was unnerving him slightly. Dudley didn't appear to hear his words though. He crossed the room and lifted the chair facing Harry's desk, carrying it across to the bed and sitting down. For a second, Harry had a vision of the chair splintering into kindling the minute Dudley's lowered his excessive weight on it, but it held up fine.

"What do you want," asked Harry.

Now that he was sitting, and apparently on the verge of disclosing whatever it was that had gotten him out of bed, Dudley couldn't seem to speak. He opened his mouth, closed it again, then opened it – giving a rather good impression of a freshly landed fish.

"Dudley," Harry was becoming even more annoyed now. His scar was still hurting and his cousin's muteness was not something he wanted to deal with at two o'clock in the morning.

"I think I can feel them," said Dudley, his voice hardly more than a whisper, so Harry had to strain to hear him.

"You… what?"

"Them," said Dudley, his agitation increasing, "I can feel them! I've felt them all year."

"Felt what, Dudley? I'm a lot of things, but I'm not a mind-reader you know?"

Normally, a sentence like that would have been enough to bring a terrified scowl to Dudley's face. The Dursleys loathed even the barest mention of anything magical or, as they would call it, the abnormal. But Dudley did nothing of the sort. Instead, his face was screwed up in a look of intense concentration, and for Dudley that was an alarming state. The longest he ever concentrated on anything was the time he took to clean his plate.

"Those things," said Dudley, leaning closer to Harry, as though conveying a secret, "The things that – you know – those things that… attacked us! The things that made it so cold."

"The dementors?" said Harry, a beam of understanding finally coming to light in his brain.

Two years ago, Harry and Dudley had been attacked by a pair of dementors while on their way home from the park two streets over. The dementors were the former guards of Azkaban, the wizard prison, and were some of the foulest creatures Harry had ever encountered. They were viscous beings that sucked all the happiness and hope out of any place they inhabited, and had the power to suck the soul out of a person with a single kiss. Harry had thought the dementors were sent by Voldemort, but later he learned that they were set on him by Delores Umbridge, a Ministry employee seeking to prevent Harry's return to Hogwarts. Only Harry's quick thinking had saved him and his cousin that night.

"What do you mean you can feel them?" he asked, now curious to know what Dudley had to say.

"I've felt them all year," Dudley said again, "At school. Everything's cold… there's no… happiness anymore. Everybody feels it, but I… I…" he trailed off, looking down at his socked feet, seemingly unable to finish the sentence.

"You know what's causing it," said Harry, finishing the thought for them, "Because you felt it before. The way they affect you."

Dudley nodded, and he seemed glad that Harry understood what he was getting at. Harry, though, understood far more than that. For a second, he debated whether he should explain anything to Dudley. The Dursleys seemed at their most content when they existed in their own, closed-off, fishbowl little world. But it was Dudley who had come into his, Harry's, room tonight, and Harry felt it was only fair to tell him everything. He didn't hate the Dursleys enough to lie to them.

"You're feeling it because they're out there now," said Harry, "They're everywhere. The Ministry of Magic have lost control of them, and many of them have deserted their posts at Azkaban. That's the…"

"Wizard prison, yeah I know," said Dudley.

For a moment, Harry broke off, startled both by Dudley's recollection of a word he'd probably heard only once, on that night two years before – and by the fact that Dudley had said the word 'wizard'.

"Yeah…" said Harry, composing himself, "Yeah… the wizard prison. They're on the loose now, and according to rumour, they're breeding. They're attacking people left and right and nobody can seem to stop them. Of course Muggles – that is, non-magical people, can't even see dementors. I saw them that night they attacked us but you just felt it go all cold. The same thing's happening now. People are just getting depressed and sad, but they don't know why."

Dudley was nodding feverishly by the time Harry stopped explaining, "Yes, yes," he said, "Two of the kids at school tried to kill themselves. But they couldn't explain why. Everybody's in a mood. I know it's these dementures."

"Dementors," Harry corrected him.

"Whatever," said Dudley, "How do I fight them?"

At first, Harry didn't answer. He was sure he'd heard wrong, but then Dudley repeated himself.

"How do I fight them?'

"You can't Dudley," said Harry, "Only wizards can fight them. The only thing that works on them is a Patronus charm, and there are some wizards who can't even produce a proper Patronus."

"You can," said Dudley, his voice quaking slightly and Harry thought he might have caught a hint of admiration in it, but that was probably his imagination, "You fought them off the last time."

"The last time you said I was the one who attacked you," Harry pointed out.

"But I know you weren't. My mum knew what they were and I'm still feeling them."

"Well, yeah, I can fight them. I've been able to conjure a patronus for years, but that –"

"Teach me," said Dudley, suddenly.

A shocked silence suddenly descended on the room. This time, there was no mistaking Dudley's words, although Harry couldn't believe he'd uttered them. It struck him that this was, at once, one of the longest and certainly the most bizarre conversation he'd ever had with his cousin.

"You want me to teach you the Patronus charm?"

"Yes," said Dudley, "I hate them. I hate what they do to me and to everybody. I can't fight them with my fists – " to demonstrate he held up his melon-sized hands, "So I want you to teach me to fight them."

Harry didn't respond for a long moment. He just studied Dudley's face, growing more and more alarmed by the fierce determination he saw there.

"I can't, Dud," he said, eventually, "It doesn't work like that. You need… you know? Talent. Magical talent. It's something you're born with."

"Don't lie to me!" stormed Dudley, so suddenly that Harry jumped. He was sure that that must have woken Uncle Vernon up, but Dudley wasn't finished, "You just want them to get me, don't you? You hate me. You always hated me, and now you're hoping they'll come and finish me off!"

"If I wanted them to finish you I would've let them have you two years ago, you stupid oaf," retorted Harry, his own temper suddenly snapping, "I'm telling the truth. I can't teach you. I could tell you the incantation, I could give you my wand and you could try until you were blue in the face but nothing will happen. That's just the way it works!"

At the end of this, Harry was breathing hard, his face twisted into a scowl. But the scowl soon disappeared as soon as his words sunk in and took effect on Dudley. He seemed to deflate like a big, blue-eyed balloon. He slumped in the chair, staring at the ground again and he seemed utterly defeated.

"Dud," said Harry, softer this time, "I'm sorry. But I can't change it."

"You're leaving, aren't you?" said Dudley, suddenly switching tack, "When you turn seventeen?"

"Yeah, I am. Why?"

"What'm I gonna do then?" asked Dudley, "What'm I gonna do if they come for me, or my mum, or my dad? If you're not here, what…"

Again, Dudley couldn't bring himself to finish the thought. Harry was appalled. It hadn't once occurred to him that his departure might have a negative effect on the Dursleys. Whenever he'd pictured the scene in his mind he'd always conjured images of a wild, uncontrollable party with lots of laughter as his aunt and uncle celebrated their seperation from the magical world. But, on reflection, Harry supposed he should have seen this coming. The worlds of Muggles and wizards were melding now, more so than ever. Voldemort had little regard for secrecy, and he certainly didn't care how many people got killed or hurt or learnt of his existence. The horrors of Harry's world were imposing themselves on the world of the citizens of Privet Drive to such an extent that even Dudley was feeling the heat.

"I don't know, Dudley," said Harry, lamely, "I don't know what you're going to do. But I can't stay."

"Why not?"

"Do you really want me here?"

"Yes."

Dudley answered so simply, and so quickly, that Harry felt an unexpected lump rise in his throat.

"Really?"

"If the dementors come, you're the only one who can save my mum and dad," said Dudley.

Harry rubbed at his scar again, his brain buzzing. Of all the obstacles, of all the considerations he'd turned over in his mind for the past few weeks, this was the last one he'd expected to face. He looked up into Dudley's round, sweaty face, and decided the truth was his only resort.

"I have to go," he said, "The dementors can be stopped, but I can't do it from Privet Drive. They're being controlled by a wizard. His name is Voldemort. Remember, I told you about him too, that night. He's evil, Dudley, more evil than you know and he's the one who's setting the dementors loose on Muggles. He's the one I've got to find, and stop. If I don't, none of us are safe. Not you, your mum, your dad, or anybody."

Dudley seemed to consider this for a moment, then:

"Why you?" he asked, showing unaccustomed shrewdness, "Why can't your… your Ministry, or whatever, stop this Voldemort?"

"That's just the way it is," said Harry, "It'll take too long to explain. He's the one who gave me this scar, when he killed my parents, and I'm the only one who can stop him. That's the way it is."

"Fine," said Dudley, standing. He seemed to have regained his old, petulant look now, "Fine, if you won't help us. I'll find another way."

"Dudley –"

But Dudley strode across the room and didn't look back. He opened the door, turned out the light, and was gone. Harry flopped back in his bed, replaying the strange conversation over in his mind. If anything, he was more anxious now than ever. Whatever the Dursleys were; mean-spirited, petty, vindictive – the list went on and on – the fact was, they were Harry's last remaining family. And they felt the threat of Voldemort. Harry tossed and turned for another hour, struggling to regain the comfort of sleep. At long, last he drifted off, slipping into a familiar dream. A little while later, a murmur slipped from his lips, full of menace and meaning:

"I'm coming for you, Tom!"