The letter made him leave. He would miss his little incubator of an island: the warm weather, the beaches, the five-o-clock somewhere culture that could care less if his poverty came from being a fugitive or from bankruptcy. The whole island suffered. The "why" of poverty didn't matter so much as the "with whom" and he had given them smashing company. The sun had mended large swaths of his soul, the part that hid his depression, and had reinvigorated the charm of his inner patron.

He cut his matted hair.

The locals had found it odd that he'd used cast nets from the boats to catch the parrots and macaws and how he'd tied little handwritten letters to their feet and whispered in their ears and sent them away again in their squawking. But even that they ignored, ultimately, because in the context of the rest of the island's sleeping rough and their various mental states, his was a mild case.

Britain would not be so kind.

Then again: had it ever?

He had to go. A weird thing happened this morning, though. My scar hurt again. That's what the letter had said and it was enough to make him leave his island incubator. He had to go. He'd told the boy to call on him if ever he needed to. Well, the boy needed to now, all right. He'd planned on the boy writing to say he'd been mistreated by that "perfectly normal" bourgeois aunt and uncle of his - anyone who spent their lives making machines that poked holes in the earth had no business raising someone else's child. That wasn't the only boring thing. The words my scar had burrowed down deep into the recesses of his being and there they festered, prodding him back home as an abscess prods one towards the dentist.

Were her parents still dentists? These people and their drills...

Or, rather, prodding him back towards what had once been home. That's the interesting thing about the word homeless: those without homes, by definition, wandered. And some wandered aimlessly. And some wandered with purpose. Mother would never have understood that. Society - even the island society - treated all homeless men and women alike: as aimless. Whether by spitting on him or ignoring him through diverted glances or refusing him a bog standard meal like crackers, they kept him from his dignity. And they tolerated him. It wasn't, in the end, welcome.

Yes, it was their tolerance that bothered him.

He didn't want to be tolerated. He wanted to be an honored guest. He'd read this memoir by some Half-Irish bloke while sleeping on the beaches - one of those discarded mass market paperbacks the Americans had left in their wake. He'd saved it from the high tide, having dusted off the sand. The author was good, though clearly unmagical, and had said something like, "Maybe your country is only a place you make up in your mind. Something you dream about and sing about. Maybe it's not a place on the map at all, but just a story full of people you meet and places you visit, full of books and films you've been to. I'm not afraid of being homesick and having no language to live in. I don't have to be like anyone else. I'm walking on the wall and nobody can stop me." Walking on the wall. He'd been walking on the wall since they'd kicked him out in his teens. The Britain he remembered was not the Britain to which he would be returning. Marauders murdered and exiled and run aground all. None of them left like the glory days. And if only he could somehow bring them back, bring their footprints back to the map like Peter's had just last year.

My scar hurt again.

He sent a letter to the headmaster about it all and the headmaster replied in agreement, though he had his reservations. He suggested going to number 12. But number 12 wasn't home, so he wrote back vetoing that idea. His home was not a place on the map at all. He suggested the Scottish countryside. The headmaster wrote back his reservations and said: keep to the caves. What was it with the headmaster and caves? The letter also mentioned how Bertha Jorkins had died.

He wrote back to the boy:

I'm flying north immediately. This news about your scar is the latest in a series of strange rumors that have reached me here. If it hurts again, go straight to Dumbledore - they're saying he's got Mad-Eye out of retirement, which means he's reading the signs, even if no one else is. I'll be in touch soon. My best to Ron and Hermione. Keep your eyes open...

So he rode back on the smelly beast. Considering how he had no money for a cab or a plane or a ship, and considering how he no longer had his motorcycle, it was the cheapest and the fastest and the most discrete way, as long as he stuck to the shadows. And the beast kept him company in a way, though it felt more like another form of being tolerated. In the beast's defense, he probably felt merely tolerated by him as well - two roommates stuck together, working together, sleeping in the same room, unable to communicate. (Not unlike growing up in the House of Black.) And they both smelled of the road and their filth and the need to wazz against walls and and the roots of trees. Smells demented, but it's the way of many ex cons. The body odor too... well it's not like they had any lack for water, sometimes a man just forgets to bathe in the midst of his depression.

And sometimes a beast is just a smelly beast, regardless of wings or hooves.

The ride was long.

Spending the summer at his friend's house, that was the postscript in the lad's letter. The postscript called to mind summers at James' house where they'd take to the woods and fields and dig burrows and lay out beds of clover and build castles of sticks and fairy stones - the ones with the holes in them, playing pretend as they did. He hoped the boy would have that sort of fun this summer. Fun was in short supply these days.