To the Reader...
I write this for my own enjoyment. Dispite my own vexation at authors who do not update often, or at all, I find myself unable to garantee the smoothe flow of chapters from beneath my fingers. In the meantime, Harry Potter, belongs to J.K.Rowling, and I am not she. Throughout the course of this story, charaters from other tales will probably make a cameo appearance, although they and their true plots will be altered considerably. If you recognise any characters, and disagree with my portrayal of them, please go to "review" and tell me why you think this character is out of character. If you do not recognise the character, or are not sure, I will post a complete list of characters at the end of this work.
This story takes place in fourth year, and makes considerable reference to events that never happened in the books.
The Fairy Godmother
Silence only sleep could bring swirled all over the Hogwarts grounds (as well as just about every-where else in the hemisphere). In most places the only sound was peaceful breathing (or not-so-peaceful snoring), or the tic-tic-tic of clocks. One clock in particular was very loud indeed; the grandfather clock in the Gryffindor common area could be heard through out the room. Tic-tic-tic it went as it counted down to midnight, tic-tic-tic. Finally, in a booming gong, it sounded out one-two-three times, and again and again in its dutiful count to twelve. Unlike the ticking, this could be heard through out the tower, and many a new first year would wake up in their first few weeks, before becoming used to it. Seeing as it was now the last week in November, no one even stirred, for a little while at least.
Up some certain stairs and behind a certain door, under certain covers on a certain bed, a certain child slept peacefully. All that was visible was wisps of short dark hair, poking out from underneath the blanket. Being a fourth-year, he neither stirred at the gongs, nor even let them into his dreams. In the dark room, the chimes nine-ten-eleven came with no affect what so ever.
The clock chimed for a twelfth time, and, at that very moment, a spark of dim light lashed in the circular room. Gone quickly, it was soon replaced by another, brighter, and steadier light. This one was came from a shapeless glow, held in the hand of a young woman, who up till the twelfth chime of the clock, had not been anywhere in the vicinity of the room.
Her feet made no sound as she moved toward that certain bed, ignoring the others in the room, but her voluminous skirts swished prettily. She halted at the side of the certain child's bed, and bent steadily toward him. A pale hand reached out to touch the boys shoulder, and gently turn him toward her. As the covers pulled back from his face, green eyes flickered open, and took in the woman above him.
"Hello, Philip darling" she purred lovingly. The boy started, and in a quick bounce, was out from under the covers, out of the woman's grasp, and was standing on the floor at the other side of the bed, wand at the ready, hate burning in his eyes.
"You" he growled, malice in his voice, his eyes, his face.
It was a strange stand-off. Harry Potter, the Boy-Who-Lived, stood defensively, clad in pajama bottoms and a Tee-shirt. He was radiating hate so thick that everyone in the room should have been cowering in terror. His wand was pointed directly across his bed, which was now un-made and unoccupied, at young woman who didn't seem to be so very much older than him. Said young woman was about a foot-and-a- half taller than the (admittedly short) savior and reluctant Tri-wizard champion. She was maybe seventeen to nineteen, her face and stance were relaxed and rather happy. She was fully dressed, amazingly so in clothes that would have been more commonplace a couple of centuries ago, and were very richly made at that. The dress was a striking color of green, a perfect match to the Boy-Who-Lived's eyes. When combined with her brown hair and eyes, she reminded one of wood lands and growing things.
"Did you sleep well, dear?" The young woman asked serenely.
"What are you doing here Anne?" The boy did not seem inclined to give a favorable answer, and instead spat out a question of his own.
"Dear Philip, I came to see you, of course!" "Anne" was all smiles and cheer.
"Why here? Why now" The boy did not relax one iota.
"Do I need an excuse to come see you, of all people?" More smiles, and that endearing tone that spoke of only love. She leaned against the post at the end of the bed.
The answer she got this time was a hex fired in her direction. She dodged, with more speed that should have been possible in her fancy getup, once again gliding over to the middle of the room. More spells shot her way, and she continued with inhuman speed to avoid them all. He continued his assault, the shades of colors and difference in words showing his variation of spells. One of his castings let off a tremendous bang, and Anne smiled as this marked the cession of the attack.
"What have you done to them?" Harry hissed, referring to his sleeping roommates, none of whom had stirred at the ruckus.
"Surely you recognize a stasis field." Anne remarked.
This seemed to truly worry Harry. "Let them out, and leave my friends alone."
"Tisk tisk, Philip." She wagged her finger at him. "I came all the way here to see you. I don't want to be interrupted, and neither do I want any…accidents. So since you're here with them, into the stasis field they go!" She was playful, not quite mocking, but definitely teasing. "Oh, I do hope no one else comes along."
Who exactly this someone was remained left unsaid, but Harry seemed to understand. "Why did you come to see me?" He was very obviously trying to end this quickly.
"I say again, do I really need a reason to come and see you?"
"Yes" Harry was not playing the game of small talk.
"Maybe I just missed you"
"And now you've seen me again, so your reason no longer stands."
"O-o-o-oh. Trying to get rid of me, are you? Is that any way to treat an old friend?"
"Yes to the first, no to the second, and you are not, and never were, my friend."
Finally, the cheer faded from the young woman's face, and she seemed saddened by his comment. "Philip-" she murmured, but was cut off by The-Boy-Who-Lived.
"What would it take to get them out of stasis now?" Harry demanded.
"I'm not sure I'm going to take them out" Anne cooed. "I never realized it before, but you've got some really interesting friends. How about we pop over to the girl's dormitory and see what we can find there?"
Anne made towards the door. Harry lunged at her, but she lobbed the light-wad at his torso. Harry's legs fell out from under him, and she started out the door. Rising unsteadily to his feet, he lurched out the door and down the short hall. Anne was already halfway down the stairs. He tackled her from behind, or possibly just tripped over his own feet.
After the short trip down hill, Harry was standing with his foot on Anne's neck and his wand in her face. He had no words for her for several moments, and just glared with his eyes glowing in the dark like twin Avada Kedavras.
"Leave…my…friends…alone." He growled at last.
"Fair enough" Anne said from the floor, and her hand shot up and pressed something metallic to Harry's pajama clad knee. He yelped, and visible sparks of electricity crawled up his skin and through his hair. He lost his balance and fell, but Anne grabbed his ankle, and then they both were gone, leaving only floating sparkles that faded away.
No snow fell form the sky, but the ground was covered with it. No trees grew for miles, but the terrain was far from flat. The only color in sight, besides the blue of the empty sky and icy sea were two young people, neither dressed for the climate around them. The young woman stood a few feet away from the edge of a large drop off, really the end of a chunk of ice that fell away to the artic waters. A few paces behind her was crouched a well known young man, who knelt in the snow with his back straight and both hands clutching his left knee.
"Do you remember this place?" Anne asked. Wind swept her hair and dress around, but she didn't notice the cold.
"Vaguely" Harry answered. Unlike Anne, his nose and fingers and bare feet were red and he shivered slightly. "If you remember, I was mostly dead at the time."
"I suppose so." Anne said whimsically.
Dogs barked in the distance.
"What parts of it do you remember?" Anne asked.
"I remember how I got hurt pretty clearly." His voice was far away but hard, too distant to carry any real hate. "Then there was reentry. I was falling falling, but then I was falling through water, not air anymore." The distance in his eyes grew greater. "Then there were people all around me. I thought it was Greta and Junpei, but I guess that it was probably you and the Inuit." One hand flew to his forehead, pressed in and massaging, as if digging through to find memories. "I guess that at that point they started administering painkillers to start healing me, because thins went from painful and confusing to dizzy and bland."
"What was it that hurt you?" Anne said, enraptured.
"I'm not telling you" He sneered.
The distant barking gained form as a dog sled appeared over one soft slope of snow. The moment lost, and the tension back, the tow watched as the dogs and driver pulled up. Harry stood, the dogs lay down, and the driver alighted hurriedly. A stiff bow was afforded to each of the persons, and then he jumped into action as Anne addressed him in his own language. A lumpy bundle was tossed to Harry. Catching and eyeing it suspiciously, he looked to Anne for an explanation.
"Clothes" she said to his unspoken question. Then she broke out in that wide smile. "Can't have you catching cold out here, now can we?" she said in a voice more suited to addressing a small child.
Harry slung the bundle in his hand by his side, not even pretending to be interested in opening it.
"Would you rather freeze to death?" She said more seriously.
Harry gave her a wild grin.
"If you don't change, I'll dress you myself." A threat more serious than embarrassment hung in her words.
Harry's smile fades. "Where?" he asked, glancing around the frozen waste land.
Anne snapped her fingers at the Inuit driver, and both turned their backs to Harry as he undid the string on the bundle and examined its contents.
Dressing, he found to his dismay that Anne had probably been planning this all along. The light that she had thrown at him in the dormitories had served the dual purpose of stunning him and making his clothes and skin temporarily water proof. Usually, when a person would be in a similar area and state of dress, their own body heat would serve to soak them. However, once donning the fur lined leather boots, pants and parka he was gratefully warm and dry.
"Done" He said, and Anne and her companion turned around to watch him put on his gloves. He wondered briefly at himself, that he would not trust Anne with his life, or the safety of his friends, but he never even bothered to make sure she wouldn't peek.
Harry sat crossed legged on the sled, bracing himself against the side rails, as the Inuit man and his dog team "escorted" him to an unconfirmed destination. Harry knew that Anne would be nowhere to be seen, so he didn't bother looking. He knew that she would be there before he arrived, ready with the next stage of whatever she was planning. And he knew, most of all, that if he tried to ditch the driver and get away, Anne would have him trapped six ways from Sunday before he stepped foot off the sled.
So all he could do was wait.
The only modern-looking house was the hospital, which was nothing more than two rooms and a shed for the generator and the water heater. Other than that, every body lived in hide tents or the occasional igloo. People milled around for their work, tending to reindeer and sled dogs, or whatever else. As expected, Anne was waiting.
"Have a nice trip?"
"Meh" Harry wasn't in the mood for small talk.
He was led to a tent in the center of the settlement. A ground cloth was laid out, and food was brought. Harry didn't bother being surprised that the tent they settled in front of was the largest and most flamboyantly made in the entire "village": Anne always demanded the best.
The food was simple, but was probably the best there was. Harry recognized some of the dishes from his previous stay.
"Aren't you going to eat?"
Harry had a grim smile. "My defense against the dark arts teacher has a reputation of being paranoid. He always checks his food for tampering." He looked back at Anne "I think I'll pass"
He ate nothing.
"Your loss" Anne huffed. She didn't' eat either, but Harry knew better than to take it as a sign that she actually had done something to the cuisine.
Local young women came to take the plates away. Harry's face darkened.
"They're the same people"
"As the ones from before? Of course."
"You…you kept them here…all this time." A sadness and horror flickered in his eyes. "Why?"
"They proved themselves worthy by saving you."
"So you took over their lives?" Harry was now angry.
"They're perfectly happy"
"Because you demand it of them." Harry had to struggle not to shout. "You won't let them feel, you won't let them think…" He gave a brief appraisal of the citizens in sight. "You won't even let them age!"
"I had to live some where. And with you gone, I don't have any one to keep me company." Anne was a remorseful being that was obviously fake, for the sole purpose of getting pity.
Harry didn't buy it. "Go back to your own people. We don't want you here."
The spat ended several minutes later with Anne striking Harry across the mouth. She tried to take it back of course, but Harry was more elated that he could still push her buttons than he was hurt. It wasn't like he didn't know how to take a punch.
Harry wandered off, making his way to the edges of the town. He didn't bother to hide his actions, and neither did the two or three people who were following him. As he reached the end of where he felt he could go without Anne coming to retrieve him, he stopped and waited for them to come forward.
There were three, two girls and a boy. All were dressed like Harry, in a leather suit lined with fur, designed for warmth, not fashion. Their faces were blurry, due to Harry's lack of glasses.
"Do any of you speak English?"
"I do" one of the shapeless beings (one of the ones he thought was vaguely feminine) spoke up.
"Do you speak it because you learned how or because Anne commanded you to?"
"I always do as the lady commands"
Harry sneered, but said nothing. He began waling again, to the left and almost perpendicular from his previous path, but curving around counter-clockwise, so that he was always the same distance from the "town". The residences in the distance seemed small, and indeed, there was almost a quidditch pitch or muggle football field between them and him. Still walking, the scenery was almost unchanged, just the blob of homes to his left and the snowy deathtrap to the right, front, and back. He made it more than half way around the circumference of the town in an inhumanly perfect circle before anything changed. He slowed and stopped, his silent tails did likewise, and he peered into the distance at what was probably a different spot on the same cleft on the ice.
"Why would she build so close to this?" he wondered aloud, not really to the spokes person of his escort.
"None of us actually go over there." The girl said. "The lady protects us from the monster of the deep. And the wards don't actually reach all the way to the edge."
Harry peered at her. "How far above sea level are we?"
The guide seemed some what surprised by this sudden question. "I don't know exactly." She said. "The drop is about forty or fifty meters."
"Hmnnn." Harry frowned, but had no reply. He stepped forward, continuing his trek around the invisible boundaries.
"How many people are in your village?" Harry asked.
"Less than a hundred." The girl sounded nervous, as their path approached the neck of the curve that brought them closest to the cliff. "A lot of our people don't live in town. They have to go out and gather supplies." She fell in to step with Harry, leaving her friends to bring up the rear. "The lady doesn't like to live here because it's so inefficient and labor-intensive." The girl was visibly fighting down panic. Her steps increased, trying to reach the end of the stretch more quickly, and she pulled ahead of her friends and Harry, who tromped through the snow with his hands in pockets and his head down. "We get a lot of visitors, but mostly they're our own people or messages for the lady." In her ramblings, she barely heard the scuffles behind her. She began to turn back to face the boy-who-lived. "Did you say something? We don't get many visitors who are as interesting a-a-a-a—uuh…." She slumped to the ground.
With one of his escorts distracted and looking the other way, Harry had chosen his moment, whipping out his hands and wand from his pockets, and spinning around to hex the other two. At this close range, even he couldn't miss with his poor eyesight. He whipped around again and cut off the translator in mid scream with a stunner, even as he pushed off and ran towards the cliff.
Harry could run. He had spent years running from his cousin's gang. And nowadays he often sprinted from class to class in that ridiculously large castle school. His small size, light body and gangly limbs were an asset in this area, no matter how unattractive others may claim these features. Even so he didn't look waste time looking back at the enemy that he knew was coming for him, and that he couldn't beat.
Far behind him something in the village fell. Then buildings and tents were mowed over. Anne plowed through the last obstacle in her path and made a beeline after Harry.
Unlike Harry, Anne was barefoot, so her small feet, though unfeeling to the elements, sank into the snow with every step, while Harry's clunky boots afforded him some form of weight distribution. In addition, unlike Harry, Anne was still dressed in that large green medieval dress, complete with petticoats and under slips, and it dragged behind her and pooled in her arms as she hitched it up so as not to trip, showing the afore mentioned feet . However, despite the visible inequality, Anne gained on him at an inexplicable pace. With both of them pounding through the snow, they made a strange sight, and it was almost funny. Y'know, right up to the point that Anne started chucking light-balls at Harry's back. Harry's speed was further impacted as he sprang from side to side to doge the more painful impacts of the attack, and did so again and again with some invisible sixth sense, never looking back to see the onslaught. Anne screamed at him, bellowed his name (the one she used for him), and tossed pleas and blasts, but none really aided her.
Harry dove off the cliff.
It was a full chested leap in the air, followed by a pivot that turned his leap into a swan dive as two energy blasts struck him in the back.
The translator had been right about the approximate length of the fall. Plummeting to the icy depths below was a rather lengthy trip. About halfway down, Harry heard the telltale "Geronimo!" call that said Anne had reached the end of the cliff and followed him over it, and he didn't need to look to know about the wings that had untangled them selves from her body to propel her towards him, going faster than he could do with gravity alone. Beneath him, the ebb and flow of the water was disrupted into a writhing, boiling mess, churned by some thing beneath the surface. When he was fifteen feet from the bottom, the waters parted making way for gigantic crocodile jaws and a slim snake-like body. Shooting straight up, the enormous beast merely opened its jaws and Harry fell in, and then it bent and twisted back over the water, the long stretches of its body still pulling themselves from the pacific. This thing glided over the water with invisible wings.
Anne made a grab at the things tail, the last part to rise above the water. Missing, but continuing chase, she bean weaving light in her hands for ominous purposes. The thing she pursued was maybe fifty feet long from nose to tail, and its toothy jaws made up at least six of it. Pearly white scales ran all over its body, with the exception of a seaweed-green mane that ran from the base of its head to the tip of its tail. Its four legs were pulled tight against its body in flight. Compared to the rest of its body they were short, but nonetheless they were long and supple. Despite its lack of visible flight capabilities, it still made good time on Anne, inching further away as it slithered ten feet above the water and floating ice.
Her magic finished, Anne fired red-hot globs at the dragon-snake. Unlike Harry, the things progress was little impacted, its long body capable of bending around the danger. Further and further they chased, out over the open ocean, and Anne screamed in fury and lobbed her death-bombs. Her fairy wings beat furiously, but little by little, the dragon –snake pulled ahead. It abruptly altered its course, slanting upward and pressing for speed. Anne raced at a different angle cutting corners in an attempt to catch up, but even the distance she gained then did not get her close enough. By now they were headed almost straight up, and the beast's anti-gravity ability beat out Anne's wings as she struggled and flapped for altitude.
The dragon snake let out a gurgle, and its lizard cheeks poofed out momentarily before its lips and teeth parted and, in a 70 mph giant living loogie, it spat out Harry. The Boy-Who-Lived shot up briefly, but was soon passed over by the beasts speed. Tumbling head over heels, he somehow managed to snag hold of the dragon-snake's flowing mane, and was instantly streamlined against the things body. He was a little below the things shoulders, having fallen passed the head and neck.
Anne ceased her assault, upon realizing the nature of the projectile. Here the beasts long body was a slight hindrance, as it started to turn around and shoot flame balls of its own across the now very great distance between the two aerial combatants. Anne dodged with ease, and worked on closing the distance. This proved easier than before, as the beast was not fleeing, but rather flying in circles around itself, winding up like a cat or a ball of yarn
Anne gained a new desperation and a burst of speed in her flight…
Harry was soon encased in the folds of his mounts coils…
Anne readied a spell…
As the final round was made and the end of the "string" (its head) lay flat around the ball, smoke filtered out from inside the coils. The ball o' dragon folded into itself and was ultimately engulfed in a thick black smoke. Anne finally reached the spot, and her speed carried her all the way through, helping to distribute the smoke as it dissolved.
Her shrieks rang out across the artic pacific coast.
And in the distance, and entire village trembled.