A/N: I apologize deeply for this.
"Hermione!" Harry called, definitely not panicking.
Hermione skidded through the doorway five seconds later, eyes wild and hair springing loose all around her face. The past year had not been kind to her nerves, Harry noted through the blind panic that was definitely not engulfing him.
"WHAT IS IT?" she cried, wand in hand. Harry was slightly offended.
"Why do you automatically assume I'm in trouble?"
"You only call me when you're panicking," she pointed out. "Is Voldemort back? If we're in for another bloody camping trip, I think we should bring Kreacher instead of Ron—"
"Hermione," interrupted Harry. "What is this?"
He was backed up beside the doorway, wand out and pointing at a Thing that had definitely not been in Sirius' bedroom during their ill-fated previous visit to Grimmauld place. It was a Thing, moreover, that could not have looked more out of place if it had tried, which perhaps it had, thought Harry, as his wand sparked and the smooth black surface suddenly blossomed into color.
"Help me figure out what this is, Hermione, I think it might be dark magic!"
After a brief pause, Hermione burst into tears—no, not tears, laughter—and Harry grew more alarmed.
"Calm down, Hermione. Look, it's okay, I can handle this. You go and find Ron—"
Hermione laughed harder, clutching her sides. Harry hadn't known people actually did that.
"It's a…" she broke off, tears streaming out of her eyes. Harry was definitely alarmed now. Perhaps the Thing was charmed to cause mental instability in witches.
"Harry, it's a computer."
"A what?" demanded Harry, regarding the Thing with even more suspicion.
"A computer," Hermione clarified, wiping her eyes. "It's a tool used by Muggles for calculations, writing, finding information, all sorts of things. I can't imagine what it's doing here, but—hang on, Harry. You were raised by Muggles too!"
Harry lowered his wand, embarrassed. Memories were starting to trickle slowly back to him.
"It does look sort of familiar, yeah," he conceded at last. The contraption's screen changed color again, and he leapt back in alarm.
Clawing at the doorframe to pull himself to his feet, he continued in a slightly shaky voice.
"This doesn't look anything like the one Dudley had, though—hang on. You said these are used to gather information? I thought they were for blowing up aliens."
Hermione felt thoroughly justified in rolling around on the floor and snorting with unladylike glee.
"What I don't understand," said Harry later as they let Kreacher carry away the breakfast things, "is how a Muggle compu…computer found its way into this house. After all, the only ones to visit Grimmauld Place since the battle of Hogwarts have been…"
"Approximately half the Wizarding world," interjected Ron, reaching across Harry to snatch another roll from a retreating basket and stuffing it into his mouth whole.
"Right," said Harry, studiously ignoring his friend's singular means of expressing culinary appreciation. "But apart from that…"
"Fred and George," suggested Hermione, who was also averting her eyes.
"Fre' an' Geor'," agreed Ron, swallowing.
"Definitely Fred and George," said Harry grimly.
After breakfast they all trooped back up the stairs to Sirius' room, where the computer screen had again assumed an innocuous black. In fact, in Harry's current state of nervous apprehension he would almost have called it seriously black. Wistfully envisioning a world in which his trepidation didn't manifest itself in truly horrible puns, Harry slid uneasily into the chair in front of the strange device. Ron and Hermione stood behind him in silent support, Ron looking rather worse than Harry felt, while a slight smirk still played across Hermione's face.
Harry jabbed the button that Hermione indicated meant 'on', and the Thing promptly let out a noise halfway between a royal procession and a dying cow. Harry ducked beneath the desk.
Hermione left the room hurriedly.
Ron crawled out from under the bed and loyally pulled up a chair, carefully seating himself out of the line of fire in case the thing grew violent.
Harry gripped the armrests of his seat tightly, watching the computer progress through a sequence of blue screens and additional unfriendly noises. When it finally settled on a certain screen, Harry and Ron exchanged glances.
"D'you think something's going to come charging out of that meadow?" asked Ron, with a nod at the suspiciously serene stretch of grass depicted before them.
"Dunno," said Harry shakily, straining his memory in the hope that his supernatural ability to recall insignificant events from when he was eleven wouldn't fail him. "The aliens always appeared from the sides, before…but I don't remember them ever coming out of the screen…"
Ron appeared simultaneously reassured and more terrified than ever.
"Where do you suppose Fred and George got this thing?" he asked, dredging up the courage to tap the side of the monitor.
"Probably your dad's shed."
Harry was inspecting the small, colorful symbols overlaying the field. Nose inches from the screen, he let out a cry of terror and leapt backward as the background suddenly changed to a field of…purple flowers.
"Nice one," said Ron, sniggering at the sight of his best friend sprawled on his back.
"Muggles are so unimaginative," muttered Harry, picking himself and his chair off the ground and glaring at the field of purple as though it had personally wronged him. Which, as far as he was concerned, it had. "You do it then, if you're so clever."
Ron gulped at the thought of touching a strange contraption planted by Fred and George. But he was a Gryffindor, dangit, so he reached over and, with a shaking hand, shoved the little rounded controller experimentally. The arrow on the screen followed his movements. With a glance at Harry, who nodded encouragingly, Ron manipulated the cursor over one of the icons and clicked.
Harry would always regard the next few hours as the most terrifying of his life. They started off innocently enough.
In the first moment after Ron clicked the small colorful circle, there was nothing. Then suddenly, words scrolled across the screen. They quickly found that clicking on the blue words would change the screen again.
"Hermione!" called Harry over his shoulder. "You were right about information—you'll want to see this. It's like…like a library."
When he turned back around, Ron appeared to be having some sort of fit. He pointed wordlessly at the screen with a shaking hand. Harry read some of the words, and paled.
All too soon he became aware that Hermione was reading over his shoulder. She collapsed on Sirius' old mattress and attempted to muffle her sobs of laughter in a pillow.
Harry, now numb with horror, scrolled down the page. There were hundreds, no, thousands of them. They could have filled a library the size of Hogwarts. Harry silently vowed never to allow Madam Pince to see this…this database.
But how on earth did they know? he wondered. How was it that the Muggles not only knew about the Wizarding world, but apparently spent loads of time reflecting on the personal lives of…
Well. He wasn't quite ready to think about that yet.
"Hermione," he got out. "Did you know about this? Look, they know about everything, even the Battle of Hogwarts, though they did get some things wrong…they seem to think Fred actually died…"
"Some of these eulogies are actually quite lovely," said Ron reasonably.
"I guess they don't know he was faking…"
"He's Fred, of course he was faking!"
Hermione had regained enough composure to begin piecing things together.
"Well," she said, "It's clear how they know, anyway. It was obviously the books…"
"What books?" said Harry and Ron together.
"Harry! I tried to tell you on our first ride on the Express, remember? You're in Rise and Fall of the Dark Arts and Great Wizarding Events of the Twentieth Century and Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone!"
"I don't recall that last one," Harry said, goggling at her.
"Well, that's because Ronald interrupted me with some stupid color-changing spell, but I did try to tell you…"
"Hang on," said Harry over Ron's spluttering. "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone? Do you mean to tell me you all knew about the Sorcerer's Stone before even coming to Hogwarts, and you never mentioned it?"
"Well…yes," said Hermione, shrugging. "Voldemort and the troll, too. I just followed the script."
"What?"
Ron too was looking rather green. "Blimey Hermione, who in Merlin's name wrote it?"
"I suspect that Rita Skeeter partnered with Professor Trelawney," said Hermione thoughtfully, "though the prose is rather better than I would have expected from either of them…"
Harry and Ron were still looking floored.
"Anyway," Hermione shrugged. "I lost track of the series after that first year, but I hear there are some movies out too…"
"There's a series?"
Harry, meanwhile, had regained enough composure to gesture at the screen and choke out, "Then all of this…"
"Fanfiction, I expect."
Harry went over to the corner to shed a few real tears. Ron took his turn in front of the computer. With shaking hands, he typed "Ron Weasley" into the search bar. Taking a deep breath, he clicked the first link that appeared.
There was dead silence in the room for about fifteen minutes as Ron read and scrolled. Finally he pushed himself away, apparently finding it necessary to fortify himself emotionally.
"Okay, my turn," said Hermione, curious in spite of herself.
"Ooh, interesting," she commented, reading. "Some of these are actually quite sweet. They don't really like Dumbledore though, do they? And most of them seem to think I should end up with Harry…"
Ron looked up sharply at this. Hermione waved it off.
"Oh don't think I'm going to start basing my love life off the advice of random people…"
Ron let out a cough that sounded suspiciously like "Lockhart!"
Hermione made a mental note to feed those old copies of Witch Weekly to a Blast-Ended Skrewt. She didn't know why she kept them around, anyway. (The magazines, that is—the Blast-Ended Skrewts were actually quite useful, even if Ron was melodramatic about them. He never liked her pets.)
She was just clicking a rather intriguing-looking story about a love affair with Oliver Wood when she realized that Harry had taken Ron's empty chair. He had fortified himself, it seemed. Perhaps it was something in the fanfiction, but Hermione could swear that his voice wavered as his hand brushed hers.
"May I?"
She relinquished the mouse without complaint.
Harry typed his name into the search box, and Ron and Hermione watched as real terror crept into his eyes. After five minutes The Boy Who Lived forced his fingers to relinquish their crushing hold on the mouse and gazed at his friends with a sort of helpless desperation etched onto his features. He dropped his head and clutched at his once-more searing scar. Had Voldemort still been alive, Harry felt sure that he too would have had a splitting headache.
"I…I don't understand…" he whispered. "Hermione…they're completely mad, all of them…Draco Malfoy, I…" his voice died away into a mutter.
Ron and Hermione looked at each other, uncertain what to say.
"Harry," Hermione soothed, "It's okay…we know you're not secretly in love with Draco, or planning a goblin rebellion, or a time-traveling ninja, or a really angsty and emotionally unstable…okay, scratch that last one, but what I mean is, we know the real you."
Ron was gazing at Hermione in frank and somewhat judgmental bewilderment. "How much time have you spent reading this stuff, then?"
Hermione blushed and turned away. "Oh, hardly any."
Harry suddenly raised his head from his hands and regarded them both with bloodshot eyes. "That's not it," he said in despair. "Don't you see? How do we know which of these is the real thing?"
Frowning, Hermione pointed out, "But Harry, we've lived the real…Oh."
"What?" demanded Ron, who had not yet caught on.
The sorrow in Harry's green eyes pierced deep into his friend's soul.
"Ron," he said. "Which of these stories is the truth?"
Ron frowned. "Well…none of them. It's like Hermione said, we lived it…and there's those books she mentioned…"
"If this was real, why would there be…"
"…books about us," mouthed Ron silently. Gazing at one another in horror, the three friends collapsed in existential angst.
Two floors above, a group of redheads muffled their laughter and Disapparated quietly. They reappeared in the back room of Weasley's Wizard Wheezes, where Fred and George had been quietly building a portal into Muggle London.
"Muggles are the best," sighed Percy, wiping away a tear.
Ginny high-fived the twins. "Let's do Remus and Tonks next, or, no…Lucius Malfoy…"
"Okay, but let's buy him the books first…"
"…I want to see his face…"
"Right then, we'd better find a Muggle bookshop…"
And together they walked through the archway into the Muggle world.