--Patina--

Kapitel Eins

Gefangenschaft

[Hope Volume Two

But in this heart of darkness

All hope lies lost and torn
All fame, like love is fleeting
When there's no hope anymore

[Apocalyptica

The tale begins a cold and lonely night in the month of July. Within the next few hours, as the clock had dawned nine o'clock, the neo-pagans would celebrate the holiday of Lughnasadh. It was an old holiday, an Irish one, that held no bearing on the true world of magic – except those who were old-fashioned and Gaelic. Thus it would be ludicrous to expect that the streets of a Roman settlement would be adorned with decorations for the holiday that occurred on the first of August. There were none, even on London's streets, the settlement being so close to Ireland and all.

The closing day in question, the last of July with August only three hours in the future, was a glum day. It had rained for a solid block of thirteen hours and brought an unseasonable chill to London. The city had never been the warmest, but it was still unusual to see so many people wearing coats when it was summer.

There was a dingy part of the city (as was in all cities) that did not hold dingy city inhabitants. While yes, this writer must confess, there were the usual denizens of the slums – the drug dealers, the lazy bastards, the unfortunate, and the whores – where were also the ones who remained their because of a duty they were foresworn to hold. The ones who did not belong in the world of normal, bustling, confusing-as-hell and crowded-as-hell London made a poor living out of a bedraggled and ugly home on a worthless street called Grimmauld Place.

Grimmauld Place did not always belong to the worthless – far from it, in fact. In the waning days of the Tudor dynasty, it had been the magical equivalent to Downing Street. It had housed Ministers of Magic, foreign dignitaries, and the wealthiest wizards and witches in Britain who had decided to move from their manors to the hustle and bustle of London. Sometime between the reign of William IV and Victoria I, Grimmauld Place had fallen to the non-magic folk, except for the home at Number Twelve. That had always belonged to the House of Black, and should have always belonged to them, with the only sidetrack being the death of the last heir.

On the street tonight, on this unhappily cold July night, a man in shabby clothing moved through the chill with a shiver or three. He was only thirty-eight, thirty-nine, maybe, but a good decade older from a condition with no cure or treatment. His hair was graying, for clarification, and his face was lined with tragedy and a personal agony. Silently, he pulled his thin robes tighter towards his thinner form, and moved towards the suspicious gap between number eleven and number thirteen on the once proud street.

His name was Remus Lupin. Once the title professor had been given to his name, and there were three or four who still insisted on calling him that. He did not enjoy being at Grimmauld Place (he would be concerned if anybody but a mad portrait and a madder house-elf did), but had to. He enjoyed walking there, however, as opposed to Apparating. Even with the smell of wet garbage and petrol and God knows what else, it was still fresher than the air inside that place.

Lupin paused for a moment in his stroll, and his hazel eyes cast a look up at the moon. It was a bad habit of his that was explainable in a gruesome way. The moon was gone completely – new moon. Best time of the month, in his opinion. There was no trace of his celestial aggressor – though Lupin was not poetic enough to describe the moon as such.

The brief pause, while explainable and safe (considering the wizard slash werewolf held his wand very firmly in the inside pocket of his robes), caused two events to occur concurrently. One was an exhale of breath by Lupin that was a both a sad sigh and a simple exhale. The second involved a pair of hands clutching at his arm and the whispery, agonized plea, "For the love of God, help me."

Now, Lupin was not a stupid man (and this writer apologizes for suggesting such a notion) and he was an alert man. Seven years of friendship with two pranksters as their only means of escaping detention had caused him to develop such a talent as a boy. He had never before had anybody creep up to him without his knowledge and lay a hand upon him. Thus, with a very sharp intake of breath, the howl of not-so-human instincts in the back of his mind, and the spinning around to point his wand in the face of whomever had gotten close to him, Lupin discovered a number of very unusual things.

If he had expected an assailant, he had received one with all the strength and vigor of a sick kitten. The man was hollow-cheeked, pale as a wraith, and skinny enough to be called anorexic or starved, and posed absolutely no challenge even if he was a wizard. He was also very dark of hair (very long of hair as well; the mess of black must have reached his waist at least if properly combed), very tall of height, and covered in a very thick coat of very red blood. The face was a patchwork of wounds – bruises, cuts, scars, burns, and something purple-green that could only be of magical origin.

The man was also dressed similarly to a rich man. His suit was silk, his shoes Italian, and his long coat looking vaguely militaristic. All of these lavishes, though, were covered in dust, soot, an amalgamation of various things that had mingled together enough to form an unpleasant smell, and human blood above all else. Threaded beneath his coat on a belt was a sword than an expert would classify as a Renaissance long sword.

His eyes were green. Not normal green either – Evans green, the sort of green that belonged to one bloodline and one bloodline alone. Beneath the fringe of too-long hair, there was one scar that millions of people knew by sight and urban legend.

Lupin starred. The man clutched his arm harder, pleading louder. "Please, for the love of God, help me Professor . . ."

"Harry?"

There was a very logical reason for the shock, disturbance, and disbelief in Lupin's voice. The man holding him tightly by the arm was no younger than twenty-three. The man inhaled, forced something that may have once been a smile, and continued in the whisper-soft voice, "Professor, please . . . I-I really need help." For the first time, Lupin noticed he was shaking furiously, and cold to the touch.

"But how –?" Lupin silenced his question just as it slipped from his mouth. Now was not the time for inquiries. He nodded and put his wand away, walking slowly with the man (Harry?) clutching tightly to his arm and looking around with frantic paranoia. With speed that would have humiliated a snail, they walked towards the spot between numbers eleven and thirteen, waiting only a minute for the House of Black to appear. The man in the bloodstained suit made no appearance of surprise at the bewitched home coming from nothing. With a crunch of disturbance, it confirmed a little something in Lupin's heart that he was clutching onto Harry Potter.

What on earth happened? he thought as he examined the person next to him, Why does he look so old? Did Voldemort do something? No, he knew. There was a rigid schedule in place to watch Harry at Privet Drive that would not disappear until midnight after his seventeenth birthday (meaning three hours still demanded the guard). Kinsley had been watching him tonight. The Auror would have reported immediately to both the Order and the Ministry if Voldemort or Death Eaters had gotten close enough to Harry to do this.

"Is it still safe?" he asked Lupin weakly, "Nobody can get in without invitation, right?"

"Of course not; come on, you look like hell." Lupin didn't hear the sardonic laughter.

Grimmauld Place still looked much as it had when it had first fallen into the Order's reluctant hands, although two years had passed. It was hard to remove twelve years of neglect and disrepair even under the best of circumstances. Yet Molly Weasley and her children (as well as Hermonie and Harry to degrees) had done some good to the evil building. It no longer smelt of mold, for one, and the walls had been repainted a pleasanter eggshell white as opposed to . . . whatever the original color had been.

"Molly! Tonks!" Lupin yelled out, his temporary ward cringing as he looked around the entrance. Something akin to horror was flickering inside his eyes, a whimper completely unlike Harry rising up in the man's throat. "It's an emergency!"

The women were there in an instant. Tonks held her wand, her eyes looking at Lupin first with grave concern before turning to Har – the man on Lupin's arm. Molly looked scandalized and milk-pale at the both.

"Gorblimey," swore Tonks, moving to grab the man easily and wince as her hand quickly was covered in blood and whatever else clung to his coat, "Who is this fellow?"

"How'd he get into the house?" Molly asked in half a shriek.

"He knew it was here. Dumbledore must have told him." But Tonks had given a small scream. Her hands had pulled up the man's fringe, revealing the telltale lightning bolt scar there. The man shrank in Tonks's hold, clutching his shoulders desperately and pleading, "Please, please help me! I went through hell to get back, I did and . . . and I just need to know it's safe here!"

"Harry?" Tonks asked, her eyes changing reflexively to their natural (and rather unappealing to everyone but Lupin) color, "Harry, is that you?"

"Please just make sure it's safe!"

It was only after quite a lot of time had passed, when one in the morning had dawned on the grandfather clock and a pot of tea boiled on the stove, that things settled into a semblance of non-chaos. Many of the Order were clustered into the basement kitchen, excluding young Ron, Hermonie and Ginny (to their intense and furious dislike) while Harry, or the elder doppelganger of the Boy-Who-Lived, was crouched in a chair holding onto a cup of tea as though it were his last anchor to all that was good and sane. His hands shook violently, his arms wrapped around the scabbard of the long sword he carried. More tea got on his lap than in his mouth.

Nervously, everyone stood around him. Tonks looked at Lupin for guidance. He cleared his throat softly and asked, "Harry, is that you?"

"In the flesh," he mumbled into the cup of tea, "Whatever's left of it."

"What happened? Kinsley didn't report anything when he left his post at eight."

Harry looked up. His face, after the mess of blood had been cleaned off, looked worse. This writer could spend several sentences detailing exactly how his face was bloated from punches but sunken from a lack of food and sleep, how most if not all of the skin was scarred, and how it only just resembled the aged face of Harry Potter making him resemble James Potter at the time of his death, but she instead will write the following. He looked very much indeed like he had come from the bowels of hell.

"But," he repeated several times, each more wizened than the last, "But I've been missing for five years, haven't I? I-I must have, right?"

Many shocked and scared looks were exchanged. Tonks coughed awkwardly. "Harry, Kinsley saw you five hours ago. I saw you yesterday, remember? You ain't been missing for five years, for certain . . ."

The look she got back was frightened and dead. The teacup he held shook horribly with a combination of shivers and a psychotic twitch. Harry opened his mouth, and forced a fake grin. "Few hours, huh . . . only a few hours." He swallowed what was left of the tea.

"What happened to you? You're . . ."

"Twenty-two," he mumbled into the rim of the cup, "Five birthdays, almost nineteen hundred days . . . with him."

Lupin felt a migraine pulse in his temples. He did not think he was alone. Awkwardly, he laid a hand on Harry's to comfort him, and felt the boy (young man at twenty-two now, not sixteen-just-turned-seventeen years old) twitch spastically under it.

"Voldemort did this?" Many flinched at the name. With eyes still as green as Lily Evans', Harry looked at Lupin, and smiled just a bit. He even gave something like a hollow laugh.

"I wish," he said, disturbing them all, "Gethsemane did."

"Is he a Death Eater?"

"That'd be simple though," Harry said with more of a black laugh, "Nothing's simple when it comes to me, though, is it?" Nobody answered. It was the sort of silence where one suddenly became telekinetic – you knew in your heart of hearts that everybody agreed with the statement, but nobody would dare to raise a confirmation of this fact. Used to the quiet, Harry made no qualms. He merely held the teacup, curled on the kitchen chair, shoulders slumped and head half-down, looking defeated and broken and scared. "He's a harbinger. They guard things; secrets, powers, emotions, memories . . . things that people lock in their minds because they don't want to see them again. I-I'll explain . . . but could I have another cup of tea? Some more sugar, please?"

"Of course, dear." Molly never let her eyes leave Harry's aged face. It wasn't right. End of term, at Dumbledore's funeral, he had been sixteen. Prematurely glum and wise, yes, riddled with things that no adult should see, yes, but sixteen nonetheless. A month and a half later, he was twenty-two. Five years younger than Bill, same age as Percy.

He smiled when he got the tea, though his hands were still shaking. Lupin looked at them. The left was wrapped very tightly in bloodied bandages, and the fingers were calloused and bent crookedly – broken too many times, and healed rather badly. He drained most of it in two gulps and, in a deadpan voice, began to speak.

The electronic clock made an annoying noise. It had just turned eight o'clock. Harry only looked at it blankly. Nine o'clock at night. Three more hours and he would never have to see the Dursleys again. The thought did not cheer him up as much he thought he would have. As a child, he had thought gleefully about the day he turned eighteen (an adult in the muggle world), where he would pack his bags, flee down the street, and go off to make his life as far away from Privet Drive as humanly possible.

Even though it was now his seventeenth birthday – a whole year sooner than he had prophesized as a seven-year-old in the cupboard under the stairs – and it was dawning to the end of his seventeen year imprisonment with the last of his blood family, Harry knew that what awaited him was nothing like what he had thought. He was going to leave Privet Drive, return to the Burrow for Fleur and Bill's wedding, and then leave to destroy Horcruxes and a serpentine bastard called Tom Riddle.

It didn't settle his stomach. He sat at his desk, arms folded atop it, eyes watching the alarm clock stoically as it changed from eight o'clock to eight-o-one. The clock may have been off time. It probably was. It had once been Dudley's once, after all, and Dudley never left anything working properly. Harry let his fingers twirl his wand around and around between them. The wood felt good in his hands. It really did.

Eight fifteen. Time moved by rather quickly, he noticed emptily. That was curious. It always moved like it was being forced to in the summer – painfully slow, mocking Harry with sadism. He sighed furiously and stood up, pacing around in his room. His green eyes always fell upon two framed photographs on his desk, not hidden by the wads of paper that littered the desk.

In one, a tall man and a redheaded woman danced laughingly in the autumn. He was aristocratically handsome, identical to Harry, except for happiness. She was lithe and sweetly smiling, her fire-red hair hidden mostly by a beret and a Gryffindor scarf. They were either maybe nineteen or eighteen, at least. Just out of school. Pity; they only had two years left to live at the best.

The other showed them even younger. More recently out of school. About as old as Harry was now, he thought vacantly, though somehow James seemed taller. It was their wedding. Sirius was there, handsomer than James, smiling wider, laughing.

"Lucky," he mumbled to the people in the photographs, although he knew they weren't. Hell, they were unluckier than Harry. At least he was still alive. With a growl, he sat down on his bed, and examined the cracks in the ceiling.

Oh, I don't think they're that lucky. They never met me. The voice had decided to avoid the laws of sound. It had come into Harry's head without taking the unpleasant route of moving through his ears first. It had spoken soundlessly; with silkiness and noble-blooded arrogance, and an almost musical and beautiful charm. It was the sort of voice reserved for an opera star or a vampire in a muggle movie.

Harry bolted up right with his wand at the ready. His mind screamed. The wards around Privet Drive were supposed to protect him against Death Eaters and Voldemort – that was the whole bloody reason he was here, wasn't it?

Lad, I don't mean harm. I can't harm my apprentice now, can I? What sort of master would I be? The Others would have my head if I did that

"Show yourself!" he barked. Uncle Vernon grunted in the next room over.

The voice sighed. If you wish, apprentice. We should move fast anyway. It makes things easier.

A wind blew against Harry's cheeks abnormally. The windows were closed, and indoor breezes did not exist of that caliber. With his wand and the knowledge he was no longer underage, Harry said, "Protego." That made him feel safer. Not by much, but enough.

Something akin to fingers grabbed his arm. Harry turned his head around with a cry, swinging a fist. It was caught easily, and bent backwards with a snap. His cry was louder now, strangled pitifully. He looked up with narrowed eyes and a bitter, battle-ready snarl on his face. He saw a thin face of a man, with graying blonde hair and pair of eyebrows that were neatly trimmed. He held Harry tightly and grinned. Now, this writer should interject here; this is not the one that had spoken to Harry in the musical voice, but of course the young wizard had no way of knowing such information. He, unlike you readers, did not have the pleasure of listening to a rambling writer.

"Lemme go!" Harry snarled, and pointed his wand at the man's throat. "Who the hell are you?"

No fear was in his eyes. Easily, he raised up his fingers to the wand, and snapped it in half. And Harry realized precisely how stupid he had been by not casting magic in the first place. As Harry starred at the phoenix feather still connecting the two bits of useless wood together in . . . in horror, the man said in a bored voice; "Shall we be going now Potter? I don't like working at night. Too cold."

"My wand . . ." he choked. How . . . moronically stupid of him! He got his wand broken!

"Your own stupid fault," the man said, and muttered something else. It was not a language that Harry had ever heard before, and one that he hoped never to hear again. It was scratchy and guttural, archaic and arcane and just so full of magic that Harry felt his breath hitch up into his throat and his body go completely numb. Unable to move, his knees buckled and he fell down onto the wooden floor. The gray-haired man held him firmly by the wrist, while Harry's drooping eyes could only see the man's shoes. They were leather boots, scuffed at the edges but polished at the toes. Harry could tell – he could see his languid reflection in the steel.

The world went dark. Harry went completely numb, weightless, soulless, nothing whatsoever. Feeling was absent to him. For a moment, perhaps, he thought it was true, adrenaline-infused bliss.

But when it was over, the feeling had gone, and Harry was left collapsing to his knees onto very hard stone. His stomach rose up into his mouth and his skin was ashen. Harry did not dare take a breath. He felt if he did, than everything he'd eaten for the last three days would come spilling out of his mouth. Eventually, however, his physical state got the better of him. He inhaled, coughed violently, and tasted the eggs he had eaten three days ago.

"Everyone feels like that their first time, lad." Something grabbed the back of his shirt and pulled him to his feet. Harry stumbled, reluctantly leaning against the gray-haired man who had been the one to snap his wand. A thin smirk played about his thinner lips.

"Who are you?" Harry asked, pushing himself a little further than he should have. He gagged, but was not sick – much to the man's relief, one would hypothesize. "Where am I? Why'd you bring me here, huh?"

The man adjusted the collar of his scarlet robe. Beneath that, he wore a fine pinstripe suit of gold and sable silk with a golden coin worn around his neck as a way of a choker. Harry could tell a number of things were stored in the pockets of his robe, but could not actually see any bulges or lumps in them. It was an odd sight.

"Inquisitive mind," he said, "I image he'll like that."

"That's not an answer to anything I asked," Harry said sardonically, and the man gave a bit of a strange smile.

"Yes, I suppose it isn't . . . I am Wynn Sambuca, man of business for His Grace, Liege of Arcady." Harry blinked a little at the odd name.

"Sambuca? Like the drink?" Wynn observed him strangely. His eyes were quite a brilliant color, Harry noticed, though every time he examined the eyes they appeared to be a different shade or hue or color in general.

"Why would you know?" he asked Harry strangely. His demeanor seemed to have shifted very rapidly, from the unsmiling person in Harry's tiny bedroom at Privet Drive to an uncle-like, paternal figure. His aura, if Harry had any aptitude in that particularly obscure area of magical sensations, had shifted entirely. A well-trained eye would see it had gone from burgundy to blue. He pulled a watch from the pocket of his suit and clicked it open. "No time for chit-chat, I'm afraid. The Liege probably wants to meet his new apprentice soon before Annalisa leaves . . . come along then."

Harry grabbed his arm tightly and narrowed his eyes. Wynn looked with that same strange gaze and oddly luminescent, oddly brightened eyes. He waited for Harry to speak, and the wizard did so in a furious undertone, "Explain this now"

Wynn grinned. "The Liege does a better job."

"I'm not going to wait." His knuckles cracked as he balled his hand into a fist. "EXPLAIN!"

"Fine, fine," he waved his hand, and Harry found himself letting go of Wynn's arm and unclenching his fist. How such a thing occurred, Harry didn't know. He was the one who could break out of the Imperious Curse by shear well, and yet . . . a breeze of a magical suggestion had passed through his head, and Harry found himself standing calmly but confused by Wynn Sambuca's side. "The Liege has been putting off choosing an apprentice for a long time now, and His Majesty has finally forced him to do such. Normally, of course, the apprentice should be about six years old, but he has no patience with kids – I'm sure you understand? Ah good – and he has selected you, my good man."

Anger boiled up very quickly and exploded just as fast. His green eyes narrowed, his face twisted, his fists clenched and his voice a roar, Harry stared Wynn right in the fact and yelled, "AND NOBODY THINKS TO ASK MY OPINION ABOUT THIS!"

"Why should we?" The confusion on Wynn's face was genuine. So was the despair and fury on Harry's. Wynn adjusted his robe a little more. "Now then, lad, the Liege expects to meet you in a few hours, and I daresay you need to tidy yourself up a bit. He's a . . . persnickety man in the area of aesthetics." Wynn looked away from Harry, prompting him to shout in anger to explain more of why everybody seemed to decide everything else for him, and yelled two more things in the old and richly magical language. It left Harry feeling just as weak-kneed and dizzy as the first time he heard it, but he recovered quicker.

He stood back up, holding his sides to keep the sick from welling up, in time to spot three women in uniforms moving down the hallway. They looked . . . almost identical to each other, to be frankly honest. All wore the attire of a French maid, obviously designed by a man who enjoyed the motif but without so much decency (prompting a rise of color in the cheeks of the young wizard, who had never seen so much as a girl's bare shoulders), all with thick blonde ringlets and fair skin, but with different hue of eye. One had blue, one had brown, and one had a dark viridian.

"Could you please escort Liege Arcady's new apprentice to his chambers, and see that he looks . . . presentable," (Wynn looked at Harry's unkempt hair, baggy clothes, and rather unshaven face with distaste bordering on arrogance), "For His Grace?"

All three women bowed lowly. In identical deadpans, they said, "At once, Sire Sambuca." The viridian-eyed girl held Harry's arm, while the other two lead him away, without much aide on Harry's behalf. Midway down the hallway, when Harry had given up the struggle against the servants, he asked of them their names.

"Alouette," the blue-eyed one said.

"Colette," said the brown-eyed girl.

"Mariette," said the third of them.

Wonderful, thought Harry in horror as he was dragged further.

[Disclaimer

I do not own Harry Potter. He and his universe are property of JK Rowling and Warner Brothers. I own this plotline and all original characters contained within it.

This is my first fanfiction so I'm sorry for any mistakes in it, and I hope that people like it! And always, a review would be appreciated; constructive criticism is always welcomed!

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