Harry's scar stopped hurting, and Harry found he had not witnessed flashes into lord Voldemort's emotions all summer. Apart from the calming words Dumbledore had said to him last year, about Voldemort exercising Occlumency against him. Harry felt rather suspicious. He had, true to Dumbledore's word, not experienced the visions, or insight to his emotions, but he still felt a pang of regret that he in a way wanted to have them.
It was hard to get over the tragedy, and every time he thought about Dumbledore he couldn't help but feel a bit guilty. He had failed to catch Snape and that had been eating at him all summer. He kept thinking, If only I had cursed him sooner or done something different. Maybe he wouldn't have escaped or maybe Dumbledore would still be around to give him advice on his most recent problem, The Dursleys!
The Dursleys had been acting strange, well stranger than normal that is… Harry was quite content to let them be, in fact, Harry hardly left his room anyway, because he found there company unpleasant, not that it had ever been otherwise. So Harry was quite content to stay away.
Harry walked over to his window, and sat on the chair he had next to it. He was waiting for the usual evening daily prophet. But the sky was empty. Not a bird in sight. Harry's mind wasn't really thinking about the news anyway, even though it was more truthful than it had been in several years; Owing to the fact that the Prophet now knew that Voldamort was now in power. But still Harry wasn't happy with everything that it said.
Most of the news was the same, and Harry no longer took time to read the whole thing page for page. He looked out the window at the darkening sky. It was dark blue with orange tinted clouds because of the fading sun behind the horizon. Harry turned to his bed, flopped into it, and laying face up he looked at the ceiling, his hands tucked under his head. He sighed and closed his eyes.
What would Sirius do? Harry wondered about him a lot, along with the ever worrisome Horcruxes. They were always on his mind; it took a great deal to push it from the front of his head these days. Harry realized that that was the first day all summer that he hadn't found it so abruptly in the front of his head.
That morning Harry found the Dursley's missing. They had gone in the middle of the night and had not returned until late that afternoon. They refused to talk to Harry, but they did give him odd looks every so often. It took an even stranger curve when uncle Vernon asked Harry if he wanted dessert that night. They were not outright mean to Harry like they normally were instead they averted there eyes, glancing at him only for small seconds when they thought he wasn't looking, and gave him plenty to eat. Their actions caused Harry to worry. He had never had a more enjoyable evening with the Dursleys, and that concerned Harry a lot.
A soft Flutter issued from the open window. Harry sat up and looked around for the source of the noise he heard. A tawny brown barn owl carrying a letter was perched on the back of the chair by the window. It shuffled its legs a bit then looked at Harry with its big green eyes. Harry looked at the owl and thought it looked rather bushier than normal. But Harry didn't get the chance to take the letter from the owl, because as he reached for the letter the owl twitched and began to change. The whole sight reminded Harry of the time he and his friends Ron and Hermione used Polyjuce potion to change into Crabb and Goyle to interrogate Malfoy in his second year. The sight was odd enough, but it took Harry a while to understand what he was seeing.
Hermione was standing with a letter in her hand that she had just taken out of her mouth that was moments ago a beak. Harry stood perplexed. "Hermione, what… how… I, you were an owl?" he said rather out of breath.
"Hello Harry, I can't talk for long. You know you mailed me this morning, well, I just received the letter. I came this way because I needed to see you."
"Wow Hermione, you're an illegal animagus?"
"No of course not… I have been registered at the ministry and so I'm legal." said Hermione in an exasperated tone. "Now Harry, we need to talk about this letter you sent me." and she waved the letter in her hand.
"I know what you're going to say, that I'm being silly and that the Dursley's are…" but Hermione cut him off.
"Harry, no I think that you are not being silly at all, if the Dursley's are under the imperious curse than you're no longer safe here." Harry stood without saying anything for a few moments, and looked at Hermione, who was looking around his room with interest.
"What do I do then?" Harry looked at Hermione in a pleading way. "I can't exactly send an owl to the ministry and say, "My aunt and uncle and cousin are under the imperious curse, could you please come and set them right"… Can I Hermione?"
"No, I think your right, we can't ask the ministry for help, but I think…" But what Hermione thought Harry never knew, because at that moment a loud explosion came from the living room below them.
Harry could here the coughing of the three Dursley's down stairs and uncle Vernon's bellows of frustration. Harry looked at Hermione in surprise. She was grinning from ear to ear. "Hermione, what's going on? And why are you smiling?" Hermione went over to the door and peered around the top of the railing down to the floor below.
"Hermione will you tell me what's going on?" said Harry in her ear. But Hermione waved her hand to silence him, and Harry realized that there was no sound from the room below. Hermione took Harry's hand and crouching low she and Harry made there way down the stairs into the hallway.
Harry looked around in surprise; the living room was full of a strange purple billowing smoke. Harry could see the feet of the three Dursley's from underneath the smoke. But he also saw another pair hidden slightly by the hem of a cloak. Harry looked over at Hermione; she was looking at the other individual's feet as well.
Harry felt very wrong in this situation, he was not at all comfortable in his crouching position at the bottom of the stairs. Harry looked at the feet of the person standing obscured in the Dursley's living room as the feet moved towards him and Hermione. Harry looked over at Hermione in disbelief; Harry true to his promise last year to Dumbledore to keep his cloak with him at all times. He quickly took out his invisibility cloak and flung it over him and the immobile Hermione.
The feet of the person moved out of the smoke and stood just a few feet from where Harry and Hermione were hidden at the bottom of the stairs holding his wand aloft. Harry had a hard time not gasping, because standing a few feet away from him was a man with long black hair, a scar on his left cheek that led down into his stubbed chin, and a dog like look to his round face. Harry stood surprised because the man standing in the Dursley's hallway looked like his godfather Sirius.
Harry's emotions were running away with him, and he was thinking very fast, what was going on… the Sirius standing in the Dursley's hallway certainly looked like Sirius but Harry couldn't understand why he was seeing this Sirius, when he knew Sirius fell thru the archway in the department of mysteries two years ago. Could Sirius really be here to rescue him from the Dursley's?
The man who looked like Sirius turned toward the stairs and Hermione began to stand to take off the invisibility cloak and reveal where they were. Harry grabbed her wrist and pulled her down. He was not ready to see his godfather back from the dead. After two years of trying not to think about the only parent he really ever had, Harry finally accepted that Sirius was dead, but here he was standing so close to him he could reach out and touch him. But the man who looked like Sirius stepped next to him and went up the stairs towards the room the Dursley's had given him when he was eleven. The man rounded the corner and Hermione pulled the cloak off of her and Harry.
"I knew you would freak out, but…" But Harry didn't let her finish, instead he covered her mouth and took her down the hall into the spotless kitchen and released his hand from over her mouth.
"Ok Hermione tell me what's going on…" he waited for an answer but unlike before she was not willing to give the answers so readily.
"Listen…" she said, 'I'll explain but you can't keep cutting me off."
"Alright, I'll just listen this time…" Harry had to resist the urge to strangle her.
"Good, last year when you came back from your visit with Dumbledore and you said you had to go get the Horcruxe and you rushed to us and gave up that lucky potion and stuff, but when you came back with Dumbledore and well you know…" She paused as Harry looked at his shoes and listened for the sound of the man who looked like Sirius overhead.
"…well, after you got back and showed me the note from R.A.B. well, you know I did some digging, but I didn't find anything." Harry nodded. "Well… that's not exactly true, you see, I found a name that I thought might be the same R.A.B. from the locket, but I well… you were so very upset and I didn't want to give you any false hope. I found the name…" But this time it was the man who looked like Sirius who spoke.
"Regalus A. Black" and a grin spread across his face. Harry jumped and stood against the opposite wall and extracted his wand from inside his pocket where it was sticking out a little ways already.
"There will be no need for that." said the man as he took his out with a elegant twist and laid it across the germ free counter and he stepped back a few steps, folded his arms. All the while Hermione looked back and forth from the man that looked like Sirius and Harry with his wand still out.
"My word, Miss Granger, when you told me he would be hard to convince, I had not expected to be held at wand point." Hermione looked at Harry and Harry glared back at her.
"You know who this is?" said Harry outraged.
"Yes Harry, and so do you." Harry raised his eyebrows and gave Hermione a look that said "Oh really?"
"Oh, and if I am such bosom buddies with this man, then how is it I somehow don't have a clue who he is?"
"Miss Granger told me your really smart, How is it that I have told you my name and you still don't know who I am?" said the man in a tone Harry didn't like at all, and his sneer reminded him far to much of Snape for Harry's liking.
"How do you know him Hermione." said Harry ignoring the man that resembles Sirius.
"Well, if you would listen for just a few more minuets without jumping down my throat, then I'll tell you." Said Hermione so forcibly that Harry felt rather foolish. "Ok." said Hermione when Harry set his wand next to the strange man's on the counter, "I found in an old book at the end of last year. A name that you've heard before Harry weather or not you remember, Regulus A. Black." And she gestured towards the man on the other side of aunt petunias clean counter. Then it all clicked.
The man in front of him most definitely was not Sirius. But the man called Regulus was most definitely Sirius's brother. They had the same black hair and the same nose and they even stood a great deal alike. Harry took it all in and said nothing, realizing that he had acted dumb.
Then Hermione began to explain again. "It took a long time for me to be sure that I was right. I was looking for a name at the end of last summer, and well it struck me as odd that you didn't think of it first."
"Think of what first?" asked Harry.
"Think of Regulus as the R.A.B. in the locket" said Hermione rolling her eyes a little.
"Oh, yes, well…" said Harry scrutinizing Regulus's dirty appearance, thinking to himself that it wasn't at all astonishing.
"Anyway," said Hermione after Harry stopped talking. "Our fifth year, you remember? We were at number twelve Grimihald Place, and we were helping Ron's mum, clean…"
Harry nodded; yes he remembered the dismal house that was the hiding place for his godfather for those few years in hiding. That house that drove him mad, and the crazy house elf, that made Harry cringe. Yes he, Harry would never forget the house of Black.
"Good, well when we were cleaning out the cabinet and we removed all those old relics, and heirlooms, well, there was a locket." Harry didn't see where Hermione was going with this. "The locket I believe, the real locket that R.A.B. stole, was the one that we took out of that cabinet at Sirius's house."
"But Sirius thru out all that stuff, we would never find the locket again now, even if we wanted to!" said Harry, "Besides what makes you think that that specific locket is the right one?"
"I already told you Harry, Regulus was the one who stole the locket, and he is the R.A.B. in the locket." Harry glanced at Regulus and looked him over, isn't it possible that you've got it wrong Hermione? I mean, I don't see how…" Hermione cut him off.
"Harry, you still don't understand…" Hermione sighed in frustration and looked over at Regulus for help.
"You see, what Miss Granger is trying to beat into your skull, is that obvious information that has been presented to you over and over again." said Regulus.
"Oh, and what might that be? Said Harry frustrated, at the way Regulus was taunting him. "…What is this obvious truth, which my unusually small brain can't understand?"
"There is no need to be so flippant Mr. Potter! We are actually quite serious." And with that Regulus removed his hand from his pocket and withdrew a long gold chain, and a locket attached to it. "You see Mr. Potter; it is actually quite simple…"