CHAPTER ONE

This story is AU after OotP although some details from canon will find their way in. No characters belong to me...I'm only borrowing them!

"Letters every three days!"

Uncle Vernon was clearly furious.

"If it wasn't enough that we've taken you in, fed you, raised you and this is what we get! Threats and letters and freaks ganging up on us in public places!" He sounded as if the fact that the exchange had taken place out in the open made it all the more insulting.

"It wasn't my idea," Harry said tonelessly. He knew it didn't matter what he said and if he'd known in advance that the exchange was going to happen at all, he could have warned its instigators not to waste their time. Suddenly he felt tired, achingly tired. He just wanted to be left alone.

"I won't have it, do you hear me? I won't have these...people coming around here and causing trouble! You just tell them..."

Harry tuned him out and turned his attention to his trunk. The sooner he could get upstairs, unpack and resign himself to another summer in this house...

"Are you listening, boy?"

"Yes."

"Well?"

"Well, what? I told you it was nothing to do with me."

"You expect me to believe that you haven't been complaining and lying and creating a fuss over..."

"I don't care what you believe. Can I go to my room?"

But Vernon clearly wasn't prepared to let it go. He stepped forward, still in spite of a recent growth spurt, managing to tower over Harry and giving him an old, childish urge to duck and run.

"You'll write those letters, boy. You'll give them no reason to come here, do you hear me? And if you think you can lord it over us with that sodding godfather of yours."

"Sirius is dead."

Harry had no idea he was going to say the words before he said them. He hadn't particularly intended to tell the Dursleys about him but in his mind, over and over, was a savage little urge to say the words, to keep saying them until they made some kind of sense. His voice sounded strangely flat to his own ears.

"Dead?" Petunia glanced over her shoulder at the front door, as if to check for errant, eavesdropping neighbours.

"Yeah. Can I go now?"

"Without him, you've nowhere to go, have you, boy? It's obvious that school of yours won't keep you in the summer. If we decide that you have to leave here..." Vernon left the sentence hanging but Harry suddenly realised that this wasn't just another empty rant. Something must have shown in his expression because his uncle's eyes were fixed on him now, seizing him up.

"You'll write those letters," he said quietly, "you'll tell those freaks you're happy and go about your work here without an ounce of trouble. Do you hear me? Otherwise, that's it, plain and simple, you're out. If that's what you want, then, fine."

There was a time that those words would have carried possibilities. It was true enough that every summer in this house, he dreamed of something...something obviously not life-threatening...but something, all the same, that would deem it impossible to return here. Suddenly, he felt cold. Leaving the Dursleys would make him vulnerable, which in turn would make anyone he cared about yet more vulnerable. After all, he truly understood now the danger that his friends were in, the fact that anyone he loved could at any time be targeted. The vision about Sirius had been a lie and look where that had led. Would the next one be?

"Ok, fine," he said quietly, "I'll do it. I'll keep them away."

Vernon nodded and bent down to Harry's trunk.

"We'll have this locked away for a start. You can keep the bird in your room for your letters but any nonsense..."

Harry turned around to look at his aunt. She stared back at him.

"We can't have your lot here," was all she said but he caught the inner meaning. She was in complete agreement. At least he'd had the sense to keep his wand in his pocket.

He wandered upstairs, trying not to think about the long weeks that lay ahead. Dudley was sitting in his own room and it occurred to Harry that it was strange that his cousin hadn't come down to witness the scene downstairs. Such things were normally his greatest form of entertainment.

"Hello Harry, did you have a good term?" His tone was one that, with a slight stretch, could be described as politely interested.

Harry froze. If he could even think of the disaster of the last few months as anything resembling something so normal sounding as a school term with any amount of coherent thought, the sight of his cousin's expectant face overtook any other chance of a sensible response.

"Thanks, you?" he murmured finally. The other boy nodded, smiled and lumbered downstairs to the television.

"That was weird," Harry muttered out loud as he walked into his room. The late afternoon sun cast a thin shaft across the floorboards and somewhere outside the window, there were the usual summer sounds of lawnmowers and car engines. This time last year he had had the odd sense, when entering this room, how strange that it looked the very same as always, when his own world was so completely torn asunder.

This time though, he wasn't expecting anything. On the train journey home, it had even occurred to him that the Dursleys' house was the one place he knew with no associations of Sirius and therefore, might make the thoughts in his head easier to quell. That would not be the case. He knew it at once.

In sudden desperation, he left the room and returned downstairs.

Petunia was standing in the kitchen, emptying shopping bags.

"How did your godfather die?" she asked, startling him, as she always did, when she asked anything even vaguely relating to his world.

"Like my parents," he answered shortly, going for the simplest explanation he could.

She dropped her gaze from his.

"Peel the vegetables and get them on," was all she said.

...

That night, the first in weeks, he slept deeply.

In a half circle around him, his servants gazed at him with adoration in their ignorant eyes. Harry found himself strangely impatient in their midst. Weaklings, most of them. Happy to join the hunt when he made the prey weak and pliable but where had they been in the most desperate instances of his existence, when his soul had floated aimlessly, without anchor? But no, he wouldn't think of that. It would not reoccur.

Bellatrix, at his side, her face radiant.

"You have news for us, Bellatrix?" he breathed.

"Yes, my lord, most promising news." She stood and faced him, blocking the others from his view.

"The mission I set you?"

"I believe it will be successful."

That was all she said and he felt her excitement as he brushed his mind against her own. He would not ask her to elaborate. The concerns she had shared with him about Severus were...unsettling. Gesturing to her to take her seat once again, he turned his gaze to the man he had believed to be his most faithful. Severus' expression was no less rapt than his counterparts, his mind open and alert. Severus had never let him down, never faltered in his duties and yet...

...Harry had to resist the urge to draw his wand and kill the man then and there.

"Crucio!"

As the man writhed on the ground in front of him, he turned from the triumphant glance Bellatrix shot him. It wouldn't do to let her know that she had been the one to alert him. Already the fact that he had ordered her not to share the details of her mission had led her to believe herself elevated to a position above every other Death Eater present. Let it pass, for now.

If her mission was indeed successful, Severus would have no choice but to act on his true loyalties. And if the suspicions turned out to be true, his punishment would be nothing less than an impressive warning to the rest of them.

It could be Severus' final duty. The thought amused him.

He pointed his wand again, thinking of the information Severus had passed to him over the last year...and the information that now it seemed, he had not...

"Crucio!"

Harry sat bolt upright in bed, his fingers pressed tight against his forehead.

He felt sick. Even though he had been, in a sense, the one casting the curse, it was also as if he had felt the pain of it. His whole body seemed to be pounding and he had a vague sense of wanting to run, as if running could dispel the darkness and grime that seemed to seep into his mind from the dream.

Not dream, he corrected himself, vision.

He had never learned to clear his mind before sleep and it seemed that he would never learn to shield his mind adequately to keep him from receiving them.

He closed his eyes, trying to remember the particulars of the scene he had witnessed. He could feel Voldemort's pleasure at Bellatrix's conviction about the success of the mission but nothing of what it might entail. And Snape...somehow the mission would expose Snape...

He hated Snape.

But no one deserved the glimpses of intent he had just seen inside Voldemort's mind.

Harry pulled over one of the pieces of notepaper Vernon had left by his bedside, chewed his pen thoughtfully and started to write.

Dear Remus,

I hope that everything is ok. I am fine. Nothing to report. The summer is going well so far.

He could think of absolutely nothing to elaborate on but he figured that it should suffice. He wasn't particularly known for his letter writing skills.

Could you please tell Professor Snape that he was right to be suspicious of my extra potions assignment. I'm sorry about that but thought I'd better let him know. He should be very careful with it as I think the ingredients got mixed up and could be dangerous.

He re-read the note. As subtle warnings went, it probably wouldn't make an ounce of sense to anyone, including Professor Snape but the fact of the non-existent extra potions assignment might just make him think.

He left the letter by his bed and lay back down but there was no more chance of sleep that night.