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January 15, 2016 A/N: Only a few edits here (grammatical and small details), but worth a read if you're refreshing yourself.
Chapter Two: Owl Post
20 July 2012
"Faster, Harry!"
A toy lorry zoomed through the air, skidding off furniture and soaring high over breakables and knick-knacks as a little girl with bright red hair and wild freckles urged it on. She ran around the edges of the room, over the carpet, and under her mother's reading hammock after the toy while Rose watched over the top of her laptop from her spot within said hammock's cool embrace at the corner of the living room. She winced as the yellow lorry executed a perfect dive and figure eight around the light fixture before rolling to a stop on the carpet. Jenny Renette cheered.
"Can you make me fly? Please?" she begged her brother, who perched cross-legged on the well-worn sofa nearby.
The boy shot a look to his mother, who smiled indulgently and snapped her laptop closed.
"Not in here, you can't," she said lightly. "Remember the incident with the telly?"
"Yeah, but I'm much better at it now. I never drop anything anymore," Harry said defensively. "And I did fix it right after."
Rose sighed and stood to ruffle her son's impossibly unkempt hair. He gave her a broad smile that made his vibrant eyes twinkle with barely suppressed laughter.
"I don't know if you can fix yours sister if she falls, though, and I really don't want to find out."
Her children glanced to one another and back at her in perfect synchronicity.
"Please, Mum?" they chorused.
"Fine," Rose huffed with a shake of her head. "Outside though. The Doctor set up a perception filter around the garden, so you should be fine as long as you don't let her go too high. Over the swimming pool, please, just in case.
"All right, Jenny, let's go put on our costumes," the boy crowed, grinning as he took off up the stairs.
"No fair! You got a head start!" she complained.
"It's not a race!" Harry yelled back, his voice echoing down the stairs.
A few moments later, the two children barrelled down the stairs, Jenny in the lead, and out the sliding back door to jump noisily into the sun-warmed swimming pool. Rose followed them out with a paperback novel in hand and sunglasses on her nose to watch while Harry entertained his sister by levitating her a few feet over the swimming pool and dropping her back in. It did not take long for the game to devolve into a water fight. They screeched and laughed and Rose found herself reading less and less and laughing more and more, until she shimmied out of her jeans, unclipped her earrings, abandoned her sunglasses, and hurled herself, screaming and still clad in a tee shirt and pants, into the water with them.
Whereupon, the water fight became an all-out war as squirt guns and pool noodles became a part of their respective arsenals. Eventually, Rose and Jenny teamed up (Jenny on her mother's shoulders) against Harry, who, outnumbered and outgunned, had resorted to using his peculiar ability to pummel his mother and sister with random jets of water pulled from all directions.
It went on with increasing noise and rambunctiousness until the owl arrived.
It swooped over their heads and circled the garden to land imperiously upon back of a wrought iron terrace chair.
The children and Rose stared.
"It's an owl!" Jenny cried. She swam to the edge of the pool to get a better look. "And it's got a letter!"
Her mother laughed.
"I can't believe it. It's just like before."
Harry frowned as he pulled himself up out of the pool.
"You mean you've seen post-carrying owls before, Mum?"
"Yeah. Just before we found you, actually. Told you we were expecting something odd this month."
"You and Dad investigate alien and paranormal activity," he deadpanned. "I don't know if I know what odd looks like."
Rose laughed and took the steps out of the pool, ringing out her shirt as she went.
"Are you quoting someone?" she quipped.
"Don't think so," he shrugged. "Jenny, don't mess with it!"
His sister paused at the edge of the terrace and glared at her brother.
"I'm not stupid! I wasn't going to touch it."
"Oi. None of that, Jenny Renette," Rose scolded gently. "It's not nice to make mean assumptions. Your brother would never call or think you stupid. He shouldn't have shouted, but it was out of worry."
"Sorry Jen," Harry added sheepishly.
The little girl pouted and turned her glare onto her mother. Rose did not quite manage to fight down her smile at the child's impudence. The owl made an impatient screech at the woman, who still failed to take the letter, which it had shaken quite insistently, from its beak.
"I wondered how it got through," Harry mused. "Didn't Dad say the perception filter wouldn't let anything smarter than bugs in?"
Rose made a face and fumbled in the pockets of her discarded jeans to withdraw a silver metal card with shining yellow light at one end. She fiddled with it a moment, until it emitted a whirring, humming sound familiar to both children.
"Is that a sonic-" Harry frowned and eyed the device, "-Scanner?"
"Your dad calls it a sonic spanner," Rose said dryly.
"Ha ha."
"Sonic spanner scanner," Jenny sung, her frustration forgotten.
The owl looked on with an expression of clear boredom, having apparently dismissed the Homo sapiens before it as the inferior creatures they obviously were, considering the time it was taking them to accept a simple letter.
"Owl plus? That's weird."
The owl screed as if insulted.
"Fine. You want me to take the letter, hmm?"
As soon as Rose's fingers touched the missive's edge, the owl took off into the sky. They all watched it beat its wings against gravity until it caught an updraft and soared into the afternoon sunshine.
"I think I was just cheeked by a bird."
Harry and Jenny laughed. Rose smiled and turned the letter over in her hands. She held the sonic scanner's yellow end just above the letter's surface. Finding nothing worrisome, she turned to hand it to her son, who watched with clear curiosity on his open face.
"It's addressed to you, Jemmy," she said by way of explanation.
Harry turned it over eagerly to confirm what she said. Rose smiled as his eyebrows rose under his fringe, just like the Doctor's did when confronted with a surprise or mystery.
"What's going on?" Jenny asked. "Is there something wrong with it?"
"No. Just the usual weirdness that comes with being a Tyler, love," Rose said lightly. "Now why don't we get you dried off?"
Harry turned the envelope over in his hands as he read and re-read the address (Mr H. Potter, Second Bedroom, 45 The Gallop, Sutton, Surrey), and examined the shimmering green ink and red wax seal.
"Should-"
He looked up to find his mother on the other side of the garden, vigorously towelling Jenny's hair while the little girl squealed.
"Shall I go on and open it?" he called.
Rose swung her cackling daughter up into her arms to carry her upside-down toward the sliding back door.
"Give us a little help with drying, first? This one's too wiggly for towels, and mummy's lazy."
The boy held the letter away, wrinkled his nose, and concentrated. A second later, steam rose from his trunks, skin, and hair. Another moment, and Jenny and Rose found themselves engulfed in vapour before they stepped into the games room.
Harry followed them inside once the steam cleared from his horn-rimmed glasses and hopped up on a kitchen barstool. Rose gave him a questioning glance. He sniffed the envelope, and then licked the wax seal.
"Ew!" Jenny laughed.
"I can't believe you picked up that habit," Rose complained.
Harry shrugged.
"Tastes like the air does when I do my psychokinetic thing," he said as he ran his thumb over the raised seal. "We shouldn't wait for Dad?"
"He's with the Torchwood crowd in Dover until tomorrow, darling. We've been expecting something like this. Go ahead."
Harry nodded and slid his thumb under the flap of the envelope. The seal broke with a snap and he caught a whiff of old books, oil based ink, parchment, goose feathers, and–
"Cat?" he wondered aloud.
"Stop sniffing it and tell us what it says."
The young boy adjusted his glasses and pulled the thick letter from its uniquely addressed envelope.
"Hogwarts School of…"
Harry stared at the words. He reread them just to be sure, but no matter how many times he did, the wording refused to change.
"Go on then. What's it say?" Rose asked, excitement colouring her tone.
Harry looked up at his mother with wide eyes. Jenny bounced in her seat.
"What is it? What is it? Tell us Harry!"
"Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry," Harry breathed.
Rose blinked. By he expression, Harry mused she hadn't been expecting that. His mother's morphed from blankness to confused disbelief.
"What?"
"Harry's a witch!" Jenny crowed.
Harry held his letter in the air to prevent his sister from grabbing it out of his hands.
"What?" Rose gasped.
"Harry's a witch! Harry's a witch!"
The girl sung the words over and over, running around her brother as he tried to make his way toward the kitchen without tripping over her.
"Sorry, but, what?"
Rose shook her head and pulled a phone from her pocket. Her fingers flew across its screen, and she put it on the counter as the dial tone rang over the external speakers.
"Hello! Can't talk right now I'm-"
"Daddy," Jenny yelled, bouncing up and down by the counter. "Harry's a witch!"
A beat of silence followed the girl's interruption, followed by clear confusion.
"What?"
Rose smirked, her previous bewilderment replaced by amusement at her husband's unconscious echo. Jenny Renette had no such obstacle to explaining, however.
"Harry got a letter and it's from a school for witches!"
"Just what?"
Gunshots sounded hollowly over the speakers.
"Doctor?" Rose near-yelled, snatching the phone up again and hastily taking it off speaker.
She brought it to her ear while Harry's brow furrowed. He caught his sister to keep her from jumping around further and shot her a look.
The child frowned but stilled at the seriousness directed at her.
"You get the hell out of there!" she yelled. Then, "It can wait! He's fine!"
She leaned away from the phone as an ear-splitting squeal came out of the speaker.
"Fine!" she shrieked, her face darkening murderously.
Rose handed Harry the phone and cursed under her breath as she stomped around the counter to the stove. Her son looked after her anxiously. His eyebrows disappeared behind his fringe again.
"Just talk to your father," she snapped. "And tell him he's banned from the tree house when he gets back and sleeping on the bloody sofa."
"Okay…" Harry put the phone to his ear. "Mum say's your banned from the tree house and you're on the sofa."
"That's not fair!" the Doctor protested. "Everything's under control, now."
Harry laughed, and Rose grumbled something about stupid, stubborn Time Lords with a death wish and no apparent sense of self-preservation.
"So what's it say?"
"Hogwarts school of Witchcraft and Wizardry, Headmaster Albus Dumbledore. In parentheses it says he's an Order of Merlin, First Class, Grand – I guess that's short for sorcerer – Chief Warlock, Supreme Mugwump, International Confederation of Wizards."
"Really?"
Harry blinked and scanned the words again to make sure he wasn't imagining things.
"Yeah."
"Brilliant! Guess we know what human plus means, now," the Doctor said in a rush. "What else does it say?"
Harry read through the page once and flipped to the next one. His expression muddled as he progressed through each line.
"Why can't I just send you a photo?" he said after a moment. "It's pretty unbelievable, anyway."
"Because it's more fun over the phone and I'm curious to hear your reaction," the Doctor insisted. "Send me photos later."
"If you say so," Harry shrugged. "It says 'Dear Mr Potter' – Well, whoever they are, they don't know my whole name. Huh. '-We are pleased to inform you that you have a place at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Please find enclosed a list of all necessary books and equipment. Term begins on 1 September. We await your owl by no later than 31 July. Yours sincerely, Minerva McGonagall, Deputy Headmistress.'"
Harry took a breath. His face slowly spread into a tentative smile. Jenny resumed dancing around the kitchen singing 'Harry's a Witch!' repeatedly while Rose dumped pasta into a pot of boiling water. She had stopped muttering, but now sent forbidding looks at the mobile. Harry shuddered to think what punishments she had in store for his reckless father.
"The second page is a list of equipment, books, and uniform kit. And apparently I can bring a pet."
"What sort of pet?"
"Owl, cat or toad."
"Well, wizards apparently send post with owls, so that'd probably be the best. Well, maybe not. I suppose they must have post offices if they have international confederations and schools, so if you wanted, you could have a cat. I assume you don't want a toad – I never met one I liked – though, I wonder what use they'd have? Interesting, the types of pets allowed, might be significant," the Doctor rambled.
Harry bit his lip to keep from laughing.
"Does it say where the shops are?"
Harry scanned the letter again.
"No. Just to send them an owl by my birthday."
"Hmm," he hummed. "Well, I'll catch an early lift home. Put me on speaker."
Harry put the phone back on the counter and caught Jenny about the waist as she ran by. She giggled as he lifted and set her on a barstool. He gave her a couple cloves of garlic to peel and got started on the rest, which Rose had left out for them.
"What now?" Rose harrumphed. "I'm trying to make tea."
She popped a tray of frozen meatballs into the oven as she spoke and started chopping tomatoes as soon as the door clanged shut.
"I promise everything's fine over here, so stop that," the Doctor sighed, his voice made a bit tinny by the speaker. I'm supposed to be the rude one in this relationship. Anyway, that's not what's important right now."
Rose rolled her eyes.
"Harry, do you want to have the most amazing adventure of our collective experiences?"
The boy looked up from his small pile of peeled garlic.
"Better than traveling through time and space in the TARDIS?" he asked dubiously. "Seeing Led Zeppelin live when they weren't drunk or high, and saving the universe?"
"Well, maybe not, but that's the beauty of this situation! It could be," he exclaimed. "Back when your mum and I found you, I thought the readings we picked up looked Time Lord-y. For all we know, you could be a subspecies. Humans and Time Lords are DNA compatible anyhow, so maybe-"
"You think wizards are part Time Lord?"
The incredulity in Harry's voice rang unmistakably, even over the phone.
"Who knows? Could be anything. It's wonderful, isn't it?"
Harry looked at his mother and sister, both of whom watched him: the first with amusement and frustration, the second with unadulterated excitement.
"Do you seriously think I'm a wizard or witch or whatever?" he asked his family at large.
"The universe is made wonderful by mystery, Harry," his father assured him. "Science or magic – Same thing, different terminology and technique. Doesn't change who you are."
Rose hid a smile at her son's suddenly misty-eyed look.
"So you think I should go?" he finally asked once the tightness in his throat abated.
"There are some other things we want to talk to you about, first, but of course I do! It's a school, after all. How dangerous could it be?"
Harry looked at his mother, who met his gaze over the top of the counter. She gave him a nod and a small smile.
"Okay. I think I'd like to, if that's all right with you. It'd be nice to not hide my abilities anymore."
"Brilliant! Fantastic! Put your mum on and go help with dinner."
Rose stepped forward and scooped up the mobile. Harry hopped off the stool and went to the stove while Jenny grabbed a head of lettuce and a hard plastic lettuce knife. She started shredding it methodically into uneven bits of salad.
They worked – Harry with excitable twitchiness and Jenny cheerfully – while Rose wove around them to handle the potentially injurious bits, her head cocked to one side as she carried on a conversation with her husband. Twenty minutes later, they sat around the table with steaming heaps of spaghetti on their plates. Jenny wore an apron and perched on an overstuffed cushion, as she was still prone to dropping things on herself and had not reached her next growth spurt, with her elbows on the table. Harry slowly twirled noodles around his fork and stared every so often at the letter, which sat innocuously in the spot usually occupied by the Doctor's place setting.
"Tomorrow, when your dad gets back, we're going exploring," Rose said between bites.
"Exploring where?"
"Torchwood has a lead we're going to investigate."
Harry sat straight. Jenny concentrated hard on winding her spaghetti into a perfect ball at the end of her fork.
"A lead for what?"
"Disappearing persons of unusual dress and behavior from before we found you," Rose elaborated. "There's a shop front south of Leicester Square. It's broken down, a complete dump, but it's been owned and operated legally by a Dodderidge family since 1500. Its age should make it fall under the historic preservation laws, but it was never entered into the database, and every time they tried to do it, it sort of got lost in the system and never registered."
Rose took a sip of wine and gestured for Harry to keep eating. His fork had paused between his plate and his mouth half a minute ago as his mother dropped into her story-telling voice.
"In the twenties and thirties, Torchwood had operatives watch it because they picked up on a perception filter over the area.
"The thing is, they couldn't look for very long. Their eyes would sort of slide off it, like they didn't want to look. And they noticed people approaching the area empty-handed and coming away with parcels and bags. Occasionally, someone would appear from that spot."
Harry swallowed slowly. Rose took another bite of her supper.
"Eventually, Torchwood decided it wasn't hurting anything and left it be, but they never figured out what the perception filter hid. And then the invisible war happened. A good portion of the massive terrorist attacks seemed to radiate around that point, and people would disappear near there, but with everything else going on, we didn't have enough people power to investigate it fully by the time we figured out its significance. And, once things started letting up, we were to busy with clean-up to bother."
She raised an eyebrow and Harry frowned at his plate as he contemplated the mystery.
"People disappear and appear or reappear with parcels. Can't look straight at it. You already said perception filter," he reasoned. "It's probably set up just like the one here. From the comings and goings, it sounds like the entrance to a hidden… What? A shopping mall? An invisible city? Is that what you and Dad talked about?"
"That's right. We commiserated a little, and he suggested, since the Torchwood blokes didn't pick up on any known tech, that it must be something else."
"Oh," Harry sat back a little. "So we're going to solve it, then? We're going to see if it's a wizard thing?"
"Yes. And then your dad and I will try to find other witches and wizards, if there are any, who don't live under the filters. Like any tech, it's got to be expensive to maintain."
Jenny sat up taller in her chair and speared a meatball.
"I'll bet Grandpa would like to know, too," she suggested. "I remember he said he got tons of odd reports when he got into office."
"Probably," Rose agreed. "Knowing him, MI6's Unit overlap people are just keeping mum to see if your daddy finds anything new."
She grinned at her kids and rolled her eyes.
Harry laughed.
"Why do they always make it a contest?"
"Contests are fun," Jenny Renette said as if it were obvious.
Rose shook her head.
"Because they thought he'd be less brilliant without the whole immortal thing," she clarified. "And they hate admitting he isn't."
The corners of her mouth twitched as Harry struggled to absorb that information.
"He's probably more clever than ever," he finally said. "You know, because he hasn't the time to not be."
"And don't forget it. I did a few times, and I still haven't heard the end of it."
Harry grinned and tucked into the rest of his food with renewed vigor. Tomorrow would be the start of his adventure.
