Chapter Four- Nightmare Come True
Black did not take the spell off Harry until several hours later. This was long enough to convince Harry that Black was not a Death Eater, but was completely mad.
"You're all that's left," Black muttered several times as he paced the room, "Lily and James are dead, and Peter, that traitor…Voldemort will win, you see. They tell me Dumbledore's dead… too. Nowhere is safe, anymore. Well- it won't be. He won't stop at Briton. He'll take the whole thing. Better off dead than in a world like that…" For a moment there was a strange, terrifying light in Black's eyes.
Not an option, Harry thought. Not for me. And I won't be able to hide. Not once Voldemort finds out about my blood. He'll lock me up and drain me. There isn't anyone that can stop him. Especially not me- Harry Potter, a squib with a grand total of two years at Hogwarts...
Harry was free to walk around his small room for a couple of hours before Black froze him again. There were no easy exits. He was on the second floor of a large house. That much he was fairly certain of. He was not in America anymore. He could see through the grimy window (locked, and charmed unbreakable), and the cars driving by on the left side of the road told him what country he was in now.
"I'd like to go home," Harry told Black as soon as he was free.
Black shook his head, "It isn't safe."
Harry considered saying something sarcastic, but thought better of it. No sense in angering the madman.
"Why is this place safe then?" Harry asked instead, hoping there was still enough sanity in the man that he could be reasoned with.
Black grinned, revealing a set of yellowed, gapped teeth. "Fidelius Charm. No one can get in while I live."
Harry felt his hopes sink. There really was no way for someone to rescue him, now. He'd have to find his own way home. That might be even more dangerous that staying here, if there were Death Eaters looking for him.
When Harry finally started to feel like the cramps he had developed from sitting so still for so long were going away, Black paralyzed him again.
"Time for bed," he said, and tucked Harry's frozen body under the covers. It might have been a tender, loving gesture if Harry was three. As it was, it was creepy.
Harry remained still through the night, occasionally falling asleep and waking to a confused paralysis that frightened him until he remembered where he was. His rest was further interrupted when Black walked around the house, apparently as restless as Harry. He would mutter as he walked along, or sometimes- even more frightening- he would burst into song, singing strange lullabies or wizarding rock tunes that hadn't been popular for twenty years.
By morning, Harry was determined to escape. The only question was how.
Black left him alone for several hours in the morning, still frozen in place. Harry wondered if Petrifus Totalus wore off after a while. What if it didn't? Or what it this wasn't that spell, but some more advanced version that would keep Harry trapped here just the same? After all, Harry hadn't heard the incantation. It had been silent, this time. What if Black got hurt, or killed, while he was out? What if Harry was left alone, starving and unable to move? What happened to a Fidelius if the Secret Keeper died? Someone had told him, when Dumbledore died.
Everyone the Secret Keeper had told the location to while alive became a Secret Keeper themselves. That was it.
Somehow Harry doubted that Black had told anyone else the secret. He didn't even recall Black telling him, though since Harry was here, he had to have been told. Harry would be the only one who could find the building he was trapped in. He would be stuck forever.
He hoped fervently that Black didn't get himself killed.
Hours passed. Harry grew more and more nervous with each second that passed. Despite his being perfectly still, his heart began to race. Forever, trapped in this room.
And when Harry was on the verge of a full-blown panic attack, Black strolled in through the door, whistling and carrying bags of food and clothes.
He didn't seem to understand why Harry began to cry, once he was moving again. Crying from relief.
Harry didn't have to sit still again for hours and hours. He had a chance to go to the bathroom and stretch, and was given a set of robes to wear. He hid his own clothes behind some musty old towels in the bathroom; he might need to get out into the muggle world, and he would stand out if he wore robes then.
The kitchen in this house was dark and dusty. It obviously hadn't been used in years, perhaps decades. Black used a spell to clear the dust from the table before he put a loaf of bread and a few apples on the table.
"Eat," he said. Harry did so, slowly at first and then ravenously; he hadn't had anything to eat for over a day. He didn't let himself get distracted from his true goal, however. He needed to find a way out of this madhouse.
"I'm not letting you run away," Black said, as if reading Harry' mind, "They've got you convinced that you have to help, don't they?" He chuckled bitterly. "They did the same to me, before you were born. Told us everyone should stand together. You know that that got us? James and Lily are dead. Peter was never on our side at all. I went to prison for sixteen years, for I crime I never committed." His face took on a dreamy, far-away look, and he shuddered. "Fighting doesn't help. Better to keep a low profile, to avoid getting their notice at all."
Harry got the impression that he was listening to a well-rehearsed speech, albeit one made by a madman.
"Please- let me go."
Black's eyes went wide, "It isn't safe out there, Jam- Harry."
"It isn't safe here, if you're going to leave me petrified while you go shopping. If you'd have been attacked-"
"Thus the low profile." Black grinned, looking almost dashing. Harry could see, for a moment, what he must have looked like before prison. Under the circumstances, it was scary; that bravado meant that there was no reasoning with this man.
This didn't change Harry's plan. He had to get away. He hadn't really been expecting cooperation, though it would have been nice.
A couple hours later, he was in his room again. Waiting for a chance, through he wouldn't be able to take it since he couldn't move.
Second by second, days passed. No opportunities presented themselves for escape. Black continued leaving Harry alone in the house with no way to escape. His food, at least, got better, though there still wasn't enough of it. Harry was rapidly losing weight. Black was rapidly gaining it. He looked almost human now, not like a shriveled up mummy found in a bog. He must have been eating while he was out.
It was strange what Harry found he could get used to. After a couple of weeks, he found it easy to drift off into daydreams or actual sleep while stuck in bed. After a month or so, he found it difficult not to, even when he was relatively free. Life had acquired a level of unreality. His dreams were more vivid, more interesting, though they were not always pleasant. Perhaps he was going mad. Black certainly was. One day-unless it was a dream (it was getting hard to tell sometimes) - Black had showed him a whole wall of heads- house elves, face in bizarre grimaces and neatly mounted.
"This is one I did," he said to Harry in a merry voice, "he asked me to. Bloody, annoying creature."
And then they had gone into the kitchen and had tea and lemon cake.
By the twelfth week, Harry was never sure if he was awake or dreaming. He would walk down the hallway only to find himself in a forest, surrounded by a cloud of blue and purple butterflies. Several times, he found himself standing in a nightclub, dancing to a heavy beat until a little girl with huge grey eyes came up to him and told him to get out while he still could. He wasn't sure whether she was talking about the club or the house that he was only dimly aware of, but either way it seemed like a good idea.
On one day, several weeks later, he had a lucid moment, and thought: If I don't kill Black now and escape, I'll go mad.
The thought made him laugh. If I'm not already.
He made a plan-several-but they kept slipping away from him. That was when he realized he was dreaming. With a jolt, he woke up, still frozen.
I do have to kill him, Harry thought again, this time with a hint of hysteria and a sick feeling in this stomach. There isn't any other way out of this hellhole. He's a wizard, and if he's alive he'll be able to keep me here.
The question remained: how? Harry had no magic, so that eliminated a large range of options. He was never left alone while mobile, so it would have to be something without any preparations required.
In short, he would be bashing Black over the head, or stabbing him with a knife from a drawer in the kitchen.
If he screwed it up, he might never get another chance. Who know what Black might do after a murder attempt? Maybe Harry would never get out of this bed again. Well, then. I'll just have to succeed the first time.
The opportunity came the next day. Black was chopping vegetables for some sort of soup, letting Harry sit at the table and have a cup of tea, and he put the knife down for a moment and turned-
Harry grabbed it without another though, not giving Black a chance to realize what was happening. He hesitated for only a second before plunging the large blade though Black's shirt into his back.
There were still a few specks of carrot on the blade. Black twitched a few times, and Harry was sure he was not dead, but it was good enough. Harry ran. The front door was locked, as were the windows, but he managed to smash one window with a chair and he climbed out, trampling the overgrown bush below.
The he started running in earnest, not stopping for the stares at his red-and-silver- blood drenched clothing. The window had sliced him up fairly well, and Black had bled, too. More than Harry wanted to think about.
He had no idea where he was going, no idea where he was. A city, in England, judging by the accents and- yes, he'd seen the cars before, driving on the left. Was this London? He slowed. How in hell was he going to get home? Should he go to the police? Try to beg enough money for a pay phone? He was too tired to think, and he ended up just sitting on a bench. Funny, that. He'd just spent months doing nothing but sleeping, and now that he was free, he just wanted to find a bed and sleep some more. He ended up falling asleep on that bench for several hours, until the police made his decision for him by waking him up.
"You can't say here, sir," a big bulky man told him, "Don't you have a home?"
Harry began sobbing.
Several hours later, Harry had been given a clean change of clothing and a warm shower while the police tried to call his house.
No one answered. The message on the answering machine was the same as it had been months ago: "You've reached the Flamel house. Please leave a message after-Dad, stop making faces. Anyway, leave a message after the-
Beep.
"Hi," Harry told the answering machine. The police had already left a message for him, but he wanted to leave one of his own, "This is Harry. I'm safe, and relatively unharmed, but I'm somehow in England. Er. The police left a phone number and everything. So, call when you get this, okay?"
Beep.
Then it was time to give the police his statement.
"I was walking around, and he must have grabbed me from behind. I don't remember much after that for a while. I woke up in his house. He kept me locked up for most every day, and I couldn't even move."
"Where was this house?"
Try as he could, Harry could not remember. He hadn't caught the address.
"The window is broken," he said, knowing they would not be able to find the house or the body, "I had more important things to do than notice the address on the way out."
"His name? The kidnapper?"
"Black. Sirius Black."
The questioning continued for a while, and Harry answered everything as accurately as he dared. They gave him a full meal and danced around delicate questions that took Harry a while to even figure out what they were.
Why had Black done this? Had Harry been…hurt? Where was Black now? Did Harry want to speak to a counselor? What exactly had the treatment been like there?
Gradually, Harry realized what they were getting at. They thought Harry had been raped, but was avoiding telling them.
With no better story give them, he let them continue to think so. It was embarrassing, but his periodic blushes and horror-struck looks probably convinced them of this story all the more.
He was given a cot in the corner of an unused room. With the light on, he fell asleep more peacefully that he had in months.
He was lying the bed, in the house, and he was sticky. He could not move, and Black was standing across the room, holding the knife. Harry found that he could move his eyes and looked down to find himself covered in tacky, half-dried, red. Somehow he knew it was his own, that Black had killed him and he was still from death, not any curse.
So this is what death is like, Harry though. Well, I know how to handle this. With a little twist that had become familiar in the past weeks he slipped into a dream.
"We've been waiting for you," a voice said, dreamily, "You're awfully late. Do you like butterflies?"
Harry shook his head, and found himself standing in an underground room, with large carved pillars supporting the ceiling. The Chamber of Secrets, he thought. He had never been there before, but somehow he knew this was it.
In front of him was a girl with long blonde hair and large watery grey eyes, staring very intently at a spot just beyond his left ear.
"I do," she continued, sounding almost angry. "I like them very much, and I would like to be a butterfly now that I am dead. They don't think very much, you know?"
"Butterflies?"
"They have the right of it, I think. They don't worry. They live, they eat, they breed, they die. And then there are baby butterflies, and they do the same thing, forever. I would like to be a butterfly."
"Are you Luna Lovegood?" He couldn't recall seeing her when he was at Hogwarts for his second year, but then, he'd been wrapped up in his problems. And she did look like Luna Lovegood.
All of this made perfect sense while he was asleep.
"Are you Harry Potter?"
"Not anymore. I changed my-"
And then he woke up in the police station, well-rested though jumpy.
Nick still hadn't picked up the phone. Harry suspected that they were back in England, fighting.
They know I'm not dead, he thought. They should have left a way for me to contact them when I got free. Unless they thought I'd never escape. After all, it was months. Maybe they assumed Voldemort had me.
Maybe it hadn't been safe to stay in the house anymore. Draco had found it. Dumbledore's letter had found it. Black had at least known the neighborhood, though perhaps not the exact address. It was only a matter of time before Death Eaters found it as well. It was a miracle they hadn't while Harry still lived there.
What if they had, and the rest of the family had still been there? Nick might be locked up or dead, and Draco-
Draco's supply of elixir was nearly gone. Harry had nearly gone crazy draining himself beforehand, but there hadn't been more than twenty bottles. How many weeks had it been? Fourteen? Fifteen? How long until that stupid unbreakable vow kicked in?
His earlier train of though came back to him. If Death Eaters had been in the house, they knew that his last name was Flamel now, not Potter, They had access to the answering machine. If Death Eaters could still get into the house and they had control of Wizarding England- which they did- then Harry was in so much more trouble that he was lucky he hadn't been captured yet.
If Death Eaters could figure out how to work the answering machine, they would know exactly where Harry was. They would know where he had been for the last few months.
If they captured him, Voldemort would have a perfect source of elixir. Voldemort would be immortal, and Harry-
Well, Harry would be lucky if he ever had a chance to move, or see the sky, or talk again. He couldn't imagine Voldemort's treatment being any better than Black's.
If. If, if, if. For all Harry knew Nick was away on a…a fishing trip, and hadn't had a chance to get to the phone.
No. That was stupid, wishful thinking.
He had to find somewhere safe to hide. Somewhere no one could find him, where he could stay until he'd though of a better plan.
A place like Black's house.
He shuddered a little at the thought, but it made sense. Black was dead, now. Only Harry could get into the house. The only other thing there was dust. Dust and a dead body on the kitchen floor.
"Just stepping out for a bit of fresh air," Harry told the policeman near the door. I'll be back in a minute."
Tracing his steps back to the house was tricky, but he knew it when he saw it.
It was the old house with the overgrown front yard and the broken window. He walked in slowly, wishing he had a weapon.
Sirius must have stayed alive for a few minutes, at least. He'd dragged himself half-way across the kitchen. There was a trail of blood showing where he'd moved in his last few moments.
The mess wasn't made any better when Harry retched all over the floor
Somehow, Harry managed to drag the body out the back door and hid it behind a bush. He got out a rag and scrubbed the floor until no trace of gore remained, stopping to heave every few minutes. He didn't have any food left in him, at least. No more mess to tidy up.
He would never eat in this room again. If he could find a way to avoid cooking in it, he would do so.
Only then did he realize exactly how hungry he was. After all, one night's food wasn't enough to fix months of near-starvation.
Looking again at the floor, he decided that one day more of near-starvation would be alright. He couldn't bring himself to eat anyway, and there wasn't any food around except what Black had been cooking when Harry had... At some point, Harry would have to leave to buy some. He couldn't eat what was on the kitchen counter.
Was there any money lying around? Black must have had some, somewhere. Slowly, avoiding thinking about what he'd done, Harry began searching the rooms. There were even more of than he'd suspected, but it was easy to figure out which one was Black's. All of the others had a thick layer of dust on their contents. Black's, while not clean, looked lived in.
Not anymore, Harry thought. He stopped for a moment, shuddered and felt sick for a minute, and continued searching through Black's belongings. There was not much to see. Some newspaper articles, clipped out of their pages and piled in a heap. A pile of dirty laundry.
Finally, in a coat-pocket, Harry found a handful of gold coins. In the Muggle world they were worthless. He stared at them for a minute, then tucked them into his pocket. In time, perhaps, he would be desperate enough to try shopping at a Wizarding store. For now, he would remain hungry. A little hunger would not kill him. He searched for a little some Muggle money, but found none.
What the hell had Black been thinking? He'd seemed confident that no Death Eater would catch him, but he must have been shopping in Diagon Alley every day. The idiot! He could have been killed.
Harry sat down on the bed abruptly, tired. It was morning still and the light was coming through the curtains dimly. The house was quiet.
Gently, Harry fell asleep on the dead man's bed.
Harry woke in the middle of the night and couldn't move. For a moment, he though he was trapped again, that he hadn't shoved the knife in hard enough, and Black had come back to trap him again, this time for good- and then he found that he could move after all, and he sat up.
There was no light switches, which confused him for a moment until he remembered that this was a Wizarding home.
Candles were everywhere, but matches were harder to find. Finally, Harry got up and went downstairs, where he lit a few candles with the stove.
It was chilly and quiet. Suddenly, Harry wanted noise. Music, or a dog barking, or…anything, really, to get rid of the thick silence. He looked around but there was no Wizarding Wireless around the kitchen, and he didn't much fancy going anywhere else. The house was downright spooky at night.
He lit a fire in the fireplace, and the cracking of the logs helped calm him a bit.
He needed a plan. Stumbling along without one had led him here, with no way to find Nick or his friends, with no means of support and a dead boy in the back yard.
In his head, he began making a list of things to do.
1. Get some Muggle money
2. Figure out a way to find Nick
3. Avoid getting captured by Death Eaters
4. Get some muggle clothes
5. Get some flashlights or something; candles are too dim.
6. Get some food.
When the dawn arrived, Harry opened up all the curtains in the house, letting sunlight touch the dusty furniture for the first time in he didn't know how many years. He got a rag and wiped the grime from the glass. When he finished, the house was still filthy, but brilliant beams of sunshine could come in.
Over the next couple of days, Harry cleaned like a house-elf. He worked from dawn to duck and ate only the little food left in the kitchen-an apple and the heel of a loaf of bread. He was going to be stuck here for a long time, so it was worth cleaning up a bit.
He went through Black's things, trying not to look at the pictures in the photo albums or read the writing on the covers of the notebooks. He didn't want to see evidence that Black had been a real person, outside of this bizarre kidnapping situation. He didn't want to see the huge chocolate frog card collection. What he did want to see- and what he found, eventually, after a full twenty minutes rummaging around in the dead man's truck, was his vault key. Black had a Gringotts account. Judging by the size of his house, it was probably fairly large.
If Harry could get into Diagon Alley without being caught, and could change some of those Galleons into pounds, he wouldn't have to worry about food again. Before, that hadn't been feasible. After all, Harry couldn't walk in as himself. Dark Wizards were, quite literally, after his blood. But if he could pretend to be someone else, using the good old muggle methods of hair dye and a change of clothes- which he'd have to steal or buy, somehow…
Well, that was almost a plan, at least for now.
A/N: Well, before anyone gets mad at me for killing Sirius… I'm sorry! And I'd like to point out that he wasn't evil, really, but had gone crazy. My rationale for this insanity? In canon, Sirius was in Azkaban for less time than in this story. Also, he had months to compose himself and regain some stability before revealing himself to Harry. He had hope, however small, that he could get Pettigrew, prove his innocence, and move on with his life. Here, he's escaped to find that the world is worse than his worst memories in Azkaban, with Voldemort winning and most of the Order dead. There isn't any way to prove himself innocent; he'd be better off if he actually had been a Death Eater. In such a hopeless situation, is it any wonder he went a bit strange? And as for Harry killing him- well, there were probably better ways to escape, but this one presented itself and Harry wasn't thinking very clearly after months of near-starvation and captivity.