James' reaction to Harry's new-and-improved haircut wasn't nearly as bad as she'd thought it would be. He'd sighed and given her a disappointed look, but hadn't actually said anything, or even tried to foist a Hair-Growth Draught on her like he had at the beginning of summer.
"I think he's given up," Alex said after their father had left.
"Either that or he's too exhausted from working for four days without sleep." It had taken James longer to return from the Department of Mysteries than ever before - not even last year had he stayed away so long. In fact, last year, he'd actually come back for a few hours near the middle of the night, leaving only a rumpled copy of the previous day's Daily Prophet as proof that he'd been there.
"I don't care why," Harry said, wrinkling her nose in disgust at the sentence she'd just read in Year with a Yeti. Lockhart was simply unbelievable, and not in a good way, either. "As long as he leaves the wards on my door down for the rest of the summer, it's fine by me if he wants to stay at work twenty hours a day." That, of course, was a bald-faced lie; Harry might not be close with her father - she hardly knew the first thing about him, and Draco Malfoy probably knew more of James' history than she did - but she loved him all the same. She was gone for most of the year, too, and wanted to see him at least for dinner, or even just breakfast, every day.
Alex, perhaps wisely, didn't say anything more on the subject, choosing to broach a new one. "Jonah is arriving in ten days. He and his parents are going to be staying at Dovecote Wayhouse."
"Where's that?" Harry asked, lowering the book a little so that she could see her brother as he lounged on one of the three couches in the middle of the library.
"Flower District, I think," Alex responded with a frown. "I told him it would be dangerous, but he said that nothing's as bad as the Mangrove City, whatever that means. I haven't been able to find any references to anything by that name, and he hasn't written back yet."
"Well," Harry said cautiously, "the Flower District is very close to Diagon Alley. There's only a few shops between them."
"How d'you - " Alex started, and then stopped. "Oh, yeah. I nearly forgot about your whole adventure down Knockturn Alley."
"Lucky you," Harry muttered, going back to her book. She hadn't slept well for the past three nights. She would wake each morning around three from nightmares, sometimes involving Ash, alive despite his gruesomely slit throat, and sometimes featuring a charred nearly past recognition - but always just recognizable that she knew who it was - Professor Quirrell. The worst yet had been an amalgamation of the two, with a blistered Ash chasing her through the dark rooms of the obstacle course under the school, towards the Mirror of Erised and the Sorcerer's Stone, crying out for her blood, with the bodies of her friends and family nailed to the walls of the rooms, their throats gaping red and shining.
Harry stood abruptly.
"You alright?" Alex asked, looking up from studying Building Walls: A Comprehensive Guide to Shoring Up Your Mind and Exploring Your Center, the book on Occlumency that Cedric had given her for her birthday.
"Fine," she said shortly. "I'm going for a fly." He shrugged and returned to the book. She picked up her stack of texts - although she privately thought it was a crime to call Lockhart's books 'textbooks' - and walked at a fast clip to her room. Within a few minutes, she was out the window and into the air. For a long while, Harry simply flew around the very edges of the Potter Estate, flying so close to the wards that her hair started to gain static from proximity. She only returned to her room when the sun began to sink past the horizon, and it became difficult to see where she was going.
Alex was waiting for her. "I know you're not telling me something," he said quietly as she stowed her Nimbus under her bed with the rest of the things she didn't want James to find. She only faltered for a moment, but since she was most of the way under her bed, Alex didn't see.
"There's lots of things I don't tell you," she retorted as she emerged and brushed some dust from her hair. And it was true - while she'd told her brother the gist of what had happened in the chambers under the trapdoor, she hadn't once mentioned the fact that she'd killed a man. Nor had she told him about Ash; she doubted she ever would. That would involve a deeper explanation of what had really happened in the Lower Alleys, and she didn't think the King would take kindly to her publicizing his existence, even just to her brother.
"But something's bothering you," Alex pushed, staring at her.
Harry crossed her arms and glared at him; he didn't budge, not even under her worst glare. She relented a little, and brought up a subject that had been niggling at her conscience for the past weeks. "What are we going to do next year?" she asked.
"What do you mean?" Alex was fiddling with the notes she'd been taking while reading the Lockhart books, and she snatched them away from him, stacking them on her desk.
"I mean," she said, organizing the Lockhart books by title, "I'm starting to…grow."
"You mean your baps?"
Harry flushed at her brother's bald statement. It was one thing hearing the boys in the locker room toss vulgarities about, but the same words were completely different when it was her brother that was saying them, about her instead of some faceless female. "Yes," she snapped. "And don't let Dad or any of the portraits hear you say that."
"Or what?" he scoffed. "The portraits can't do anything."
"No," Harry pointed out, getting out her largely unused chess board and setting it up on the bed. "But they can order the elves to wash your mouth out with soap."
"Fine," Alex said lazily, making his first move. "But I don't see what the problem is." He wasn't referring to his language.
"I'm pants at charms," Harry said, "and glamours are one of the most taxing and tricky type. Potions won't work either, since there's no potion that can change a person's gender. Only Polyjuice does something of the sort, but it turns you into another person, not just a different version of yourself."
They played in silence for a long while, both of them trying to think of some way that Harry could disguise herself.
Finally, when Harry was beginning to realize that there was no way she could win the chess game, Alex sat up so quickly that a few of the 'dead' pieces rolled off the bed and onto the floor. "Transfiguration!" he exclaimed.
"I'm not Transfiguring myself," Harry said immediately. "Even I'm not slated to start human-transfiguration until fourth year, and that's at a sped-up pace!"
"So Transfigure your clothes," Alex said with a shrug, putting her king in Check.
"That won't…" Harry started, but trailed off. "That - might actually work," she said slowly, absently tipping over her king and getting to her feet. She rushed to her desk and pulled out Transfiguration Lessons for the Newfound Prodigy. She flipped to the 'Altering and Modifying: Transmutations' chapter and read fervently through the section.
"Well?" Alex asked after a good five minutes. "Will it work?"
"It might," Harry responded, scrawling out notes and ideas on a piece of parchment. "It won't be very comfortable, but with the right alterations and binding material, and hair-cut and behavior, I should be able to make it work." She didn't mention that changing her clothes would do nothing for when she was in the Quidditch locker rooms, which was what she was most worried about; robes, after all, did hide a lot.
They spent the rest of the evening discussing her disguise, and when she went to bed that night, Harry congratulated herself on successfully distracting her brother from what she wasn't telling him.
The rest of the month of August went by quicker than Harry had expected. Once Jonah arrived to London, Alex spent a few hours each day in Diagon Alley. Harry always declined to join them after the first day, where she met Jonah and his parents and ate lunch with them. None of the three Americans even suspected that she was a girl.
The rest of the time when Alex was out of the house, Harry went back to her perusal of her mother's old belongings. It was during the last of these explorations - on August thirty-first - that she discovered a trunk at the very back of the room that she was positive hadn't been there last summer.
When she pulled it out and opened it, she saw that it was filled with letters. The vast majority were from her mother to her father, or vice versa, but a significant amount were signed off by either Moony, Padfoot, or Wormtail. She stared at the names, certain that she had seen them before, but unsure where. But the most interesting thing in the trunk was underneath the letters. When she pulled out the oddly shimmery fabric, Harry wasn't immediately sure what it was. Only when she draped it over a nearby box of her mother's robes did Harry realize that she'd just found an invisibility cloak.
Heart hammering in excitement, she draped the cloak over herself, and then stepped into the hallway, making sure to close the door behind her. Under the folds of the cloak, she roamed the halls for a good half hour: not a single portrait glanced her way, and even Mathilda, fluffing the pillows of the couches in the largest sitting room, didn't know she was there.
Alex was just as thrilled as she was at the discovery of the invisibility cloak, and tried it on himself. Before leaving to go to bed, though, he'd handed it back to her with a serious expression. "You should take it with you," he said, depositing the silky fabric in her hands. "You'll need it more - I'd just use it to make mischief." Harry didn't say that she'd probably use it to make mischief too, but accepted it with a nod.
"If you ever need it - "
"I'll ask," Alex assured her, but she knew him well enough to know that he'd likely never ask. He'd just find a different way to hide.
"See you tomorrow?" she asked as he headed towards the door to her bathroom, and the secret passage within.
"Yeah. I'm meeting Jonah at the Leaky Cauldron, so we can Floo there together."
As with the year before, James woke Harry up shortly before six to say goodbye and wish her a successful year at school. He was gone before she'd truly come out of the hazy warmth of sleep.
When Alex joined her for breakfast, still yawning, his hair damp from bathing, she asked, "You've got your trunk all ready?"
"Yes - packed and everything," he replied, rather testily.
"Alright, alright," she muttered, spearing an orange slice with her fork. "No need to be mean about it." They ate the rest of their meal in sullen silence, until Triss reappeared and cleared away the dishes and uneaten food.
"'m'sorry," Alex mumbled as they started up the staircase to their rooms.
"It's fine." Harry didn't know exactly why Alex was apologizing. They got into arguments more often than she could keep track of.
"I - well - just… be careful," her brother stressed.
"What do you mean?"
"Well," he hedged, dragging his fingers along the wall and earning a few rude remarks from the portraits he knocked into, "you nearly died in June, and then there was the troll and the wraith and - "
"I didn't nearly die!" Harry exclaimed, even though Alex was alarmingly close to the truth. "It was just a little fight - and Cedric was there the whole time!"
"I should have been there!" Alex shouted, spinning and glaring at her. Harry sighed and ran a hand through her hair, making it stand on end, before trying to pat it back down.
"We couldn't have gone through this in, like, July?" she muttered quietly before saying calmly, "I can take care of myself, Alex."
"But - I should've - If I hadn't come up with the idea - "
"Look," she said firmly, "only three people - well, four, if you count Madam Pomfrey, and she's bound by oath to keep quiet - know that I'm a girl, and they're all trying to be all manly and responsible by trying to 'protect me'." Her voice had taken on a bitter overtone. "Having you there wouldn't make a difference, and I'd probably end up jinxing all of you before the week was up."
He sighed, and turned back down the hall towards his room. "I'll meet you in the dining room," he called back over his shoulder in a forcedly chipper tone of voice.
Harry shook her head and bounded up the stairs to her room. The two of them had never had anything like this happen before: she trusted Alex to take care of himself, and he trusted her to do the same. Alex was being weird, and she didn't like it.
When she met back up with Alex in the dining room, dressed in her Hogwarts uniform (which thankfully still fit from last year, even if the trouser hems showed a sliver of ankle when she sat), the fee for the Knight Bus in a readily accessible pocket, he was back to normal, and didn't say anything except, "Got everything?"
Glad that he hadn't brought the subject up again, she nodded. "Yeah. You?"
He gave her a sideways smirk. "Naturally." Harry smiled; even though he didn't know it, Alex had just done a remarkably good impression of Draco Malfoy at his most arrogant. "You go first," he added, the smile fading.
Harry moved towards the hearth, rolling her eyes as she did so even though she was inwardly still wary of Floo travel after her mishap. "I'll be coming right after you, so move quickly!" Alex called out as she stepped into the green flames, pulling her trunk with her, and cried out, "Leaky Cauldron!"
The dining room spun away, replaced by green flames and dizzyingly brief images of other rooms connected to the Floo Network. She pulled her trunk closer to her body, and immediately regretted it when she began spinning even faster. Starting to feel sick with the speed at which she was rotating, Harry closed her eyes. Only when she felt herself slowing down did she open them.
For once, she could actually see through her spectacles; someone on one of the ends of the Floo - either the Potter house elves or Tom the innkeep - had cleaned since she last come through. But even though she was far cleaner than usual, Harry still had to take her glasses off to clean them. She couldn't wait until she was seventeen so that she could just spell the soot off.
Harry had only barely moved out of the way when the fire flared green again and Alex stepped out.
"Made it alright?" he asked, heaving his trunk along after him, oblivious to the smears of ash on his cheeks and forehead.
"Yeah." Harry wished they'd said goodbye back at Potter Manor. She knew that at least three different strangers were watching them. "Where are you meeting Jonah?" she asked quietly.
"Up in his room, I think." Alex craned his neck around to check for his friend. "Yeah, he's not here so he'll be packing still." They stood for a moment, just looking at each other, before Harry stepped forward and hugged her brother.
"Write when you get there?"
"Only if you do too," Alex responded, squeezing her harder. "And I swear that I'll be taller than you by the end of the year."
Harry chuckled and stepped back. "No guarantees there."
She grabbed her trunk and started hauling it towards the door to muggle London, where she could hail the Knight Bus. Just before she stepped out the door, she looked back. Alex had started up the stairs. Harry grinned when she saw that his socks were bright purple; at least she got to wear somewhat normal socks as part of her uniform.
The pimply young conductor of the Knight Bus lugged her trunk aboard and set it by one of the many mismatched armchairs. Harry paid the four sickle fee to get to King's Cross, and then sat back, bracing her chair against the side of the bus. The ride was just as bumpy as she remembered. The only difference this year was that when a very dark-skinned Lee Jordan clambered aboard some ten minutes and three counties after the Leaky Cauldron, the boy came and sat next to her.
"Hey Harry!" he greeted her with a grin. "How was your summer?"
"Alright," Harry said with a shrug, nearly hitting her head on the window when the bus jumped to a new street. "Yours?"
Lee, apparently, had spent much of the summer abroad. This year, his family had traveled to southern Africa, spending most of their time in Kenya and Tanzania. Harry was jealous; she'd never even been off the island, or indeed anywhere besides Diagon Alley, Potter Manor, Kings Cross, and Hogwarts.
"Kings Cross!" the conductor bellowed out. Harry and Lee followed a vaguely familiar blonde girl off the bus. After loading her trunk onto a trolley, Harry and Lee followed the blonde to the barrier between Platforms Nine and Ten. One at a time, each of them slipped through from the muggle platforms to the largely empty magical counterpart.
"D'you know when Fred and George are getting here?" Lee asked as they teamed up to get each of their trunks onto the train. By unspoken agreement, they sat in the same compartment.
"Sorry, no." After a few minutes of silence, Harry stood up and pulled Transfiguration Lessons for the Newfound Prodigy from the top of her trunk. The book was deceptively slender: even though it wasn't very large, it was dense in words and very lacking in the large diagrams often found in her course books. For the next half-hour, they sat in silence. Harry was conscious of Lee's presence, but she didn't quite know what to say. While they were both friends with the twins, they didn't see each other much otherwise. She mostly hung out with Hermione and Neville; he had friends in Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw that he spent time with when the twins were too busy for anyone except each other.
As eleven o'clock approached and the platform outside the windows got busier, Harry put her book away. She had just sat back down when Lee, looking out the window, exclaimed, "There they are!"
When she joined him at the window, she could see a cluster of red-haired boys moving towards the train. Mrs. Weasley and her daughter lagged behind them.
"Cutting it a bit close," Harry commented as she opened the window.
"They usually do," Lee said dryly.
Harry snickered as she stood on the seat and stuck her head and upper body out the window. "Oi! Fred! George!" The twins turned to the sound of their names, and as one, grinned. They turned their trolleys towards Harry. In less than two minutes, their trunks were loaded into the compartment and the twins had seated themselves - Fred next to Lee and George next to Harry.
Fred opened his mouth to say something, but the compartment door slid open before he could. Hermione and Neville stood there, a little unsure until Harry, grinning stood up. "What took you two so long?" she asked.
Hermione smiled, relieved, and came right in, storing her trunk in one of the two free spots under the seats. "We walked most of the train looking for you. Has your brother left for Asclepius yet?"
"Oh, yes, Alex, wasn't it?" Fred asked mock-pensively.
"Have we heard of him before?" George added.
Harry rolled her eyes as Hermione took the seat next to the door on the other side of Fred, leaving Neville to sit next to George. "Oh, I don't know," she said sarcastically. "I seem to remember a rather interesting trip to Flourish and Blotts."
"What happened?" Neville asked. He sported a faint spread of freckles across his nose and cheeks than he hadn't had a few months ago, and seemed to have lost some of his puppy weight, but besides that seemed mostly the same, right on down to Trevor, who now had his very own portable terrarium (presumably so that he wouldn't keep escaping).
Harry sighed, and together with the twins, explained what had happened in Flourish and Blotts. Partway through her diatribe about irritating blonde professors, the train began to move, picking up speed slowly. Hermione was more interested in the King than the story of the fistfight between Mr. Weasley and Mr. Malfoy ("Honestly - they're grown men!") and Harry then had to give the abridged version of her adventure down Knockturn Alley. Neville was strangely unimpressed by her adventure, although he did help explain to Hermione why Knockturn Alley and the related Lower Alleys were so dangerous.
Their conversation branched out from there. Neville described the plants he'd found in the Ivory Coast, and Hermione talked a little about her youngest cousin, who she thought might be a witch but couldn't be sure as the little girl was hardly even three months old. Lee entertained them with stories about his younger sisters - nine and eight respectively - and the wild beauty of Africa. Fred and George spoke of their older brothers Charlie and Bill visiting early in the summer.
After the sweet trolley came by, Harry brought out the eagle totem and passed it around. Fred and George came out of the experience with wide eyes and identical grins. Lee was interested in the magic that had been worked on the carving, but both Hermione and Neville looked a little ill and only spent a minute or so in the trance.
"Although it is fascinating how such an ancient race could have worked out such complex magic without the use of wands or staffs," Hermione mused as color slowly came back to her cheeks.
"You'd get along great with Alex," Harry said, her voice a little muffled as she returned the eagle totem to her trunk. "He spent about a week researching them. Had to get a book and everything." Harry had written to Hermione about the library in Potter Manor, even though she knew that the chances of her friend ever actually seeing it were slim to none. Even if the wards did allow Hermione onto the property, Harry wouldn't be able to invite her over: James thought that Hermione was Alex's friend, not hers.
The rest of the train ride to Hogwarts was spent playing Exploding Snap. Only once the train began to slow down did Harry realize that they had yet to put on their robes. The last five minutes on the train were spent in a hurry, first finding their robes and putting them on, and then trying to neaten their compartment to at least a less messy state. The six of them were amongst the last students to get off the train, with only the two Prefects - both sixth year Hufflepuffs - lingering to makes sure all students had disembarked.
Once on the platform, Harry realized that she didn't know how the upper years got to and from Hogwarts. Last year, she, Hermione, and Neville had taken boats across the Black Lake when arriving and when leaving. Now, however, they weren't first years.
"How do we get to Hogwarts?" Harry asked.
Lee answered first. "Horseless carriages."
"The what?" Hermione asked incredulously.
"Carriages that pull themselves," George supplied.
"Like autos, but carriages and no eggends," Fred added.
"Engines," Hermione corrected automatically. Only Lee chuckled; Harry just felt confused. She obviously knew what an automobile was, but she'd never heard of an engine before.
"See," Lee said when they rounded a bend about a minute later. Harry stopped in her tracks, nearly tripping Neville, who also stared at the carriages in a mixture of fear and horror while the other four continued towards the carriages without worry, listening to Hermione as she hypothesized what could be responsible for the carriages pulling themselves.
Harry didn't have to postulate. She could see what was pulling the carriages: horses. But horses the likes of which she'd never seen before. They had the hooves and the tail and the equine shape, and as she watched, one of them flared out a pair of leathery wings, revealing skin stretched tightly over bone, so that she could count every rib and vertebrae, and the shoulder and pelvic bones stood out in a grotesque manner. Each carriage was pulled by only one of the ghastly creatures.
"I - can you see them too?" she asked Neville, once she'd swallowed a few times as she adjusted to the creatures' appearance.
Neville nodded once, short and jerky. "Do you think they'll attack us?" he whispered shakily.
Harry paused. "No," she said stoutly, grabbing Neville's wrist and starting forward. He whimpered once, quietly, but strode with her as they tried to catch up with the others. "Someone had to put them in harness, and they've probably been used for years."
Harry barely noticed what the others spoke about on the ride up to the castle; she was too busy wondering what the creatures were. If Neville hadn't been able to see them too, she probably would have thought she was hallucinating.
Her preoccupation with the weird horses lasted all the way through dinner. It was only Fred's loud, "Wattlebird," that brought her out of her reverie. In the common room - she only belatedly noticed that Ginny Weasley had, in fact, become a Gryffindor - Hermione pulled her over to the side while the twins and Lee set off a few firecrackers in celebration of the first night back at school.
"Are you all right, Harry?" her friend asked in concern. "You've been distracted all night. Did you even see Cedric when he waved?"
Harry flushed in guilt. "No. I - did you really not see anything pulling the carriages?"
Whatever Hermione had been expecting, it wasn't that. "No," she said slowly, and then, as expected, she asked, "Did you see something?"
"Me and Neville both," Harry affirmed.
Hermione turned to look up the stairs. Harry assumed that Neville had already slipped up to the dorm. "What did you see?" she asked warily.
A loud burst of laughter made Harry pause and look around, but it was only Fred and George. They'd fed a firecracker to a salamander, and it was zooming around the room with sparks flying out of its mouth. Ignoring the mayhem - there'd be more to come, anyways - Harry described the skeletal horses as best she could. "And they had wings, too," she finished.
"What about eyes?" Hermione asked.
Harry shook her head. "If they did, they were all black. I couldn't see any." Despite herself, she shivered.
"But why couldn't I see them?" Hermione wondered, her voice betraying a certain amount of frustration.
"Be glad you can't," Harry murmured. "They're not exactly conducive to good dreams." She was already dreading falling asleep. Her dreams of late had been riddled with Quirrell, Ash, and screams and burning flesh. She had a bad feeling that the horses would make their own appearances.
"Ooh," Hermione growled, crossing her arms and glaring at the twins, who were now throwing a Fanged Frisbee back and forth while standing on tables, the students in between them either ducking or trying to catch it. Harry wondered where Percy was - he was one of the few Prefects that would actually confiscate anything from the twins. "I wish the library was open already." Hermione looked genuinely upset. "Then we could find out what the horse creature is. If Neville can see it too, then it's definitely real."
Harry smiled. "It's good to be back."
Hermione looked at her, startled, but gave an answering smile, soft and understanding. "I know what you mean. I love my parents very much, and really enjoy spending time with them, but…" she trailed off, looking a little lost.
Harry finished for her. "They just don't understand." It was something she'd read in her mother's oldest journal, the only one that was amongst her other things; the other journals were likely stored away somewhere else.
"How do you - " Hermione shook her head. "Never mind," she sighed. The two of them stood for a moment longer, watching the boisterous students as they chattered and giggled, happy to be at Hogwarts - from first year all the way to seventh, although the seventh years were busy passing a bottle of alcohol around and Ginny had clearly been crying - before sighing again. "I don't see how they're going to be able to function properly tomorrow if they stay up much later," Hermione said waspishly.
"The twins or everyone else?" Harry asked, a small smile on her face. "Because if you ask me, the twins can probably do just fine even if they stayed up all night." And Harry would know; the twins had stayed up quite late the year before when plotting, and they were nearly always the last people to leave the Quidditch parties. Either that, or the parties ended when the twins left.
"Everyone else," Hermione said, but Harry could see a corner of her mouth twitched. "Goodnight, Harry."
"G'night. See you tomorrow." They split up, Hermione heading up the stairs to the girls' dorms, while Harry mounted those that led to the boys'.
As she'd expected, Neville was already in the dorm. He was laying on his bed in his pajamas. He'd already put his things away. Harry noticed that he'd collected a few more potted plants over the summer. His bedside table looked like a little jungle, with Trevor's terrarium in the middle. A small bubble of warmth blossomed inside her when she realized that Neville had used her gift: the glass sphere, almost identical in shape to a Remembrall, sat on the stand she'd made for his Remembrall last year. A beautiful blossoming twig - no more than an inch and a half long - was suspended in the middle.
"Is that for Professor Sprout?" Harry asked, opening her trunk and pulling out her books and shelving them for easy access. Her myriad trinkets - she didn't really have very many - followed suit, as did her supply of parchment, ink, and quills. She tucked her Nimbus under her bed.
"Yeah. It's from a cacao tree." Harry stopped from digging through her trunk for her pajamas and stared at Neville.
"You mean, chocolate?" He nodded and smiled wanly at her expression.
"It won't grow well here," he said, "and it's not really useful in potions, but I thought she'd like it." Now he looked nervous.
"Neville," she said seriously, "I'm not a particular fan of plants, and I think I'd like a cacao tree."
His eyes widened. "Oh."
Harry grinned at his expression, and left for the bathroom. When she returned, dressed in her pajamas and ready for bed, Neville was snoring softly, curled tightly on his side. A yawn split her face, and she grimaced. Riding a train shouldn't be so exhausting, she thought as she clambered into bed, settling herself onto the feather-soft mattress with a sigh. She was asleep before Ron, Seamus, and Dean came up, only waking slightly when one of them - most likely Ron - stubbed his toe and swore up a storm. Harry only smiled and turned over. It was good to be back.