Brint: Except that it is never stated whether Shunpike was actually a DE, a sympathizer, or Imperiused. Harry assumes it is either the third or that he was falsely imprisoned the same way Sirius was, but that's an assumption made with no actual knowledge of the course of events that led up to it. A five-minute conversation about an escaped convict is not enough to determine someone's character, which was the only explanation Harry ever offered for why Shunpike 'couldn't' be a Death Eater.

I can say without a single doubt that this is my favorite chapter so far in this story. Part of that is that I got it all done in something like eight hours, and part of it is that it feels the most Dresden Files-esque.

Oh, and related to what I said to Brint above, I posted a new one-shot a few days ago. It's closer to a character study than anything, but it's something that's been rolling around in my head for a while, and I'm glad to finally get it out.

Disclaimer: Did the Muggleborn and Muggle-raised students form a group, even informally, to educate themselves on the strange new world they had entered? If not, I don't own the Harry Potter franchise; it belongs to J.K. Rowling, Scholastic Press, Warner Bros., and whomever else she sold the rights to.


Chapter 7
The Demeter

Awareness came slowly to Harry. Did Uncle Vernon throw me back in the cupboard? It certainly seemed like it; his back felt like one big bruise, and the hard floor was doing it little good. And his head! Had Aunt Petunia bashed him with her frying pan again? And of course stretching out was futile, what with the cold bars hemming him in…

Wait. His cupboard did not have bars.

The memory of his most recent adventure returned, and his eyes shot open. The sight that greeted him was most undesired: a sky painted purple by the encroaching night, broken every five inches by shiny steel bars. Slowly he pushed himself to a seated position and stared at the cage he was trapped inside. "Where am I?"

"A boat."

Harry turned to see the speaker. In the cage next to his huddled a blonde girl about his age, her knees drawn up to her chest and her arms holding her in a tiny ball. When she said nothing more, he glanced around, his fear growing steadily. They were not the only people stuck there; at least a dozen cages were scattered over the ship's deck, and in every single one of them sat a kid or two. He turned back to the girl. "How long have we been here?" he asked, but she just shook her head and ignored him.

"You've been here since earlier this afternoon," someone else said. Shifting his eyes over, Harry found another cage, this time containing a black boy sitting with his legs crossed under him. "They threw me in here this morning, and a few other kids at the same time." The boy nodded at the girl. "She's been here the longest, or at least she's the one who will still talk who's been here that long. Two or three days, someone else told me."

Another glance showed the proof of that statement. The girl's pigtails were dirty and disheveled, and her arms and what little of her forehead he could see were the bright red of a building sunburn. Harry turned back to the other boy. "Who kidnapped us? Why?"

"I don't know. All I know is that I was at the park when a man came up to me and wanted help finding his lost dog. Had a picture and everything. Always thought those kids they told us about in their 'Stranger Danger' lessons were dumb, and now look at me," the boy said with a cracked laugh. After a moment, he looked closer at Harry. "You're taking this really well. I was a wreck when I first woke up."

Harry hesitated a moment and then shrugged. "This isn't too much smaller than the cupboard my relatives used to lock me up in." The boy stared at him in shock, and he hastily added, "Besides, today isn't the first time something strange has happened to me. We'll figure out some way to get free."

And the first step of that plan was to slip out of this cage. He could still feel the slight but familiar weight of his focus ring on his left thumb, and he glared at the patch of wooden deck immediately in front of his cage. "Darbas." The world closed in on him and engulfed him in darkness, but before he could even get the first nervous breath out, something hard smashed into his face. The bars reappeared right in front of his eyes before gravity took control again and dropped him heavily to the rough plywood covering the floor of his cage.

"Hey, how did you do that?!"

He ignored the astonished cry of the other boy and shook his head clear of the ringing filling his ears. Why had his ghosting refused to work? No, he realized, it had not refused to work; something caused it to fail. "The cage," he breathed in horrified comprehension. He had teleported while both outside and inside a house, but never had he tried it when he was trapped somewhere. If he couldn't get out on his own two feet, he supposed it made a strange sort of sense that he couldn't teleport away, either. At least, it made sense if he didn't think about it too hard.

If that were the case, he needed some other way of freeing himself and the other kids around him. Inspecting the edges, he quickly found a heavy padlock keeping the top closed. He grabbed hold of the lock and focused his fear and the rapidly building anger, not at all a hard task in this situation. "Bats'vel."

The lock rattled, but when he gave it a tug, it stayed stubbornly attached.

Okay, now I'm starting to worry. "Lash," he whispered, "a little help here?"

A soft puff of air brushed against his right cheek. "I am here. What do you wish for me to do?"

"I can't open the lock. Why isn't my magic working?"

Lash sighed, and with the angel still unreal, he could only imagine that she was shaking her head. "Hold the lock again. What do your senses tell you?"

He grabbed the padlock again and concentrated, trying to force himself into the same state of mind he had first discovered in the Black Forest and Lash had tried to refine in the months since. For close to a minute, he could not find anything strange, but then a tiny muttering reached his Inner Ear. Though he could not make out any words, the tone was one of… stubbornness? "I don't know. I feel something, but…"

"There is a spell on it keeping it locked. That is what deflected your spell." Lash hesitated for a moment. "If I am reading it correctly, there should be a key that holds the partner to this spell. Without that, I could possibly work out how to unravel the spell, but I know not how long that would take."

"We're stuck here until we find some way of getting rid of that lock," he reminded her. "Time is all we have. I'll try to get the key somehow while you figure out the spell."

"You aren't crazy, are you? Because I don't want to be stuck next to a psycho."

His eyes squeezed shut at that. He was so used to talking out loud to Lash that he had never given much thought to how it might look to someone who didn't know about magic. "Just trying to get us out of here."

The black boy snorted, and Harry looked over again to find him leaning back against the bars and watching him with very little worry considering what he had said. "Good luck with that. If no one else has gotten out, I don't know how you think you're going to do it, Psycho."

"My name isn't Psycho. It's Harry," he retorted. The other boy said nothing, so Harry jerked his head at the blonde girl. "What's her name?"

"Sally… something. Sally-Mae? Sally-Anne!" he said with a snap of his fingers. He gave Harry a smile; it was weak, but it was still there. "I'm Dean, in case you were wondering. And you're Psycho."

"Told you, not Psycho." Dean just shook his head with that hesitant smile still peeking through his earlier despair, so Harry moved onto to his less irritating conversation partner. "Sally-Anne?"

The girl flicked fearful eyes at him and looked down at her knees again.

"Sally-Anne, look at me." When he had her attention, he smiled as friendly as he could. "Hi. I'm Harry."

"…Hi."

The response was weak, but it was progress. "I know you're scared," he said gently, as if the way she was shaking would not tell anyone who laid eyes on her that she was absolutely terrified. "I'm scared, too, but right now I need your help if I'm going to help you."

Sally-Anne looked away before answering, "I can't. It won't work. Beth tried to get out, and it just made them mad. They took her away, but then she didn't come back."

Well, that was at least mildly horrifying. He considered pushing her on that – after all, if they didn't try to get out, then they would be stuck there for no one knew how long – but even he could see that doing so would do no good. "That's fine. You don't need to do anything." Sally-Anne took that as permission to go back to studying her dirty knees, but she looked up again when he continued, "But I need to know what's going on. If they get mad, it'll all be on me."

"I don't know. They just said that someone would snatch me up before they even let me out because people liked blondes. I don't know anything else." And now she was crying. Wonderful. He didn't know what to do with crying girls. She snorted the snot back in her nose and bawled, "I just want to go home! I just want my Mummy and Daddy!"

Wincing, he reached out to give her a pat on the shoulder. Maybe that would help?

"Quiet down, you lot!"

Harry whirled around, grunting when his wrist banged against the steel bars of Sally-Anne's cage before he could pull his hand back. He knew that voice.

Sure enough, the young man he had followed out of the alley was walking around a stack of crates toward them, a frown on his face and a red bandana covering his black hair. The man gave them all a hard look and a nod. "That's better. Just keep quiet, and everything'll go a whole lot easier."

If that wasn't the perfect invitation for a little bit of trouble-making, Harry didn't know what was. "Let us go!" he demanded.

"Ha, you've still got a little of that fire in you, don't you?" The teen walked closer and squatted down to be closer to eye-level with him. "A good nose and a strong soul. You keep those, kid. Where we're going, those will be a big help to you, the only things you can count on until you learn how to do whatever it is your buyer wants you to do." A smile appeared then, but for all that this was a bad guy, it was not the scary grin complete with maniacal laughter Harry was used to from Dudley's cartoons. It was just a normal smile. The young man raised one hand and rubbed his thumb and first two fingers together. "Not to mention, a little spirit in you means a whole lot more dinero for us, you know?"

Lash huffed. "Of course. Greed, the most common motivator for any mortal's action."

"But why are you doing this?! Where are you taking us?!"

The slaver shrugged. "It's nothing personal, kid. The big plantation owners in South America? They love Muggleborns, can't get enough of 'em. I mean, think about it; young wizards without parents or friends who can look for them and who don't have any way of escaping once they're bought and paid for? Where could they possibly get better labor than that? In fact," the young man said, leaning closer and lowering his voice, "I've heard that some of them will literally work you kids to death, but that's not too common. Or, at least, it doesn't happen all that quickly. You'll be fine, long as you don't cause too much trouble."

Harry stared at him in mute terror.

"Don't give me that look," the pirate said with a frown. "I told you, it's all economics. There's a demand for Muggleborns over there, there's a good supply over here, and someone somewhere is eventually going to get one to the other. If it's not us, it'll be someone else, so we might as well jump in on it and make a little profit in the process."

He had nothing to say to that. This was all so wrong, so evil, and this teenager was just standing there like it was the most natural thing in the world. Who thought like that?! It was slavery. The man had even said that kids, kids who had done nothing wrong at all, were dying from being worked into the ground, but all he cared about was making money!

If this was the kind of greed Lash had witnessed over the ages, it was no wonder she had such a poor opinion of humans in general. He was more surprised she had agreed to be his guardian angel in the first place!

"What kinds of things will we have to do?" he asked in a shaky voice.

The man – no, Harry decided, he was going to be Bandana Boy from now on; Lash had told him how one of her humans, Dresden, had a habit of giving his enemies nicknames to make himself less afraid of them, and right now, Harry really needed to not be so scared – shrugged. "Lots of things. Most of you are probably going to the fields. There's all sorts of stuff to be planted and harvested, stuff your owners can't have Muggles working with either because they can't do it properly or because it needs wizards to handle it for it to be properly magical. You, personally? You look like a fighter, the never-say-die type," Bandana Boy laughed. "I expect some trainer's going to see you and take you off our hands to turn you into something awesome for one of the arenas. They have gladiator matches in those places, and it's dangerous, yeah, but the really good ones get famous. If you can survive the first couple of years, you've got nothing to worry about."

That didn't sound like anything he wanted any part in, but in looking away, his eyes fell on the shivering form of Sally-Anne. "What about her?" he finally asked. "She said something about blondes being special?"

Bandana Boy looked at Sally-Anne as well. "Yeah, blondes down there are considered exotic. In one way, it's a good thing; instead of the arena or the fields, she'll be sold as a house-slave, and that's an easier job than any of you boys are going to have. But since she'll be so pretty once she gets a bit older…" He grimaced, and though he tried to wipe the expression away, he was not fully successful. "Well, I'd be surprised if some young stud doesn't eventually see her and decide she would be better used for something other than household chores, if you catch my drift."

"I think so." And Harry really, really wished he didn't. Sally-Anne understood it, too, because she immediately whimpered and curled up into an even tighter ball. Apparently tired of the conversation, Bandana Boy stood up and turned around to walk away, and that was when Harry saw it: a big, ugly, metal key, black like the padlock on their cages, hanging from the slaver's belt. If he could just get ahold of that—

Bandana Boy disappeared behind the same crates as before, and his opportunity was lost. "Lash, please tell me you have something."

"It takes longer than that to break down a brand-new spell, even for me," she snapped, appearing in a flurry of light. She pressed her back against the crates and shook her head with a sigh. "Give me an hour or two, and I should be able to do something with it, but until then…"

"What do you mean, it's a brand-new spell?" Lash grimaced at his question, and his heart sank. This could not be good. "Lash?"

The angel grit her teeth for a moment before she said, "I'm sorry, Harry. I thought I knew what I was doing, but I am just as lost as you."

He blinked a couple of times as he tried to process that. "I don't understand. Why are you lost? This is magic; you know this. You're teaching me, so you have to know more than I do."

"That is just it. I know about the magic I have studied, the spells and rituals I have observed or devised myself." She pushed herself away from the crates to kneel in front of him. "But now? The reason your magic was so strange to me is not because you are different, but because this world is different than the one I have walked. And the Veela, the dwarves, that Diagon marketplace? I know nothing about any of them." With a bark of unhappy laughter, she lowered her head and broke their gaze. "There is only one explanation that I can come to. When I was sent to watch over you, I was sent to a completely new reality."

"But what you've taught me has worked!"

"Has it?" Lash looked up at him again. "Have you opened a Way? Brewed a potion? Summoned a spirit from the Nevernever? I taught you a few tricks with Evocation, but that is all I have to show for my efforts. No, Harry, I sought out to make you a great wizard, possibly the greatest the world has ever known, but now I cannot. I failed."

Not a tear spilled from her eye, but Harry knew she was upset, even more than Sally-Anne had been. How could she not be? He had thought earlier that very day about how nice it would be to have an older wizard to talk to and learn from, someone he could ask questions about the new culture he had found himself in, but could his worries possibly compare to Lash's? He had known about magic for four months while she had been studying it since the dawn of time. To find out that everything she knew was suddenly different; of course she would be lost and confused.

But maybe it wasn't entirely hopeless. What if what she really needed what he had needed when she came into his life? What if she just needed a friend?

Harry reached out and gently squeezed her shoulders. "Maybe you're right. Maybe you can't do what you wanted to do. But I don't care." Lash twitched under his hands. "You cared for me when no one else did. You helped me when no one else would. You are the only one who has ever stood by me, and even if another guardian angel, one who could do everything you promised me you would do, came up to me and offered to take your place, I wouldn't take him up on it. You're my angel," he sniffed, brushing a couple of tears off his cheek with his shoulder so she would not catch him crying, "and I wouldn't give you up for the world."

A strangled laugh came from behind the curtain of blonde hair that hid her face, and finally she looked up at him. Her wet eyes moved up and down, examining him as though she had never seen him before. "Precious child," she murmured, so softly that he doubted she meant for him to hear it at all, and she raised one hand to rest against his cheek. "So young, yet noble and gentle already. What folly of His abandoned you into my care?"

Dean noisily cleared his throat behind Harry. "Psycho, you're really starting to scare me."

"And so ends that heartfelt moment," Lash grumbled as their hands dropped. A deep breath, and then she was all business once again. "You noticed the key that man possessed. Unless you want to while away another hour or two at the least inside this cage, you will need to take it from him, preferably in such a way that he cannot alert the rest of the crew to your escape. Additionally, we may not have that time to waste. Unless they have more cages in a lower hold that they plan on bringing out, they have all the prisoners they plan to take on this voyage. In their shoes, my plan would be to depart under the cover of darkness and make for open water as soon as possible."

A time limit. Great. "Get the key off Bandana Boy, take him down, free everyone, and get out of here, all before they leave. That should be simple enough," he muttered sarcastically. "The key isn't the hard part; it's beating him up before he can call anyone else over. Suggestions?"

"Fling a rock or something else suitably hard at his head?" He sighed at her falsely bright tone. "That is the only method I can think of with the skills you currently possess…" Her eyebrows rose, and she corrected herself, "No, I take that back. There may be something else you can do."

"Well?" he impatiently demanded.

She smirked. "You just have to be a little tricky."

After she explained the plan to him, and he explained the relevant portions to Dean, they were ready to spring their trap. The dark-skinned Muggleborn rolled his shoulders and cleared his throat dramatically, and then he called out in a fearful voice, "Hey, somebody! Anybody! Help us! We're being kidnapped!"

"Will you shut up?!" Bandana Boy yelled after a couple of seconds of this. He stomped over with a fierce scowl on his face, and in one hand he held a short club that he was thumping into the palm of the other hand. Probably the same one Bandana Boy had used on him, Harry noted. He quickly let that thought drift away, focusing on the state of mental emptiness he was trying to maintain. The slaver glared at them all with a gimlet eye, and then his gaze fell on the lone empty cage and his face paled. "What happened to that one?!"

"I don't know," Dean answered in a voice that Harry hoped sounded appropriately scared and confused to Bandana Boy; it certainly didn't sound like it to him. Pointing at him, Dean continued, "He was there, and then he was gone!"

Beginning to panic now, the slaver ran up to the cage and peered inside with eyes wide in disbelief. This was the best chance he was going to get. Harry let the veil hiding him drop and stared back into Bandana Boy's eyes, his arms raised as high as they could and his palms aimed at the man's head. "Zhamanel!"

He still had not yet mastered how to control the speed his kinetic spells gave objects, and so the slaver's face slammed into one of the steel bars with all the force of an angry bull. Bright red blood poured from his broken nose and splattered onto Harry's face, and then he snarled the incantation for his second spell. "Herranal!" Bandana Boy's head whipped backward with a sickening crack, flinging blood onto Dean who immediately screeched like a little girl, and the man fell back. His head hit the ground with a low-pitched thud, and he was still.

At the sounds, a warbling voice called out in the same foreign language Harry had heard when the teen first brought him to the ship. "Control!" Lash barked, and she vanished while his entire body itched. His mouth opened to spew out a long sentence in that same strange tongue. The unknown speaker said something in reply, and then his body was under his control again. "I bought you a little time," Lash whispered in his ear, "but only a little. Hurry."

He nodded and stretched his hand out between the bars as far as he could, and his fingertips just barely brushed the tip of the key. Shifting a bit and jamming his shoulder against the cage, he tried again. This time he pinched the key's teeth, and smiling at his success, he tugged hard against the string attaching it to Bandana Boy's trousers. One, two, and then the iron key was his.

Several of the other kids had started whispering, their spirits rising at the chance to escape, and he whirled around and held a finger up to his lips. "Ssh!" Once they were all quiet, he slipped the key into the padlock and carefully twisted it, and the lock popped open. Pulling it off and setting it and the key onto he deck, he pushed the lid of his cage up as quietly as he could and stood; a quick step to straddle the edge and another to get off, and then he lowered the lid back down. He was free!

He was not quite so careful with Dean's cage, sacrificing some caution for speed, but soon the black boy was out as well and he moved on to Sally-Anne. The blonde girl nearly ruined the whole thing for them then; as soon as she was standing, she glanced over at the unconscious slaver and slapped her hands over her mouth to muffle her shriek.

Harry spun, the key raised over his shoulder like a knife, and then he saw what had scared her so badly. When he first met Bandana Boy, and every time since, the young man had been just that: a young, human, man. Now he wasn't. The teen's skin had been replaced by beige fur, and his head

He blinked his eyes to make sure they were not playing tricks on him. That looked like a deformed hamster's head attached to the man's shoulders!

Something poked him in the back, and Lash appeared squatting next to the person… creature… thing with one eyebrow raised imperiously. Harry crept closer, grimacing as the new perspective did little to soothe his jangled nerves. "Lash?"

"He was South or Central American," she explained, though she had eyes only for the terrifying oddity before them. "The ancient peoples of that region had myths about individuals that looked like people with the heads of jaguars; those entities were given the rather uncreative name 'were-jaguar' by European scholars. But this is the first time I have ever found evidence of a were-capybara."

"Lash, we have to go!" he hissed. His eyes flicked almost of their own accord toward where he could hear the rest of the crew chattering. "You were the one who said we needed to hurry!"

That shook her out of her musings, and she nodded apologetically. "Yes, you are correct. I will ponder this issue once we are gone."

It took him a couple of minutes and not a few jolts of adrenaline when the other kids got too loud, but soon enough they were all clustered together at the front of the ship. Most of them were beyond relieved to finally be free, but some were still worryingly silent, eyes skittering furtively over the deck and mouths clamped shut tight. "I can't believe that actually worked," Dean whispered with a smile. "Now how are we supposed to get off this thing?"

Harry winced. "That… is a very good question." Going down the gangplank was right out; there was no way they could sneak all sixteen of them past the entire crew. He looked out to the piers in the distance, all of which were too far for them to reach before being caught, but closer to them he spotted a set of stairs built into the sea wall. Pointing at the stairs, he said in a voice much more confident than he felt, "Right there. We swim to the stairs, climb up, and run away until we find a phone or the police or something."

"But how are we supposed to get down? There's nothing to climb on," one of the girls asked.

Harry and Dean shared an uncomfortable look, and glancing at Sally-Anne showed that she had reached the same conclusion. "Jump?" the blonde asked in an uncertain whisper.

"Jump," Dean agreed.

"It'll be loud, but the waves hitting the wall should cover up some of the noise," Harry pointed out. "Everyone needs to jump and start swimming as fast as you can. If someone falls behind, don't wait up for them; just keep going. Remember, phone or bobbies or adults or something."

A boy, one of the nearly catatonic ones, let out a piercing scream of fright, and Harry whirled around to find the last thing he wanted to see. They had run out of time.

"Herranal!" he yelled, and his blast of force caught another of the hamster-faced pirates square in the chest and threw it into the mast. "Go!"

He was already running to the other side of the line of cages when the first splash reached his ears. Raising his hands to point at the stacks of crates that had been so helpful in hiding the slavers' true appearance, he turned them to his advantage now. The cone of kinetic energy he unleashed was greater than any he had ever thrown out before, and the heavy boxes flew away and crashed into the monsters coming after him.

A knife forged out of molten pain stabbed into the center of his head, and he dropped to one knee with a cry of pain. Lash had warned him of the dangers of pushing himself too far, had told him that it would leave him all but defenseless, so of course he had to push himself into that state when his life was on the line.

"Harry, come on!"

"I told you to go!" he shouted back. Dean gave him an agonized look before throwing himself off the deck.

It was just him and the monsters now.

"Herranal," he panted, but all his spell did was ruffle the nearest slaver's puffy shirt. He was out, completely drained. At least the others had escap—

"Don't you dare resign yourself to this!" His entire body tingled so fiercely that he feared that ants were going to start pouring out from under his skin, and Lash's voice commanded him, "You have my power; you have the environment. Use it! Harness that energy and hit them with everything you have!"

Everything he had? Well, there was one spell Lash had forbidden him from using until he got more practice in; he might as well use it now and hope he and Lash would still be around for her to scold him later. He gave them a weak smile as he tapped into the wellspring that was Lash's magic, and then he pulled to him all the energy he could find around him. A deep breath filled his lungs, and the beasts stalking warily toward him slowed as gusts of white mist poured forth from their mouths and the waterlogged wooden deck grew a thin layer of frost.

And then he let all that power go. "Ayrvel!"

What exploded from his hands was not a blast, not a cone, but a veritable torrent of golden flames that swept over the monsters with the same fury as the sea. The counterforce from his attack shoved him backward to hit the cage behind him, the gargantuan spray of fire arcing up to hit the masts and the sails and set them ablaze. His last-ditch attack quickly petered out, lethargy spreading through his limbs and muddling his thoughts, and he let his head drop as his nose was filled by the smell of smoke and his ears by screams and splashes and crackles.

Lash snorted from beside him, body manifested once again. "The innocent have been saved against all odds, the villains have been driven away, you are still staring death in the face, and everything's on fire." She laughed. "I am dealing with Dresden all over again."

"Sorry," he slurred. This headache was terrible, and he was just so tired.

"No, but I will make you sorry if you let yourself burn to death after winning the battle. Up you get!" Her illusionary tug was unable to pull him to his feet, but he slowly pushed himself upright and staggered drunkenly to the low rail of the deck. "Hurry up, Harry. Or have you forgotten the ship burning down around you?" The railing banged into his shins, and then he was falling head-first into the bay.

Bubbles. Long streams of tiny bubbles drifted in front of him, coming out in ones and twos from his nose to fly for freedom toward the patch of wavering yellow in front of him, and he smiled. After all the terror and confusion he had had to deal with today, this little bit of peace was actually rather nice. Maybe he could just take a nap… just for a minute…

Something grabbed his outstretched arm and pulled, and his head broke the surface of the waves with a splutter. "All right, Psycho, I got you," his rescuer gasped, shifting Harry into a better grip and pulling him away from the burning boat. "You are so lucky my Mum forced me to learn how to be a life guard when my little sisters were just starting to swim."

"I thought you… I said go. Why…?"

"I don't know how the hell you did all the crazy stuff you did back there, but there's no way I was gonna just let you hang back and get eaten by those things after you saved my skin," Dean retorted with a huff.

Harry grinned faintly. "Magic. I'm a wizard-in-training."

"I should tell you that you really are crazy if you believe what you just said, but it's hard to argue with it right now, what with the monsters and the disappearing and the bloody bonfire." Letting go of him for a moment to readjust his grip, Dean pulled him onto the bottom stair. Had they already reached it? Harry's vision swam as his eyes threatened to close. "The rest of them ran ahead to call the bobbies. Since I don't think anything's going to be chasing us for a while, we can catch up with them."

"You go ahead," Harry heard himself say. Since he had not thought of a single reply to what Dean had said, and honestly was not sure that he had understood everything, that could only be Lash speaking through him. "I think I'll just rest here for a little. That last bit took a lot out of me."

Dean looked down at him with a worried expression before eventually nodding. "Okay, you stay here. I'll go and tell the others where you are and grab a towel or something for a pillow and come back here."

"'Kay." The other boy ran up the stairs and vanished, and his mouth sighed. "Ready to go home, Harry?"

"Please." He was too exhausted even to pay attention to the discomfort of teleporting, and then he was falling onto his bed at Privet Drive. Aunt Petunia's going to be furious if I don't change out of these clothes soon, was the thought that ran through his head, and he giggled. "Lash? 'Sit okay if I go sleep now?"

His angel appeared next to him, smiling as she ran her hands through his sodden hair. "Yes, you may now sleep like the dead. You have most definitely earned it."


One of the issues with the magic in Harry Potter being so… poorly elaborated on, I suppose is the best way to say it, is that we as fans run into situations where we just don't know how things are supposed to work. The limits of Apparation, such as while locked up as Harry is, is one such instance. The only evidence we have in canon either way is when he and Ron are locked up in the Malfoys' cellar in book 7, but that has the issue that suddenly it requires a wand, which Ron didn't have. Of course, not only was that little detail never mentioned in the actual lessons, it's also implied a couple of chapters earlier that Harry Disapparated himself and Hermione away from Nagini-Bathilda even after his wand had been broken by Hermione's Confringo, so who really knows how accurate that explanation was?

By the way, I hid a hint for next chapter in this update. Good hunting!

Silently Watches out.