Disclaimer: Usually I write out this very specific disclaimer explaining exactly what it is I don't own but I find myself not really interested in doing so as it is very tedious. Suffice it to say I own nothing that was created by anyone else and I am making no money whatsoever from the writing of this FanFiction.

Warnings: Mild to moderate violence, character death, foul language, alternate universe (i.e. kiss HP canon goodbye), angst, drama, starts pre-Hogwarts Era, and who knows what else.

AN: This story is self-beta'd; so there may be occasional grammatical or spelling errors that crop up every now and then and for those I apologize in advance.

Chapter Ten: Awakening

Sunday, November 14, 2021 3:43 PM

Harry returned to consciousness in the blink of an eye.

One second he knew nothing and the next he was laying in darkness on a comfortable bed feeling as if he'd been worked over by a Boss Monster recently.

It only took a moment for his memory of the final moments of Aincrad to slam into his brain and when it did, Harry let out a rage filled scream of grief over the memory of all he'd just lost. When his scream died down into sobs, Harry reached up with both hands and covered his face (ignoring the searing pain that cut through his right shoulder with the movement) as he saw again Kirito's shocked disbelief when Asuna shattered in death, Kirito's face filled with grief, desperation, and rage (the teen so utterly broken due to Asuna's death) when he killed Kayaba before both man and teen shattered, and the obvious grief on Agil's face just before the man vanished from right in front of him.

Numbness settled over Harry as he ran his hands over his face and through his hair (still ignoring the pain of moving his right arm) before he sat up and gazed blankly at the unfamiliar stone walls and antique furniture of the room he found himself in. A glance upwards revealed his golden HP bar (currently sitting dangerously low, which would explain why he felt so tired) and green curser still floating above his head and he let out a resigned sigh as he opened his Menu in the hopes that he could find out where he had ended up.

Harry couldn't resist torturing himself with a brief check of his Friend List to see all five of his friends grayed out (the color had come to signify the death of the players whereas prior to being trapped in the game, the color had just indicated the players were offline) and the grief drowned him a second time as he stared at the evidence that his friends were gone.

"Agil," Harry sobbed brokenly, the loss of the man he'd come to see as a father hurting the most because the man had always seemed so strong. It didn't help that he never even told the man how he truly saw him or how much he'd come to care for him in the two years they'd known each other. "Damn you, Kayaba! Give me back my father! I need him. I need them all. They were all I had."

The sound of the door opening followed by a soft gasp pulled Harry from his grief and he glanced up to find a middle aged woman dressed in an old fashioned maroon and white healer's smock and hat. Reaching up with one hand, Harry closed out his Player Menu and warily studied the unfamiliar woman before he glanced up to note that she was an NPC according to the green cursor surrounded by a simple green ring floating above her head. Her presence only confirmed what he'd been trying to deny right from the start; he'd been ripped from SAO and thrust into some other VRMMORPG environment instead of waking up in his body.

"I wonder if this means that my relatives really did kill me off," Harry apathetically mused out loud as he watched the woman bustle forward once she got over her shock.

"Oh by the blessing of the Lady of the Lake, it is good to see you awake at last, Mr. Potter," the woman declared as she pulled out a stick and began waving it over Harry. "We'd begun to fear that you would never wake up."

"Who are you and where am I?" Harry asked in Japanese out of habit, his mind not yet registering the fact that she was speaking English or that she'd used his actual last name.

"I'm sorry, dear, what was that? I'm afraid I didn't understand a word of what it was you were asking me."

This time, Harry picked up on the fact that she was using English and his wariness increased since there had been very few players that had known that he spoke English. The fact that it was an NPC using English only heightened his unease because the system shouldn't have that kind of information. Harry frowned after a moment though as it occurred to him that he might have been shunted onto the nearest server when Aincrad self-destructed; which for him would mean an English server. Since he was, as far as he knew, the only British player that had been trapped inside of the game; or at least the only player located within the British Isles as the game had not been sold outside of Japan (his uncle's purchase the only exception as far as he knew).

"Mr. Potter…?"

Harry continued to ignore the NPC Healer as he reopened his Menu and flipped through the options. When he didn't find any more information on what game he'd been thrust into, he switched back to his Player Stats in order to see what level he was currently at, only to frown when he saw there were now two pages to his Stats Page. The first page was new and it depicted his Stats for the current game (most of which were currently blank) while the second page held a list of his SAO Stats at the end of the game. Thinking of SAO only brought the grief back though and he closed out the Menu as tears slipped down his face; he no longer felt curious enough to determine where he stood in this new game.

"Is there something wrong, Mr. Potter? Are you in any pain?"

"Just leave me alone," Harry rasped tiredly, his heart in far too much pain to deal with what he was certain was nothing but another piece of stupid code.

The woman pursed her lips at the rudeness before her gaze filled with pity and regret and Harry just stared at her apathetically while the tears continued to course down his face. Eventually, she took the hint and backed out of the room and Harry gave into the despair, loneliness, and grief as he curled up on the bed and bawled his eyes out. Hours later, after he'd finally cried himself dry; he just lay there staring at the stone wall without really seeing it as the memory of his world ending played over and over again in his mind. It wasn't that he really cared that Aincrad was gone at this point, home though it had been to him for two years.

No, it was the loss of his friends and his self-claimed father that tore at him.

He'd give anything to be back in Algade helping Agil with the shop.

After a while, his solitude was intruded upon once more by the same nurse and an ancient old man with a white beard that looked nearly long enough for him to trip over. Harry flicked his eyes up to determine the man's classification before he returned his eyes to the wall once he realized that the man was also an NPC in the new game and studiously ignored both man and woman; they were not important.

"It does this old heart good to see you awake at last, my boy," the old man stated as he sat down in the chair that was positioned beside the bed.

Harry flicked his gaze to the old man once more before he simply rolled over and ignored the NPC and the spike of pain that his new position sent through his injured shoulder. The man sighed and Harry hoped that that meant that he would leave. Unfortunately, it didn't as Harry soon learned when the man began speaking again.

"Allow me to introduce myself, I am Albus Dumbledore and I owe you an apology, Mr. Potter… Harry, I did you a great disservice…"

Harry bolted out of the bed in pure panic over the use of that name; he had still not registered the fact that the nurse had used his real last name several times earlier. Hearing this old man casually use his first name though, a name he'd never entered into the system at any point or even given to his friends really freaked him out.

"Who are you and how did you get that name?" Harry demanded as his back connected with the cold stone wall while he reached for the dirk that no longer hung from his right hip. Harry didn't even bother waiting for an answer as he opened up his Menu after he'd failed to find his weapon. Instead of equipping himself with the missing dirk though, he began rapidly shifting through the various pages in a desperate search for any clue as to how the server might have found that information to plug into whatever game it was that he'd been forced into.

As his fingers flew through the pages, he muttered under his breath in Japanese, "This isn't happening, this can't be happening. How can the system hack that information? Did they steal that information from my old school? Could whoever created this new game have gone to my aunt and uncle's house to take control of my body? Is that why I didn't wake up in my body? How did they know I would appear on this server though? Was I shunted here purposefully? That still doesn't rule out the possibility that I am dead either."

"Potter-kun, please calm down," Dumbledore urged in Japanese, making Harry's fingers freeze above his Menu as he peered over the semi-transparent page to meet the man's blue eyes. "You have nothing to be afraid of and you are most assuredly not dead. I had you brought here…"

"You had no right! Send me back! I have to find my father and the others, the game ended so they should have been released but with the system deleting itself, they might have gotten stuck and I can't just leave them to die. I won't."

"I am afraid that I am not following you, my boy. Your parents are dead; they have been gone for ten years now. This is not a game and I can not in good conscience send you back to the place you were before. As I had been saying earlier, I did you a great disservice in leaving you with your aunt's family but, in my defense, I had wrongly assumed that they would treat you like family because you were part of their family. I had you brought here so that you might heal and so that you can learn about your heritage."

"Oh, you're good, I'll give you that," Harry countered with a frown as he casually dismissed the man's words and returned to searching through the menu functions. "You have just enough information to make the story sound believable but that was probably the way you were programmed. Makes me wonder who it was that went to so much effort just to try and convince me that this is where I belong. You aren't fooling me though and you'll never keep me here; I won't allow it. All I have to do is find the backdoor to this stupid game and then I'm out of here."

"Mr. Potter, you are not trapped inside of any game. You are home now," Dumbledore insisted as he switched back to English as if to emphasize his point. "I understand that you have been through a trying ordeal and that it will take time for you to accept the changes that took place while you were gone, so I will give you some time to adjust before we sit down and discuss your future."

Harry watched the old man exit the room, not for a moment believing anything that the man had told him. Harry knew better; if he'd really returned to his body he would not still be in pain from his partially healed shoulder, he'd not still be covered in the scars he'd received in SAO (he could see the ones one his arms and wrist just as plain as day), there would be no Menu available, and he would either be locked inside of his cupboard under the stairs or he'd have woken up in a hospital with the Nerve Gear still strapped in place on his head.

"Come on, Mr. Potter, let's get you back into bed," the nurse instructed as she entered Harry's line of sight; the eleven year old had completely forgotten about the woman in the wake of dealing with the weird old man.

Harry considered ignoring her but upon further reflection realized that he was still exhausted and he'd been shivering due to his see-sawing emotions and the chill air that seemed to plague all castles for some time without realizing it. Once under the covers again, Harry continued to flip through the Menu; this time he checked his Inventory and noted that he still had everything he'd taken with him to that final battle.

He also found that he'd picked up four Items from the battle of the Skull Reaper; one of the Reaper's Scythes, the Reaper's Stinger (Harry's dried blood still coating the tip where it had pierced Harry's right shoulder), an Item called the Cloak of Mourning (it boosted one's offensive capabilities), and something that was called the Reaper's Crown (Harry had no clue what this one was). All four Items had been shunted to him automatically when the game had ended because he'd been the last one left who'd faced the Skull Reaper in battle after the others had begun vanishing.

Sighing, Harry closed out the Menu and curled up with his pillow as he cried himself to sleep still missing Agil and the others.

Friday, November 19, 2021 8:15 AM

Five days later, Harry sat on the same bed dressed in a fairly decent set of secondhand clothes that included a pair of black slacks, a white button down shirt over a white t-shirt, a gray woolen vest, a simple black tie, open fronted black robes, polished black dress shoes, and a sling for his right arm to support his mostly healed but still weak shoulder. The clothes had been given to him by the nurse earlier that morning. Today he was to be taken to acquire the supplies he would need to muddle through this new game in the hopes that the sooner he cleared the game, the sooner he could find a way back to Aincrad's server so that he could find Agil and the others.

The eleven year old studiously ignored the possibility that the server had been permanently shut down already.

Dumbledore had returned the previous evening along with four new adults (whom were introduced as Professor Minerva McGonagall, Professor Severus Snape, Professor Pomona Sprout, and Professor Filius Flitwick) plus the nurse (whose name he finally learned was Madam Poppy Pomfrey) to explain where he was and why he was there. The more Harry learned, the more he became disturbed by this new game. Someone had gone through a considerable amount of trouble to create a game that was attempting to supplant reality in his mind.

Dumbledore, who was apparently his in-game guardian according to the NPC, knew just enough facts about Harry's real life to make his story appear real but it was twisted just enough to scream fake to Harry; the eleven year old not realizing that it was his facts that had been twisted by the lies the Dursleys had fed him for eight long years.

First of all, there was the fact that Dumbledore claimed to have known Harry's birth parents but the man insisted that they had been killed by some evil wizard with a dorky name instead of in a car crash. That might have been believable if not for the fact that the man had gone on to insist that the evil wizard had tried to kill Harry as well but had failed. That instead of Harry being killed, something inside of Harry had weakened and defeated the big bad dark guy and sent him fleeing into the night to lick his wounds.

Now, Harry was proud of the abilities he'd cultivated and he knew that there had been few solo players within SAO that could claim to have defeated a dragon on their own let alone four of the fiercest in the game (the three wyverns no where near as powerful as the dragons) aside from himself but not even he was egotistical enough to claim credit for defeating a powerful and powerfully evil dark wizard at the tender age of one. Besides, his aunt and uncle had been most insistent that his parents had died in a car crash because they'd been out drinking and doing drugs. It also seemed far more plausible to have gotten his old lightning bolt scar in a car crash than because he'd been hit by an unblockable killing 'curse' that he somehow survived.

So that was a huge strike against the man's believability; babies don't defeat the bad guys in any story. They might be orphaned and grow up to beat the bad guys out of revenge but they had to be trained through a series of deadly trials to gain the strength first; even Harry knew that much about the heroes in any story (and he hadn't been allowed to read that many stories least he 'get ideas' about his own unnaturalness). Yet another strike against his supposed guardian was the fact that the man kept claiming that both of Harry's parents and Harry himself were magicals; all of them part of some super secret society of sorcerers and sorceresses.

Harry had been nine when he'd been trapped in SAO and in all the memories he could recall from his life before he'd been trapped inside of the game, he'd never once seen any evidence that he was anything other than an unwanted and unloved boy and a burden to his relatives. There had been no turning any one's wig blue, no unexplained trips to the top of the school building, and no talkative pythons being released from the zoo.

His relatives had called him a freak and blamed everything on him but there was evidence enough that his 'freakishness' had been anything that stood out differently from the Dursleys and most of that was explainable by normal standards. His hair refused to sit neatly, he was too small for his age (mostly the fault of the Dursleys anyway), he had never been sick with the flu (or any other common illness), he was smarter than Dudley (an easy feat), and he'd been dumped on their doorstep by someone instead of being placed into foster care or in an orphanage after his parents died.

No, the only place Harry had ever known magic to exist was inside of SAO and he knew that the magic there had been created by the computer coding that was the building blocks of the entire program. Even the so called magic that Harry had inexplicably unlocked within the game behaved much as one would expect from a computer game and no different in Harry's mind than the unique Skill of Duel Wielding that Kirito had unlocked at some point in the game. Kayaba had gifted little kernels of extras like that to a small handful of players within the game so it was to be expected that some form of magic had existed there above and beyond the magic that was the world of SAO.

The final strike against Dumbledore's credibility had been the claim that Harry's body had been locked into something called a magical stasis for two years in order to explain away the reason why he still looked like a nine year old (well truth be told, he looked more like an eight year old but that was because he was still so short and scrawny). Cryogenics was a field of study that Klein had once regaled Harry with when they'd gone out to celebrate the defeat of the Boss Monster on the forty-first floor. Klein had insisted that scientists had been researching for a way to preserve the human body for over a hundred years as a way of defeating time itself and if science couldn't prevent true aging, then how could magic?

And what reason would magic have to save someone like him when there were so many other people out there that he thought would have been more worthy of magical healing and protection; Asuna, Kirito, Agil, Klein, and Lisbeth coming to mind.

Coupled with that was the fact that Dumbledore kept insisting that Harry's ability to feel pain was proof positive that he was not trapped in some game or illusion; Harry had been feeling pain and bleeding inside of a game since he'd reached level thirty. Agil had once suggested that because Harry hadn't properly had his NERDLES implanted that the device was malfunctioning and that the pain he felt had been the result. Agil's explanation was far more believable than Dumbledore's; even if it didn't explain why Harry bled when injured during a fight but it had explained the pain and possibly why Items seemed more realistic when in Harry's hands.

The other five NPCs (the nurse and the four adults he'd learned were some kind of teachers) had unsurprisingly offered their assertions that the story was true, each one of them either claiming to have personally taught his parents how to use their magic or claiming to have gone to school with them. That was only to be expected though since they were all part of the same game and apparently were all programmed to work out of the same business, or in this case the same school.

Learning that he would be trapped within the castle for at least seven years had been terrifying but after a while he began to wonder if there would be pre-programmed time skips in order to speed the game along. It just didn't seem realistic enough to force players to play through each and every day of a seven year education in magical arts. Then again, the more he learned about the game, the more he began to wonder if it was some kind of on-line prison for criminals in order to save money on housing them since it would be easier to lock a murderer up in a hospital bed and let his brain occupy itself than it would be to lock up the man himself where he could harm others out in the real world if he escaped.

It seemed like the kind of place that the Dursleys would have sent Harry to in any event; especially upon learning he'd been the one to steal the gaming equipment from the rubbish bin.

And so, here he was, waiting for the staff member that had been assigned to guide him through the first steps of the game so that he might start working his way through the required quests in order to beat the game. He'd spent every second of the past fives days hunting through his Menu for a backdoor out but hadn't been able to find one, so it was either allow them to lock him up in some sort of virtual mental institution for refusing to cooperate or play the game until he found or made another way out.

So long as he was somewhat free to move about, he could always look for another human player in order to get more information on the game or a system door that would allow him to escape; since there was still no logout function.

So he reluctantly chose to play along in the hopes that he could find a way out.

The moment he'd resigned himself to muddling his way through yet another game, two new bars had shimmered into existence below his gold HP Bar; a green one labeled as HP and a blue one labeled as MP. A quick check of his Stat Page let him know that the original gold HP Bar was now an indication of his overall Health, the green one would track his physical health (or Hit Points), and the blue one kept track of the magic he had available (Magic Points). The amounts of all three bars were currently listed as incalculable and hinted that whatever glitch had messed up his classification and HP in SAO was still affecting him in the new game.

A knock at the door brought Harry to his feet as he turned to meet his escort who turned out to be a young woman with long, silky black hair and light brown eyes that looked to be in her early thirties. She wore black robes (that looked more like a dress on her), high heeled boots that just barely peeked out from beneath the robes, and the stereotypical witch's hat upon her head. Harry supposed she could be considered pretty and if he'd been there, Klein probably would have tried to hit on her; a thought that actually made Harry smile sadly for the briefest of moments before he gave the newest NPC in this game his full attention.

"Good morning, Mr. Potter, I am Professor Sinistra," the woman informed him as she held out her hand for Harry to shake only for her to awkwardly drop it when he ignored the hand. "I teach Astronomy here at Hogwarts and because all of my classes take place in the evenings, I was asked to escort you to Diagon Alley this morning so that you might purchase your school supplies. Do you have the supply list Professor McGonagall left with you yesterday?"

"Yes," Harry replied as he opened his Player Menu to materialize the list in question so he would have it on hand. "Will I need to worry about us running into any monsters on our journey to the market town?"

"No, I'll be apparating us directly to the entrance to Diagon Alley in order to save time and to prevent you from getting lost since you have no experience with traveling through the Floo. The only creatures you'll need to worry about around here are the ones living within the Forbidden Forest; which is why students are prohibited from exploring the forest. If you will follow me…"

Harry reluctantly accepted the automated Party Invitation that the system sent him so that even if he did get separated from his guide, he'd be able to locate her fairly quickly; which was standard procedure when starting a quest led by an NPC. As the woman led the way out of the castle, Harry allowed his eyes to take in the prison he'd potentially spend the next seven years in; taking in the animated suits of armor, floating ghosts, and moving portraits.

Harry wasn't really impressed; Aincrad had had far more magnificent buildings and an endless number of fantastical and deadly Dungeons spread throughout the entire virtual universe and each floor had held entire worlds filled equally with wonders and horrors.

Game Terminology:

Aincrad – An Incarnating Radius (the name of the Castle that is SAO)
Dungeon – an area within the game where players can attack or be attacked by monsters (or other players)
HP – Hit Points: the number of Life Force/Life Points/Health Points a person has
MP – Magic Points (Only in MaM)
Nerve Gear – equipment created by Kayaba Akihiko (Argus); allows the user to enter FullDive
NERDLES – Nerve Direct Linkage Environment System (a surgically implanted chip that allows the FullDive system to interface with the brain – the surgically implanted part may or may not be canon as it was something I thought seemed more logical than it just being part of the interface helmet)
NPC – Non-Player Character
Player Stats – A list of a player's in game statistics and skills
SAO – Sword Art Online
Solo Player – a player that moves through the game alone

Harry's New Game Data/Stats Page (upon waking):

Classification: Unsorted
Level: First Year
Student Rank: -
Health: Incalculable
HP: Incalculable
MP: Incalculable
Pet: None
Special Titles: -
Wallet: Empty

Main Equipment:

Hospital Gown – Basic Clothing with no special capabilities

Skills: (Levels – Basic, Intermediate, Advanced, Proficient, & Mastered)

Magical Knowledge:

None

Spell Casting:

None

Practical Skills:

None

10-16-15: Minor edits made to chapter to fix spelling/grammar mistakes and removed unnecessary author's notes.