Harry Potter and The Key, Chapter 5
By: PepperjackCandy
Disclaimer: All things Buffy are owned by Joss Whedon, Alien Enemy, 20th Century
Fox, etc. The Harry Potter universe is owned by J.K. Rowling. I'm just putting
them in the same bowl and mixing them up a bit. 8-)
Once again, SPOILER WARNING for those who haven't seen Season 5 of Buffy or
read Book 4 of Harry Potter.
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"Good morning."
Harry was used to being awakened, but usually the voice was that of his roommate
Ron. Or, less often, Neville, Dean or Seamus. This wasn't any of them. It was
a girl's voice.
He woke up immediately with a "Wha?" And looked right into the gently-smiling
face of Dawn Summers.
"You startled me." Harry said, chagrined.
"Oh. Sorry. You want to go downstairs and get some breakfast?"
He smiled at her and stood up. "Sure."
When they got downstairs, they found that the only people left in the house
were themselves, Willow, Tara and Spike, who had already gone down to the basement
to rest.
"Where're Xander, Anya and Giles?" Dawn asked as she took a seat at the table
and poured herself a bowl of cereal.
"Xander and Anya went to get a start on making the arrangements." Willow informed
them.
"And Giles?" Dawn asked.
"He said he had some work to do at the shop. He said he'd meet us at the funeral
parlor after Anya's softened the mortician up."
Giles was in the exercise room behind the magic shop, taking out his frustrations
on the punching bag. Ever since Dumbledore had put him in charge of the Potter
boy, he'd been reliving his own Sorting. And remembering what it was that had
drawn him to socialize with Slytherins in the first place.
He punctuated his remembrances with punches and kicks at the bag.
Intelligence.
Watchers' Council?
Don't tell me you didn't know?
Know what?
Why, that you're destined to become a Watcher, of course.
No. I didn't know.
Oh. Talking out of turn. Sorry.
Well, as I was saying. Abundant courage. That makes you prime material for .
. .
Don't say it!
Why not?
I.
But why not?
Giles showed the Hat his cousin, who started out all right,
Oh. Well, they're not all like that,
I won't go to Gryffindor. You said I have a thirst for knowledge. Why not Ravenclaw?
But I really feel you'd do better in Gryffindor.
Look. I come from an old wizarding family, with ties in France.
Well, if you put it that way, I guess it's RAVENCLAW!
After Willow and Tara had finished their breakfast and had gone upstairs to
shower and get dressed and Spike had gone down into the basement for some rest,
Dawn and Harry sat at the table finishing their breakfast.
"Actually, now that Giles is gone . . ." Harry began.
"I know you're wondering about what I meant . . ." Dawn said simultaneously.
They both smiled.
"You go first," Dawn said.
"No. You go first." Harry insisted.
"What I have to say might affect how long you want to stay in Sunnydale."
"Well, what *I* have to say might affect how long you want me to stay in Sunnydale."
"You want to flip a coin for it?"
Harry gave up. "No. You go first."
Dawn stared into her cereal bowl for a minute, drawing circles in the milk with
her spoon. "I'm not . . . well, I am, but I haven't always been."
She started again. "I've practiced this so many times, but now I don't know
what to say." She paused and looked up at Harry. "I . . . haven't always been
human."
"None of us have. I mean, we were all a sperm and an egg at one time, right?"
"No." She shook her head. "I wasn't. Ever. I've only been human since last August.
That's," she counted on her fingers. "Nine, almost ten, months."
Harry nodded, for her to continue.
"Before that, I was an energy source known as The Key. A god, Glorificus, needed
to use it, me, to basically destroy this whole dimension and get back to her
own place, you know, Hell. But a group of monks turned *it* into *me,* and made
everyone believe that I was really the daughter of Hank and Joyce Summers. Including
me.
"It's really strange, 'cause I can remember living with my mom and dad until
I was nine, but I've never even met him. And now I'm gonna have to go live with
him." She said sadly.
Harry thought that maybe the best thing to do would be to get her back onto
the topic at hand, so he asked the next question on his mind. "And so this Key,
that's why you were Cedric's most important thing, isn't it?"
She nodded. "Yeah. They needed an untrained wizard to use as a power source,
and his uncle sort of told him too much about what they were doing when they
tested him. He knew how important I was to everything he loved, and subconsciously
named me his most important thing.
"Apparently, they spent days trying to find someone that even came a close second,
but the . . . thing . . . Like a wine glass, but not?"
"Goblet?"
"Yeah. It kept showing them me and wouldn't accept his girlfriend or parents
or anything else. Something about keeping the playing field level. You and the
others had their most important things, and the Goblet wouldn't accept Cedric's
second most important thing. They tried to convince it until the last possible
minute, and finally the Goblet sort of took it into its head to get me itself.
That's part of why they couldn't send me back right away. They had to figure
out how I got there in the first place."
"Did you know that you were the Key during the Second Task?" Harry asked.
Dawn blushed and nodded. "But I had a good reason for not telling you. It was
just so nice, forgetting that I was . . . made, and just pretending to be a
normal teenaged girl getting a tour of a wizarding school."
"Oh, it's all right that you didn't tell me until now. It's a pretty big thing
to have to share with someone else." And it makes it a little easier for
me, since I didn't warn you about Voldemort before now. He added silently.
He stood up, and panic flashed through her eyes for a moment. He grasped her
hand and squeezed it reassuringly. "I'll be back in a second. I have to go get
something."
Harry went into the living room and got his wand, then returned to the kitchen.
He picked up their empty bowls and put them in the sink, and then dug around
in one of the kitchen drawers for a moment.
He returned to the table and put a toothpick down on it.
"Right. It's all about energy, you see? This is a toothpick. It's a toothpick
because all of the energy inside it is saying 'wood.' Now, if you can reorganize
the energy so that it's saying, say, stainless steel," He pointed his wand at
the toothpick, turning it from the inside to the outside into metal, "and then
do this," he blunted one end, and made the other extra sharp, then added a hole
to the blunt end, "what do you get?"
Dawn picked it up. "It's a needle."
"Yep. And is it any less of a needle because it used to be a toothpick?"
There were tears gathering in her eyes as she shook her head no.
Willow came back into the room. "Hey, guys. What're you talking about. What's
the matter, Dawn?"
Dawn was still all teary as she said, "I told Harry about, you know, the Key,
and look!" She handed the needle to Willow.
"It's a needle." She looked slowly from Dawn to Harry and back again.
"Harry made it for me. It used to be a toothpick."
"Did you really? You learned that at your wizard school?" Her eyes widened in
amazement.
"It's no big deal." He shrugged. "I just wanted to make the point that she's
not any less of a person because of how she got here."
"No big deal?" Tara came into the room and Willow said, "Harry turned a toothpick
into this," she held out the needle, "and he says it's no big deal."
Tara's eyes widened as large as Willow's had been, if not larger. "We do need
to get going, though, Will."
"Oh, yeah. Right. That's what I came to tell you. That we're ready to go and
that you two should go upstairs and get . . . showered and . . . changed and
. . . things."
Harry and Dawn walked back upstairs. "I'm sorry." Dawn said, still holding the
needle in her hand.
"Sorry for what?"
"For embarrassing you."
"I wasn't embarrassed." He blushed.
"And thank you."
"For what?"
"For," she held out the needle. "This. The lesson. Believing in me. You can
get ready in my mom's room." She pointed towards the room that had once belonged
to Joyce.
Harry walked that way, but stopped when Dawn called his name. She walked over
to him and kissed him very lightly on the lips, making him blush even more.
When Dawn got into her room, she took a spool of thread out of her dresser drawer
and broke off a length. She then threaded it through the needle and knotted
the end, and hung it over the corner of her mirror before getting her clothes
ready for the day.
After they were showered and dressed and ready to go, the foursome left the
Summers house together, each couple walking hand-in-hand.
Harry pulled Dawn a little away from the other couple. "By the way," he said,
"you said in one of your letters that one of your friends is a former demon?
Did you mean Spike?"
"I was actually talking about Anya."
"Anya? Of Xander-and-Anya?"
Dawn and Harry climbed into the back seat of Willow's car and continued their
conversation.
"From what I've heard, she spent a thousand years or so as a vengeance demon.
If a woman was scorned, Anya would provide her with a world in which the man
who hurt her got exactly what that woman thought he deserved for hurting her.
Or maybe she changed this world. I've never been clear on that. Somehow it was
like both happened.
"'Cause that's how she lost her powers. They were contained in a necklace she
wore, and she provided Cordelia, she's one of Buffy's friends, the world that
she wanted, and she lost it there."
When they arrived at the funeral parlor, they found Anya chatting with the mortician
like they were old friends. Xander sat to one side, a stunned expression on
his face.
The mortician saw the quartet walk into the room and immediately schooled his
face into serious lines. "Miss Summers. I'm so sorry at your loss." He said
in a sincere tone. "But you chose an excellent emissary. She drives a really
hard bargain." His sincerity slipped a little and his eyes twinkled in Anya's
direction.
"I won't burden you with the details. Let's just say that you had some very
unusual requests, such as holding the service tonight?"
Dawn gripped Harry's hand more tightly as she nodded. "Yes. Well, some of her
friends work all day and wouldn't be available to come to a daytime funeral."
"Very well." He walked the six friends into his office just as they heard the
outside door open again.
"Hello? Is anyone here?" Giles's voice rang out.
"We're in here, Giles." Willow called back.
Giles saw Dawn leaning over the mortician's desk, pen in hand, about to sign
on the proverbial dotted line. "Don't sign anything, Dawn!"
She looked up. "Why not?"
"Because, these morticians are all crooks and swindlers, that's why." He took
the papers from Dawn and began to page through them. His face fell progressively
farther as he paged through the document.
"Oh." He said simply as he finished. "Go ahead, Dawn." He handed the sheaf of
papers back to Dawn and looked over at Anya, nodding slightly in recognition
of her ability as a negotiator.
Dawn signed the pages and handed them back to the mortician.
"Very well, Miss Summers. I will finish the arrangements and will see you here
tonight for the funeral."
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Next: a few guest appearances!