POEM BY ME

Fools Rush In

By Ginny :)

I appologise for being so slow lately. I've had a science GCSE and a maths test. I have my grade 7 acting exam in a few days, and I need to read 'Northen Lights' and 'Much Ado About Nothing' in 5 days... argghhh...

Ok, after what happened to Cassandra Claire, I'm gonnna take my disclaimers a *little* more seriously. Ahem;

I own Sarah Linnet aka *Everworld86*. And I own the Gaurds. And The Establishment. Everything else is owned by J. K Rowling, espeacially the starting line, cause she wrote it before me ^_^ The title comes from the probverb 'Fools rush in where angels fear to tread'. Much thanks to hermione potter for betaing!

Please read and review!

Ginny :)

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"... As Hagrid had said, what would come, would come... And he would have to meet it when it did."

Sarah Linnet put down the book with a happy smile. This was the 12th time she'd read 'Harry Potter and The Goblet Of Fire", and she still wasn't tired of it! Lucky Harry, getting to go to Hogwarts, having all those cool lessons and adventures and stuff! If only she, Sarah, could have got an owl letter for her 11th birthday! How cool would that have been?! Very, very cool! Even about that Voldemort and that slimy bugger, Snape. Even with a little git like Malfoy! Pity reality wasn't shaped like that... Sarah sighed, stood up, and crossed the room to her computer.

Fanfic writing time! Look out, world, here comes Sarah Linnet aka *Everworld86*!

She stared at the screen for maybe fifteen minutes. What could she write about? Something would present it's self, eventually.

"OK, finished!" Harry heard someone cry behind him. With a sad sigh, he knew what this meant. He was to go back to the... the... 'establishment', as the Guards put it-- although it was really little more then a prison-- where he and his fellow characters went when they were unused.

"Oy, you boy! Potter! Move along there!" someone pushed him harshly, dragging him by one arm, back onto the Muggle's King's Cross Station. A Guard escorted each of the other characters behind Harry. The Guards were... unexplainable. As soon as you tried to look at them, they seemed to be somewhere else, although they never once moved out the way of his line of sight in the human, material way that people are meant to move.

Behind him, Harry could hear Malfoy complaining loudly, and some other far off argument.

Harry accepted his fate. He'd tried arguing, but long ago discovered that his will was not his own. He watched a group of Muggles on the platform sadly, nauseatingly aware that he was invisible to them, even though they were so clear to him.

A family was arguing heated about something. 2 youngish children were busy pretending to shoot each other with invisible guns, and being barrated for it by their mother. A gang of teenagers were mucking around, one boy hanging upside down by the barrier that separated Platforms 9 and 10, his other 2 friends laughing, singing loudly about someone called Hippocrates to the tune of "Ev'rywhere We Go". A busker was playing a Disney song on his guitar. People threw coins and talked amoungst themselves.

Harry envied them. To be sent to Hogwarts, to be a part of the wizarding world, was little more, little less, then a curse. The darkest curse in the world.

Complete control-- which's the curse that was on them. And far stronger then any Crucatus curse, because this was one that could not be fought or broken. An author's bond with her subjects.

As the procession of dismal characters was lead out of King's Cross Station. Where there should have been a street filled with Muggles, a dark gray building faced them. Its windows were like blind eyes, staring bleakly at them. The door creaked as it was pulled harshly open, like a mouth complaining of being hungry.

"In there, boy." He was shoved unceremoniously into a cell of a room. The door slammed. He was trapped.

Harry stared around the room. Barred windows. No bed. A cardboard-hard settee was the only place to sit, apart from the gritty floor. There was also a sink, gray with dirt, it's taps covered in deep blood- red rust. The walls were plain, white- washed, moulting the pale powder like dandruff.

Harry felt a kind of... not exactly fear... there was no accurate word for it. It wasn't the kind of sudden terror, the horror that grips the mind like a vice, but a kind of slow, dreading sickness that seems to screw it's self slowly into your stomach. A feeling like that is too complex just to be referred to by a word as uninformative as 'fear'.

Harry slouched, face down, on the settee, sick to his stomach. He could be in this place for a long time yet. There was no one to talk to, or, for that matter, nothing to say. Everything Harry had ever said or done since the age of just before 11, had been given to him, arrived in his brain, constructed by a mind that was not his own. He did not know the other people that were also part of the cruel game, the 'story', the will of this other person, that they were all forced to take a part in. They had to be something like the characters they were forced to play, surely? Harry supposed he was, but he was not as strong as that Harry was. He couldn't fight a wizard like Voldemort. He couldn't even fight a Muggle writer, who might pass for a witch, with the magic spells she wove using words.

They were slaves. Once they were shoved out of the story, they were worth-less. Harry vaguely wondered what happened to those characters that died in the series. What about, say, Quirrel? Was he stuck somewhere in this hell- hole, never allowed out, even to obey someone else's will?

Or was he... disposed of? Harry liked to think that he had been allowed to leave, to return to happy and beautiful Reality, but it seemed unlikely. Reality was another place. This was Fiction, so much harsher, surely, then anything Reality could offer?

A noise made Harry start, and look round. It was odd to hear a sound so close. Usually, they were distant, as if from the opposite end of a long tunnel.

The noise, though, was nearby. A noise like tapping... as though from the inside of the wall... curious, Harry crossed to it, and tapped back.

Tap, tap taptap

Tap taptap, tap

Tap

Taptap

Someone was definitely knocking in reply to him. Harry frowned, confused for a moment.

"Hello?" he called.

"Who is that?" a voice called back. It was a female voice, which Harry recognised.

"Hermione?"

"You can't be. I'm her. Who're you?"

"I meant, is that Hermione?"

"Yes it is, I just said," she sounded irritable, "It's me, and, and thingy. Ron. Now who are you?!"

"Harry."

"Well, that's something."

"Where are you?"

"Inside the cavity in the wall."

"Um, why?"

The voice that answered was not Hermione's, but Ron's, heavily sarcastic "For our health. You ask a stupid question and you're going to get a stupid answer, Harry.

Harry thought he could hear Hermione glaring at Ron though the wall. He grinned slightly. It was weird... he'd never once had a free- willed conversation with them before.

"Ignore Ron," Hermione tutted, "We're trying to escape!"

"Really?" Harry was surprised. The idea had only vaguely occurred to him before... who knew why.

"Really." Hermione confirmed. "Look, it's a bit squashed and airless in here. Harry, can you make a hole in the wall somehow?" she persisted, ever practical.

Harry looked round, frowning to himself, "Yes... I think so... wait a moment..." He wished he had his wand with him. As it was, Harry took half a dozen steps back, and took the wall at a run. He smacked hard into it. A shower of plaster and whitewash fell onto him clothes. He massaged his arm where he had bruised it.

"Ow! I can't get through!"

"Try again!"

"OK."

Again, he ran into the wall. Again, it moulted more fine powder. It took another 2 more runs before it finally began to crack, and a large chunk of wall-plaster fell away, revealing the cavity to Harry. It contained, as promised, Ron and Hermione.

"C'mon!" Ron grabbed Harry's arm, and pulled him through the gap, "Hurry up!"

"Why? What--?"

Hermione grinned at him, her face alight, "We," she said, "Are all going to escape."

"All of us?"

"That's certainly the plan, yes."

"Where to?"

"The Muggle world."

"Is this really a good idea?"

"Yes."

"Won't the Muggles notice?"

"Doesn't matter," Her face was set hard, "We just have to get out of here. We've got to!"

Ron nodded fervently at her side, "Yeah, else we'll be stuck here forever. Like, like slaves."

"Like House- Elves!" Hermione added, just to hammer the point home. Harry sighed. In Fiction or Reality, Hermione was obviously not going to forgive anyone who dared mistreat House- elves.

"Are you with us?" Ron turned to Harry, "Coz if you're not with us, you're against us!"

"Yeah," Harry was still confused, but common sense entered in, "Yeah, I'm with you. Let's go!"

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I plan to continue this at some point, not nessisarily in the near future, but you never know.

As a kind of 'experiment', is there anyone out there who would like to feature in this as a charactor, as in a fanfiction writer?? Any takers?? I just need one or two innocent victims... if so, please Email me at rachel@meghora.freeserve.co.uk or leave a review, with your pen name, what 'real' name you'd like in this, your looks, hobbies, personality, fave HP book/ character, and anything else you want to tell me about you!! No, you won't be portrayed as an evil person who wants to torment charactoers [unless you want to be. There's always one, isn't there?] It'll be a bit of publicity, and you'll probably get a complimentory plug too ;) ! Any takers? It'd be even better if you have MSN or Yahoo or AIM/ AOL chat servers... but don't worry if you don't.

And please take a few seconds to review... in that little box down there, please...

Ginny :)

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