Harry Potter and the Hidden Runes by the Dream Society (or rather, part of it)
A/N: this is a story written by more than one author.
Kate
Cella
Ellen
Nicole
…so ya. On with the show!!!
CHAPTER ONE
Harry woke with a finish. "Wait," he thought, "that's not right," and promptly feel back asleep for three more hours.
Harry woke with a start. He tried to remember the strange dream he had been having, then realized that the cwaazy summer that he had been having had actually happened. There had been many Voldemort sightings, especially around Cambridge. He looked over at his calendar. Red X's covered the page counting down to September first. It was August tenth and for some reason, he was particulary interested in the subject (or lack there of) of the new DADA teacher. Now that everything was becoming more and more dangerous for him, his lessons could be his only escape. Also, a well-rounded DADA teacher would help Harry...well frankly, stay alive.
Harry glanced at his alarm clock, which was previously owned by his grotesquely large cousin. It stated 4:00 am, but he could never be sure. Harry's current bedroom was filled with broken toys and things of Dudley's. The collection had been growing in large numbers by the year. Had it never occurred to him that his clock might be broken? He decided not to worry about it.
He suddenly craved for the pizza being stowed in the Dursley's icebox. "Mmm...pizza" he thought, and decided that he would sneak down to the kitchen for a piece. He crept quietly down the stairs jumped the ones that creaked and landed noislessly on the blue carpet below. Harry snuck soundlessly into the kitchen and opened the freezer. Light flooded the room from the mini plastic light along with the chill of frozen food and uneatable TV dinners.
"Ug…" Harry pushed aside a slice of hamburger (or a really old ice-cream sandwich, he couldn't tell) and searched hungrily for a morsel of pizza. "don't people normally put food in the ice-box?" the thought jumped out as he was hit with a large scent of something old and decaying hiding in the bottom Tupperware. Possible, the Dursleys were waiting for it to evolve and move out. Disgusted he let his hand travel through the world of can veggies and old meat, a smile curling as he found his prize.
"Bingo!" Harry pulled the pizza from its plastic wrap kingdom and drooled with want.
A click behind him of the light switch- ironically- switching on brought the slice falling to the floor with his smile.
Aunt Petunia stood there, her pink curlers protruding from her horse-like face.
"And what, may I ask, are you doing?" she said, tapping her foot impatiently.
"I...em..well, you see..."
"Just don't wake Dudley! Poor baby, he needs his beauty sleep."
"Then keep him asleep for a looong time.." Harry muttered. But, Aunt Petunia had already left, and Harry finished his sneaky task.
Quietly returning to his room, as he passinately didn't want "Duddikins" to wake, starting the daily torture lesson, Harry spotted a letter waiting for him just inside his door.
He promtly dropped his pepperoni-and-anchovi-and-smoked-salmon-and-jalepenos-and-pepperjack-cheese-pizza flat on the floor.
"Hm," he contemplated carniverously, "Suspicious looking letters in the middle of the night, what more could a boy hope for?" And although he neither ate the pizza on his floor or read the tomato-saucy letter, his craving of suspicious objects and carniverous pizza was fulfilled, and he went back to bed. "Ah," he thought sneakily to himself, "Another sneakily sneaky mission accomplished." And, humming the theme from Mission Impossible, he fell asleep with a start to a Sneaky-Dreamful night.
"WHO ATE MY INCREDIBLY SPECIAL PIECE OF PIZZA?" Harry heard yells outside his room, and sat up to rub his eyes. The door of his bedroom flew open with a crash, revealing a...well, you couldn't really call it a boy. Not really a human. Let's just say a whale with sausages for legs and arms named Dudley. "YOU ATE MY PIZZA!"
"Not so," Harry retorted, "Lift up your foot." Dudley did so. A strange blob of smoke-salmon and pineapple chunks (how'd they get there? harry wondered) was plastered to his Size 27.5 tennis shoes (yes, they were pretty small for Dudley, but his others had bursted recently and these were the only ones left).
"Oh," said Dudley, "You didn't eat it. Then who put it here?" He scratched his head, which took some work, and looked all around, apparently expecting the culprit to be lurking nearby.
"I dunno," muttered Harry, "Must've been the boogie-man. Had a party in my closet last night. Suppose he wanted something to eat."
Dudley looked thoroughly frightened at this. "Why would he want food?"
"Suppose he needed fuel so he could BOOGIE down, get it?"
Apparently Dudley didn't. He scratched his head some more while Harry chuckled at his own lame joke. "Oh," Dudley murmured, stepping out of the way as Harry tried to push past him through the doorway (which was impossible) and stumbled down the stairs.
"Wait," Dudley called after him, "Does the boogie man live in my room, too? Or does he Just stop by to watch me sleep?"
Harry's head wiped around, and his foot missed the stair by a good three inches. A crash shook the small badly finished house as harry tumbled to a stop at the bottom stair. Coughing around thirty years of ignored dust he shouted "Wha-cough-at?!"
Dudley stared at the floor sheepishly. "well does He? I mean, if its not him them who…?"
Harry cut him off. He stood shakily, hopping that hadn't taken to many years off his life. "I dearly hope you find the help you need and save some of you sanity while there's still a chance."
Dudley, not quite understanding, waddled back to his room, the creak of the poor floorboards bringing a sympathy to Harry's ears. "God if he gets fatter one day he'll jump up and get stuck." Then Harry remembered that this happened last Thursday and he'd spent six hours trying to figure out how it happened and how to fix it.
Harry shook his head and focused his thoughts at the matter at hand….before realizing there was no matter at hand. At which he understood what it was like to be a normal teenager with a normal teenage life and normal teenage acne. In that second he wondered normal teenage things, like how many olives can fit in your mouth, what the Internet is really used for if it isn't just a porn network, and why he never got an allowance.
Harry shook his head again, and was back to being Harry.
"Wow, that was wired…"
Yes, he was back to the abnormal boy with the abnormal life and abnormal pimples.
He slowly started his journey to the kitchen, when from out of the shadows came two very large eyes that belonged to a very small creature.
"Dobby?! What are you doing here?" Harry asked, quickly pushing him into the small cupboard under the stairs.
"Dobby came to see Harry Potter, sir! Dobby wants to tell him of great news!" Dobby exclaimed, straightening the tea cozy on his head. He beamed up at Harry like he was some sort of god. Of course, any house elf who was like Dobby would if they'd been freed by him too.
"Well, what is it, Dobby?" Harry was beginning to get annoyed. He had just remembered the letter in his room, and it seemed to be calling to him: "Read me, Read me...you know you want to..."
"Sir, Dobby has been promoted, sir! To DADA Teacher!" Dobby's shill and rather school-girl like voice echoed off the small asbestos ceilings. He wrung his hands around the frill of his un-matching clothes, a bashful smile awaiting Harry's response.
Harry calmly brushed past Dobby and walked out the front door. There, under the house-elf's surprised and unsure eyes, he took a deep breath and threw back his head to scream. And then stopped. And thought. What DID DADA stand for, anyway? He'd always wondered that. It was something Dobby was teaching... maybe Dobby's Amazing Dusting Advisory class. Yes, that must be it. Who better than Dobby to teach about cleaning? Aha, of course.
He calmed himself down considerably and turned to look at the anxious little elf.
"That's very nice, Dobby. Now you can teach all the other elves of the world your talents! Congrats."
"Thanks, Harry Potter!" Dobby said gleefuly, then stopped. "Wait, Harry Potter just said other elves? Dobby will be teaching YOU and your friends at Hogwarts, of course!" "
Oh, of course, how silly of me, Dobby-" muttered Harry, climbing the stairs, ignoring whatever the elf had just said. Now, where had he left that letter? Ah, on his floor, of course, under the pizza. He jogged back up the stairs and flung open the door to his room dramatically, looking around his carpet for the letter. But what met his eyes was something... so horrible.... he could barely keep his eyes on it. Or rather, NOT on it. For there, on the floor, was NOT his letter! Where was it? He checked in all the normal places: under his bed, in his sock drawer, under the floor panel, down his pants... but somehow, it was no where. Where could it have gone? Had the sender come back and taken it away? Just then he heard a shout from Dudley's room.
"Oh lover boy Harry, got a girlfriend, huh? Never would've believed it from you! I mean, of course, a studly guy like me gets chicks all the time-"
"No you don't!" yelled Harry, then remembered what Dudley had yelled. "Wait, WHAT?"
"Yeah, yeah, and I'm sure THIS means nothing to you, then: 'Harry, I love you, I love you, you're the love of my life, I would die if you were gone, please stay in my life, marry me, be mine! You're so special and handsome and wonderful-" Harry's head was growing larger and larger with all this praise, until he remembered that it was Dudley saying this. Why was DUDLEY calling him handsome? Then it hit him... he must have the letter!!!!! The letter was a love letter!!! But from whom? "Dudley, give me that letter!" He jumped up and ran into his cousin's room where whale-man was sitting on his bed, holding a sheet of pizza-covered paper. Harry grabbed at it, but Dudley stood on his bed (making Harry thank God again it was only a mattress on the floor, or it wouldn't hold his weight) and held the letter above his head. Harry stood on his bed as well and jumped at it- and would've been able to reach it, too, had Dudley's stomache not pushed him away unintentionally. "Fine-" gasped Harry, giving up, "At least tell me who it's from."
Dudley looked through 4 pages of scribbly writing until he reached the last page. He stared at the bottom. "It says... it's from... er... what does that say? Oh, it's from- Ron Weasley." Harry thought for a moment, surprised that his best friend would write such a letter...but then realized that Hermione was staying at the Burrow for part of the summer. Did they write it together? He decided that it was then time to get that letter. He proceeded to ask as if it was a normal thing, and sighed.
"Give it here, Dudley." His eyes widened in terror.
"You're...you're ...you're.........GAY?!?!?!" As he processed this thought, Harry could see the color wash out of Dudley's face. With a look of disgust, he quickly threw the letter to the ground and waddled out of his room, squeezing through the door with much effort on the way out.
Harry snatched up the letter and stuffed it back in its now-tomato-saucy envelope and sprinted to his room before Dudley changed his mind and came back to get it.
Safely on his bed, Harry slowly opened the letter.
Dear Harry,
There is some thing I must confess to you. I must profess my undying love to you. Harry, I love you, I love you so much . You're the love of my life, I would die if you were gone, please stay in my life, marry me, be mine! You're so special and handsome and wonderful and I would gladly run away with you to some deserted island you are so-
At this point Harry looked to the end of the letter. Yes, it did say Ron Weasley in his recognizable untidy scrawl. This isn't right….
....and yet it seemed so perfect! Oh wait, no it didn't. Harry shrugged, and skipped through three pages of undying love before reaching the end, were it stated clearly. - Hermione is staying over, and we would LOVE it if you could come. Enclosed is a handful of Floo-powder, and a ticket on the Knight Bus, take whichever you want.
Please Harry, i need to see you. I need nothing more then to be with you. We must talk, and i'm sure you feel the same.
Love forever
Ron Weasley
PS LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE YOU
What is this?? Harry thought. He kept staring at it, especially the part that said "And I'm sure you feel the same." This had to be some joke, some mistake, something! He looked through the pages, scanning, skimming, looking for some sign that it was normal. And then he saw it. Among the loopy, lovey-dovey writing was a hidden message. It was written in the same script, but it did not include the words "love" or "kiss me" or "i miss you" or "i can't go on without you" or "i've never seen anyone so sexy as you". And it hit Harry that this was not some joke, and certainly not serious. it was a secret message. Ron was in trouble. he must only be allowed to send out letters that his kidnappers or whoever was tracking his mail didn't think was important. But there, in the middle of the letter, right after it said, "And without you, i would die. i would kill myself and give my body to science. or have it encased like a mummy and set up in the Great Hall-" it cut off and said, in an urgent tone, "-Or give myself away to kidnappers knowing you'd never come to rescue me..."
The letter of course went on to talk about Ron's strange attraction to the way Harry's robes clung to him- but that part was ignored.
"He's been KIDNAPPED!!!" Our Hero thought, striking a heroic pose and clenching his heroic teeth. "I must hurry to his side because…well…that's what I do! And so far, this story is going no where!"
Through the magic of film making Harry suddenly appeared later in the day on the front steps of the Burrow. He blinked. He was there.
"Wow, that was weird" he thought, not remembering how he got there. Harry shrugged and flung the door open.
"Come out you cowards! ENGARDE!"
Not bothering to look around Harry flung himself on the first thing he saw. Unfortunately he lost his battle with the Weasley coat rack and stumbled into the kitchen. There sat Hermione, days of no sleep in her eyes.
(end of chapter 1!)
