Dear Reader,
So, you've made it to Chapter Three, have you? Pitifully optimistic mortal, you're hanging on waiting for this story to get better, aren't you?
MWAHAHAHAHAHAAH!
Ahem. Sorry. I do apologize.
Whether I am apologizing for the lack of getting-better-ness quality of writing or the fact that I am laughing at your sweetness is up to you to decide.
Because you've been so good as to hang on for this long, I'll try to get writing more often. I do like to write, and I like pretending I have an audience that actually reads what I write. Heavens know my brothers are sick of it ^_^ And they don't like the mushy stuff at all. They are really sweet, though. For brothers. They almost never treat me as sub-human just because I am female. That alone puts them in my good book forever!
Anyway, I tire of such useless prattle. On with the show!
Sincerely as always, your somewhat assuming authorship, Katrina Elizabeth Rose Mac
Oh, yeah, and Harry Potter does not belong to me. I'd happily make a trade for him, though. Does anybody know if JKR likes brownies? ~_^
******************************CHAPTER 3 START*********************** *
Harry, it turned out, was lying spread eagle in a dumpster.
A particularly smelly, dirty, nasty, full-of-garbage sort of dumpster.
And as he lay there, dazedly looking up at the storm-clouds gathering overhead (storm-clouds? But hadn't it been sunny back at the Burrow?), he could have sworn that he could hear a voice singing from the sky.
*So I've finally died and this . . . this is heaven,* he thought. *Funny. I never imagined that it would smell quite this bad . . .*
But then his scattered threads of thoughts began to twist themselves together, weaving once more into something resembling actual coherency. And Harry realized that he was feeling just a tad too bruised and sore to be in heaven just yet.
Moaning a little at having to move his sore limbs (he must have fallen a considerable distance into the dumpster, the way he hurt and the way the garbage actually carried his indentation), he crouched in the midden, wincing a bit as he sank ankle deep in the warm muck. He tried not to look too closely at anything rotting around him and tried even harder to keep from breathing in through his nose. It proved difficult and he found himself getting light-headed and queasy all at once.
And then, the singing got louder, as though singer herself (well, he supposed it was a girl; the voice was clear, high, and, well, music to his ears) were actually coming closer. He looked up to see that the dumpster he crouched in was actually next to a rather large, stucco apartment building. An open window about three floors up was probably the source of the serenade he partook of.
Harry cocked his head, trying to remember why he was in a dumpster in the first place.
He had been at the Burrow . . .
Teaching Hermione to apparate . . .
She had gone on to the Ice Cream Shoppe with Ron . . .
He was about to follow when BOOM!
A humongous explosion had shaken the little garden patch just as he was attempting the jump.
Well, his concentration had been broken, for sure. He was lucky to be still in one piece, never mind that that one piece was now in a slimy dumpster.
But a slimy dumpster . . . where?
Certainly not in Ottery St. Catchpole, out by the Burrow. Nor in Diagon Alley.
"Toto," he muttered, trying to brush something slimy off his black robes. "I don't think we're in Kansas any more . . ."
And that's when it hit him.
Literally.
A harsh cracking sound, little white bits flying everywhere. Something wet and liquidy thick and not altogether pleasant running down his forehead.
Harry couldn't help it. He swore. He was in a dumpster, ankle-deep in sludge, and someone had just dropped an egg on him. All he needed now to finish off this perfect day was for Draco Malfoy to come prancing by in drag.
And so Harry swore some more, more creatively this time, trying to get that awful visualization out of his mind.
He looked up when he heard a gasp, however. A small, pale face looked down from a third story window directly in line with the dumpster. Her hands were clasped to her mouth and her light eyes were almost as big as Dobby's, the way she was looking at him.
"Ohmigosh." She mouthed, stricken. Apparently, she had been the one to discard the offending egg that one dark-haired boy was currently picking out of his hair. "Ohmygosh! I am soooo sorry! So sorry! Hold on! Don't move, I'll be right there!" And her face disappeared from the window.
Harry stood up in the dumpster and gripped one of the sides, slippery with slime though it may have been. Sighing, he heaved himself out, falling not quite gracefully onto a prettily manicured lawn surrounded by neatly pruned shrubbery. Looking down at himself, he grimaced. In this neighborhood of neat lawns and trimmed topiaries, somehow he thought that his black robes and wand looked out of place. So he hurriedly stripped off the soiled robe, revealing a simple striped t-shirt and pair of light pants, and looked for a place to hide it.
He was going to have a lot of explaining to do.
Oh, who was he kidding? He was going to have a lot of *lying* to do. A Muggle (how could she anything but Muggle? More than ninety five percent of the blasted island was Muggle!) had found him in her *dumpster*, for the love of Chocolate Frogs!
And at that point, said Muggle (Muggle-ess?) jerked open the back door of the apartment complex, tripped on the back step, and would have hit rather unforgiving pavement had she not bowled into Harry Potter, taking him down in a heap.
Blushing like mad, the little blond straightened herself before he'd had much of a chance to say anything. She pulled his sleeve until he was sitting on the unlucky back step of the building. Then, she promptly took up a wet dishtowel she'd run down with and gasping apologies, gently scrubbed at his hair, swatting bits of shell left and right as she tried to get the more stubborn pieces of egg off of him. Harry went rigid, as unused to strange girls attacking him with flying poultry-derived projectiles as he was unused to being set upon with dishrags.
"Sorry, sorry, so sorry." The girl gasped, thinking she had hurt him with her scrubbing of his scalp. "I don't think this is working, you'll probably have to come up. I am so very sorry. For the egg. And for me falling over the step. And making you hit concrete. Stupid step, sitting there, waiting for someone to kill themselves . . ." and so she trailed off, muttering curses on the poor, defenseless step that had so stupidly attacked her.
Harry laughed, quietly and so suddenly he even surprised himself. The quiet mirth grew into a ringing chuckle as he allowed the girl to lead him up the stair way. She turned to look at her hapless victim, dishtowel still sitting haphazardly over his head, and raised an eyebrow. "Maaaybe that egg hit you harder than I thought."
"No, no." He gasped between snorts of laughter. "It's just. . . it's always the last step. . . that's the doozy. . ."
And to his absolute surprise, because almost no one except Hermione and Ron ever found his jokes truly funny, the girl giggled into her hands, a beautiful sound that brought to mind crystallized bells.
*****************CHAPTER BREAK*********************************
Laura, Harry Potter soon learned. Her name was Laura.
And she was determined to "set to rights" everything that she had "messed up".
This included sticking the head of Harry Potter, the Boy Who Lived, under a faucet and scrubbing him until all the little bits of eggshell that he had previously thought were embedded in his skull were scraped clear out of his hair. Thankfully, no outrageous amount of blood was shed or Laura would have pulled out the first aid kit. And Harry Potter, while thinking that it was terribly nice of Laura to go through the trouble of fixing him up, had this sneaking little suspicion that Laura should never, ever be allowed to become a nurse.
But it was all worth it, because in the end, Laura sat him down to dry at a small kitchen table and brought him some fresh tea. She told him the least she could do was offer him some cake, once it was done baking. The same cake, she added mischievously, that had called for the egg that he was (thankfully) no longer wearing.
He decided he liked her, for her quiet good hyperactivity (for hyper she was, running from place to place as though she had a thousand things to do) and her total acceptance that a boy had just happened to be looking for a out-of-bounds football and had leaned too far and fallen into her dumpster, landing therein just in time to be hit by an egg thrown out the window. Like that was plausible.
Besides, she was wearing an apron. With ducks on it.
And she had flour in her hair.
And she didn't seem to mind at all.
And the fact that she had never before heard the name Harry Potter, didn't expect him to be charming or witty or courageous for something that had happened so many years in the past, made him warm up quite a bit to the little sprite.
For little, she was. And spritish. She stood a little above five foot, at least a head and a half beneath him. In little less than an hour, she had changed the notoriously girl-shy Harry Potter (curse that Cho Chang for ruining him!) into something somewhat more talkative, more relaxed. He felt like he'd known her for years. Like he was talking to Hermione, only . . . not.
She sat at the table next to him, waiting for her kitchen timer to beep so that she could pull out the cake while sipping tea from a cup that was almost bigger than her head. When he asked her about the enormity of the cup, she grinned and said that she needed caffeine. Lots of caffeine.
"Isn't that kind of unethical? I mean, you're kind of hyper already. . ."
She held up a warning finger. "No man, Harry Potter, comes between me and my caffeine. None."
Harry grinned. "He who would try would perish in the attempt?"
Laura nodded solemnly. "In the most gruesome way you can imagine. So don't even think about it." She grinned evilly at him and cackled loudly.
Harry smiled and thought about how much Ron and Hermione would like Laura, if they could ever meet her. He shook his head, trying to get rid of that thought (which had been popping up quite a bit over the last half hour of joking and jibing). Wizards don't consort with Muggles because Muggles couldn't find out about wizards. It was like an unwritten law.
But then the cake timer beeped, and Laura skipped to the oven to take it out. She took a deep, dramatic sniff and sighed happily. "Aaah, the out of the oven smell. Pastry at it's finest. Perfection." Then she grinned wickedly. "Now time for FROSTING!!!"
Harry looked at the pure delight that shined out of her light eyes and hesitated for just a minute. "Umm . . . Can I frost, too?"
She looked him over skeptically and then shrugged. "Wash your hands, dumpster boy. I will *not* have my cake smelling as badly as you do right now."
"Hey, I do not smell! My shoes might, but I left them by the door. And my hair is now lemony-fresh, thanks to someone attacking me with what looked suspiciously like dish soap!"
She sniffed. "Well, something smells." And then she noticed the balled up black robe that Harry had been forced to carry up to the apartment with him as he hadn't been able to find a hiding place fast enough. "Ah-ha!" She leapt on it, before he could stop her. "And what is this?"
"Um . . ." Harry thought very fast. Normal people did not just go around wearing black robes. "A costume?"
Laura sniffed it and made a face. "In all of seventeen my years here in Maidstone, never have I smelled anything so bad! Can I wash it? And why were you wearing a costume? I thought you'd been playing football."
Maidstone? Information to be stored away for later. That meant he wasn't so far from the Dursleys, in their house in Surrey. Too close for comfort.
"Well, um, see, I was. Playing football. Kicking the ball around. By myself. On the way home from . . . from a children's party, yeah. I'm . . ." he grimaced a little bit at the irony. "I'm a magician."
Laura's eyes lit up. She might have been a seventeen year old, but she was inclined to have a little fun now and then. "A magician? Really?" She looked down at the robe. "Is it safe to wash? I won't scrub off any needed magic-ness?" she teased him.
Harry laughed, relieved that she had bought such malarkey. "No, no." he assured her weakly. "Most of my stuff is more magical than you can even imagine."
So, you've made it to Chapter Three, have you? Pitifully optimistic mortal, you're hanging on waiting for this story to get better, aren't you?
MWAHAHAHAHAHAAH!
Ahem. Sorry. I do apologize.
Whether I am apologizing for the lack of getting-better-ness quality of writing or the fact that I am laughing at your sweetness is up to you to decide.
Because you've been so good as to hang on for this long, I'll try to get writing more often. I do like to write, and I like pretending I have an audience that actually reads what I write. Heavens know my brothers are sick of it ^_^ And they don't like the mushy stuff at all. They are really sweet, though. For brothers. They almost never treat me as sub-human just because I am female. That alone puts them in my good book forever!
Anyway, I tire of such useless prattle. On with the show!
Sincerely as always, your somewhat assuming authorship, Katrina Elizabeth Rose Mac
Oh, yeah, and Harry Potter does not belong to me. I'd happily make a trade for him, though. Does anybody know if JKR likes brownies? ~_^
******************************CHAPTER 3 START*********************** *
Harry, it turned out, was lying spread eagle in a dumpster.
A particularly smelly, dirty, nasty, full-of-garbage sort of dumpster.
And as he lay there, dazedly looking up at the storm-clouds gathering overhead (storm-clouds? But hadn't it been sunny back at the Burrow?), he could have sworn that he could hear a voice singing from the sky.
*So I've finally died and this . . . this is heaven,* he thought. *Funny. I never imagined that it would smell quite this bad . . .*
But then his scattered threads of thoughts began to twist themselves together, weaving once more into something resembling actual coherency. And Harry realized that he was feeling just a tad too bruised and sore to be in heaven just yet.
Moaning a little at having to move his sore limbs (he must have fallen a considerable distance into the dumpster, the way he hurt and the way the garbage actually carried his indentation), he crouched in the midden, wincing a bit as he sank ankle deep in the warm muck. He tried not to look too closely at anything rotting around him and tried even harder to keep from breathing in through his nose. It proved difficult and he found himself getting light-headed and queasy all at once.
And then, the singing got louder, as though singer herself (well, he supposed it was a girl; the voice was clear, high, and, well, music to his ears) were actually coming closer. He looked up to see that the dumpster he crouched in was actually next to a rather large, stucco apartment building. An open window about three floors up was probably the source of the serenade he partook of.
Harry cocked his head, trying to remember why he was in a dumpster in the first place.
He had been at the Burrow . . .
Teaching Hermione to apparate . . .
She had gone on to the Ice Cream Shoppe with Ron . . .
He was about to follow when BOOM!
A humongous explosion had shaken the little garden patch just as he was attempting the jump.
Well, his concentration had been broken, for sure. He was lucky to be still in one piece, never mind that that one piece was now in a slimy dumpster.
But a slimy dumpster . . . where?
Certainly not in Ottery St. Catchpole, out by the Burrow. Nor in Diagon Alley.
"Toto," he muttered, trying to brush something slimy off his black robes. "I don't think we're in Kansas any more . . ."
And that's when it hit him.
Literally.
A harsh cracking sound, little white bits flying everywhere. Something wet and liquidy thick and not altogether pleasant running down his forehead.
Harry couldn't help it. He swore. He was in a dumpster, ankle-deep in sludge, and someone had just dropped an egg on him. All he needed now to finish off this perfect day was for Draco Malfoy to come prancing by in drag.
And so Harry swore some more, more creatively this time, trying to get that awful visualization out of his mind.
He looked up when he heard a gasp, however. A small, pale face looked down from a third story window directly in line with the dumpster. Her hands were clasped to her mouth and her light eyes were almost as big as Dobby's, the way she was looking at him.
"Ohmigosh." She mouthed, stricken. Apparently, she had been the one to discard the offending egg that one dark-haired boy was currently picking out of his hair. "Ohmygosh! I am soooo sorry! So sorry! Hold on! Don't move, I'll be right there!" And her face disappeared from the window.
Harry stood up in the dumpster and gripped one of the sides, slippery with slime though it may have been. Sighing, he heaved himself out, falling not quite gracefully onto a prettily manicured lawn surrounded by neatly pruned shrubbery. Looking down at himself, he grimaced. In this neighborhood of neat lawns and trimmed topiaries, somehow he thought that his black robes and wand looked out of place. So he hurriedly stripped off the soiled robe, revealing a simple striped t-shirt and pair of light pants, and looked for a place to hide it.
He was going to have a lot of explaining to do.
Oh, who was he kidding? He was going to have a lot of *lying* to do. A Muggle (how could she anything but Muggle? More than ninety five percent of the blasted island was Muggle!) had found him in her *dumpster*, for the love of Chocolate Frogs!
And at that point, said Muggle (Muggle-ess?) jerked open the back door of the apartment complex, tripped on the back step, and would have hit rather unforgiving pavement had she not bowled into Harry Potter, taking him down in a heap.
Blushing like mad, the little blond straightened herself before he'd had much of a chance to say anything. She pulled his sleeve until he was sitting on the unlucky back step of the building. Then, she promptly took up a wet dishtowel she'd run down with and gasping apologies, gently scrubbed at his hair, swatting bits of shell left and right as she tried to get the more stubborn pieces of egg off of him. Harry went rigid, as unused to strange girls attacking him with flying poultry-derived projectiles as he was unused to being set upon with dishrags.
"Sorry, sorry, so sorry." The girl gasped, thinking she had hurt him with her scrubbing of his scalp. "I don't think this is working, you'll probably have to come up. I am so very sorry. For the egg. And for me falling over the step. And making you hit concrete. Stupid step, sitting there, waiting for someone to kill themselves . . ." and so she trailed off, muttering curses on the poor, defenseless step that had so stupidly attacked her.
Harry laughed, quietly and so suddenly he even surprised himself. The quiet mirth grew into a ringing chuckle as he allowed the girl to lead him up the stair way. She turned to look at her hapless victim, dishtowel still sitting haphazardly over his head, and raised an eyebrow. "Maaaybe that egg hit you harder than I thought."
"No, no." He gasped between snorts of laughter. "It's just. . . it's always the last step. . . that's the doozy. . ."
And to his absolute surprise, because almost no one except Hermione and Ron ever found his jokes truly funny, the girl giggled into her hands, a beautiful sound that brought to mind crystallized bells.
*****************CHAPTER BREAK*********************************
Laura, Harry Potter soon learned. Her name was Laura.
And she was determined to "set to rights" everything that she had "messed up".
This included sticking the head of Harry Potter, the Boy Who Lived, under a faucet and scrubbing him until all the little bits of eggshell that he had previously thought were embedded in his skull were scraped clear out of his hair. Thankfully, no outrageous amount of blood was shed or Laura would have pulled out the first aid kit. And Harry Potter, while thinking that it was terribly nice of Laura to go through the trouble of fixing him up, had this sneaking little suspicion that Laura should never, ever be allowed to become a nurse.
But it was all worth it, because in the end, Laura sat him down to dry at a small kitchen table and brought him some fresh tea. She told him the least she could do was offer him some cake, once it was done baking. The same cake, she added mischievously, that had called for the egg that he was (thankfully) no longer wearing.
He decided he liked her, for her quiet good hyperactivity (for hyper she was, running from place to place as though she had a thousand things to do) and her total acceptance that a boy had just happened to be looking for a out-of-bounds football and had leaned too far and fallen into her dumpster, landing therein just in time to be hit by an egg thrown out the window. Like that was plausible.
Besides, she was wearing an apron. With ducks on it.
And she had flour in her hair.
And she didn't seem to mind at all.
And the fact that she had never before heard the name Harry Potter, didn't expect him to be charming or witty or courageous for something that had happened so many years in the past, made him warm up quite a bit to the little sprite.
For little, she was. And spritish. She stood a little above five foot, at least a head and a half beneath him. In little less than an hour, she had changed the notoriously girl-shy Harry Potter (curse that Cho Chang for ruining him!) into something somewhat more talkative, more relaxed. He felt like he'd known her for years. Like he was talking to Hermione, only . . . not.
She sat at the table next to him, waiting for her kitchen timer to beep so that she could pull out the cake while sipping tea from a cup that was almost bigger than her head. When he asked her about the enormity of the cup, she grinned and said that she needed caffeine. Lots of caffeine.
"Isn't that kind of unethical? I mean, you're kind of hyper already. . ."
She held up a warning finger. "No man, Harry Potter, comes between me and my caffeine. None."
Harry grinned. "He who would try would perish in the attempt?"
Laura nodded solemnly. "In the most gruesome way you can imagine. So don't even think about it." She grinned evilly at him and cackled loudly.
Harry smiled and thought about how much Ron and Hermione would like Laura, if they could ever meet her. He shook his head, trying to get rid of that thought (which had been popping up quite a bit over the last half hour of joking and jibing). Wizards don't consort with Muggles because Muggles couldn't find out about wizards. It was like an unwritten law.
But then the cake timer beeped, and Laura skipped to the oven to take it out. She took a deep, dramatic sniff and sighed happily. "Aaah, the out of the oven smell. Pastry at it's finest. Perfection." Then she grinned wickedly. "Now time for FROSTING!!!"
Harry looked at the pure delight that shined out of her light eyes and hesitated for just a minute. "Umm . . . Can I frost, too?"
She looked him over skeptically and then shrugged. "Wash your hands, dumpster boy. I will *not* have my cake smelling as badly as you do right now."
"Hey, I do not smell! My shoes might, but I left them by the door. And my hair is now lemony-fresh, thanks to someone attacking me with what looked suspiciously like dish soap!"
She sniffed. "Well, something smells." And then she noticed the balled up black robe that Harry had been forced to carry up to the apartment with him as he hadn't been able to find a hiding place fast enough. "Ah-ha!" She leapt on it, before he could stop her. "And what is this?"
"Um . . ." Harry thought very fast. Normal people did not just go around wearing black robes. "A costume?"
Laura sniffed it and made a face. "In all of seventeen my years here in Maidstone, never have I smelled anything so bad! Can I wash it? And why were you wearing a costume? I thought you'd been playing football."
Maidstone? Information to be stored away for later. That meant he wasn't so far from the Dursleys, in their house in Surrey. Too close for comfort.
"Well, um, see, I was. Playing football. Kicking the ball around. By myself. On the way home from . . . from a children's party, yeah. I'm . . ." he grimaced a little bit at the irony. "I'm a magician."
Laura's eyes lit up. She might have been a seventeen year old, but she was inclined to have a little fun now and then. "A magician? Really?" She looked down at the robe. "Is it safe to wash? I won't scrub off any needed magic-ness?" she teased him.
Harry laughed, relieved that she had bought such malarkey. "No, no." he assured her weakly. "Most of my stuff is more magical than you can even imagine."