AN: Yo people! I'm sorry I haven't updated in (glances at calendar) ACK! Ten days! Ergh, I'm disgusted with myself. Well, finals are over, and I'm currently enjoying a five-day weekend over which I plan to catch up on my writing. Here's your chapter, enjoy!
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Harry's head hurt.
He winced and refused to even attempt to open his wet eyes. He was about to groan and sit up when he became aware of loud voices a short distance away. He stopped moving and feigned sleep in hopes of grasping the conversation.
"Are you insinuating that I am a liar?" Harry recognized the bellow of his Uncle Vernon.
"I'm not insinuating anything, Dursley. I'm saying you are a liar." It took Harry a moment to realize he knew that gruff voice to be that of one Mad-Eye Moody. He wondered why he would be here, and talking to Uncle Vernon, no less.
"How dare you!" Uncle Vernon blustered. "You have some cheek to come onto my property, into my own home, then accuse me of mistreating my freaky little nephew!"
"If you'd bothered to listen to me, Dursley," Moody continued, unimpressed by the other man's temper, "you'd know what I was accusing you of. I never said you'd 'mistreated' Potter, I said you'd neglected to keep watch over him."
"What the bloody hell should I care where the little blighter goes?" Uncle Vernon demanded.
"Don't you call him that, you deranged porker!" a new voice had been added to the argument. Harry's fuzzy, aching brain was slow to identify the newcomer as Nymphadora Tonks, an Auror and Order member he'd met only last year. Apparently Uncle Vernon was too affronted to retort, as all Harry could hear were the telltale choking noises of his Uncle's purple-faced rage. Another new voice, Remus Lupin's, managed to be both polite and incredibly menacing at once.
"If you would kindly keep your voices down, I believe Harry has a headache."
Harry hadn't realized he'd grabbed his head during Uncle Vernon's shouting, and slowly opened his eyes now that he'd been found out. It was blissfully dark in the room, which Harry recognized as the Dursleys' living room. He didn't think he'd been out long enough for it to have grown dark, as the last he remembered it'd been nearly lunchtime, so he reckoned the Order members must have done something to dim the midday light.
"How're you feeling, Harry?" Lupin inquired softly, moving to the couch upon which Harry was laying and kneeling down.
"Fine," he tried to reply, but the vibrations of his vocal chords only made his head buzz more. "Ow," he finally managed to whisper, wincing.
Lupin smiled slightly, though worry was still evident in his eyes. "Do you think you can sit up?" he asked.
Harry didn't want to chance nodding, so he slowly eased his upper back off the couch cushions. The ensuing head rush made him still for about two minutes, clutching his head. When the buzzing faded, he looked up expectantly at Lupin to find him holding a cup with some kind of potion in it.
"What is it?" Harry asked.
"It's a pain relieving potion-a strong one," Lupin said softly.
Suddenly Harry grew suspicious, and his eyes narrowed. "Why didn't you want me to face the boggart that first Defense lesson in third year?"
Lupin looked slightly taken aback at the sudden question, while Harry could swear he heard Moody murmur something along the lines of, "That's my boy!"
Coming back to his senses, Lupin quickly answered, "I was afraid the boggart would take the form of Lord Voldemort and frighten all the other students."
Harry smiled apologetically and reached for the potion. A few moments after downing the whole of it, he felt his head clearing and the painful buzzing slowly stopped. "Thank you," he sighed in relief.
"No problem," Lupin smiled, and then grew serious. "Harry, can you tell us what happened today? What's the last thing you remember?"
Harry frowned, trying to piece his memory together. "I was talking with Dudley, and he asked me…something," he avoided saying what exactly, shifting his eyes around to see if his cousin was there. Surprisingly he was in the room, as were his parents, who were also listening. Harry briefly wondered why they cared to find out what had happened and continued. "I got up and started coming back here…and Dudley's gan-friends," he quickly corrected upon remembering that his Aunt and Uncle were in the vicinity, "came up to me…one of them-Piers-said something that set me off. I got angry and saw…I saw flashes of what happened at the Ministry last year," he mumbled, keeping his eyes low to avoid the pity he feared to be in the eyes of the wizard in front of him. "Then I woke up here with a supreme headache."
"And you don't know how you got here?" Lupin asked gently.
"No, though I assume you guys carried or levitated me in somehow," Harry replied.
Lupin, Moody and Tonks all shared a look that immediately put Harry on edge; he saw that the Dursleys were doing the same in their own group. Now he was really worried.
"What's going on? What's the matter?" he asked.
Lupin was the one who answered. "Nobody carried you here, Harry. They didn't levitate you, either."
"Then how the hell did I get here? Will you just tell me, I don't like being kept in the dark," Harry said, glaring.
"That's just it-we're not certain."
Harry stilled. If they didn't bring him here, and the Dursleys didn't either, then what had happened? He was unconscious at the time; did they expect him to explain? He grumpily said as much.
"You weren't really unconscious, Harry," said Lupin, "this will require some explaining."
"I'll say," grumbled Harry, though no one heard him.
"It all starts with your birthday," Lupin began. "The watch we sent you does far more than tell time. It tells us where you are, at all times."
"You mean you've been keeping track of me through this?" Harry asked, holding up his wristwatch. "That spell must have been part of your 'improvement' of it. It's certainly an improvement to being constantly watched and followed-and a lot more reliable than Mundungus Fletcher."
"Quite right, Harry," Lupin said, smiling. "And that's not all it does. It also has spells on it that will alert us when any outside powerful, dangerous, or unfriendly magic is used within twenty feet of you. We can use the locator to tell us where to Apparate in order to help you out."
"What if it happens at Hogwarts? You can't Apparate on the grounds, as Hermione has told me thousands of times," said Harry.
"We have these," Lupin said, pulling something that was around his neck out from under his robes. It was a small brass charm, shaped into two letter "M's" overlapping each other. "We each have different ones just in case the wrong hands ever gets a hold of them. They won't see any similarities between them and will assume they're just regular pendants. These are specialized Portkeys that will get us past almost any anti-Apparation wards and to your side."
"Then you may be seeing a lot of me, as Malfoy's quite fond of sending 'unfriendly' spells my way," said Harry.
Tonks laughed and said, "Oh, we've thought of that. The watch can tell us what the spell was and can sense the caster's magical signature. Anyone who's ever used a wand is catalogued at the Improper Use of Magic office. Being an Auror makes it very easy to get any files one may need for certain business," she finished with a wicked grin.
"You mean this watch can do all that?" Harry asked incredulously.
"Now Tonks, don't go corrupting Harry's impressionable young mind with your shady ways," Lupin joked. "But she's right, Harry, your little watch can really do all that."
"But what's this all got to do with what happened today?" asked Harry.
"I was getting to that," said Lupin. "You had to know this in order to fully understand the severity of what happened today." At Harry's "Oh," he continued. "Your watch went off this morning at about ten minutes after eleven. Naturally, Alastor, Tonks and I Apparated to the site indicated by the locator immediately. Odd thing, however-you weren't there."
"Not there?" Harry repeated, confused. "What do you mean? The watch sent you to the wrong place?"
"No, actually, it didn't. Your cousin here," Lupin gestured to Dudley, "was the only conscious person in the area at the time. He claimed to have seen you there only a moment before we arrived, and that you'd simply 'disappeared,' as he put it."
Harry looked over at his cousin. Dudley hadn't flinched when he was mentioned as Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon had, though he did look a little green. "I disappeared?" he asked. Dudley could only nod, glancing up at Harry's face. "Wait a minute," he continued, frowning at the three Order members, "what do you mean he was the only 'conscious' person there?"
"Well," said Lupin looking torn between amusement and confusion, "Dudley said that right before you disappeared, some kind of blue light flashed out of you and knocked the boys that had surrounded you about fifteen feet back. Apparently, it knocked them out as well."
"And then I just…disappeared?" said Harry worriedly. He couldn't remember any of this! He didn't like being in the dark about anything, and this was some very deep dark. He also didn't like the fact that he'd caused people (no matter that they were Dudley's gang members) magical harm without knowledge or control of it. What on earth had happened to him? Why was this happening to him? "Where did I go? You must've found me, as I'm here now," he said shakily.
"We did find you, but it was because you were already here. We came to the house right after we got the story from your cousin to see if you'd returned. I suspect you may have performed some kind of accidental Apparation and landed here."
Harry found this plausible, though only slightly. Although he'd accidentally Apparated before (when he was being chased by Dudley and his friends) when he was much younger, that had only been a very short distance. The street he'd allegedly Disapparated from had been a good half-mile from the house. This fact did not alleviate Harry's unease in the slightest.
"When we found you, you were in your room upstairs and in quite a state," Lupin said before being interrupted by Tonks, who'd kept remarkably quiet until now.
"Yeah, you were doing the weirdest thing. You had your eyes open, but they weren't green-they didn't even have whites or pupils. They were this bright, glittery blue-silver colour, and so was your scar. You were just standing in the middle of your room, but things were blowing around as if you were standing in the middle of a windstorm! Then all of a sudden-"
"Tonks!" Lupin cut her off sharply, noticing the nearly catatonic look Harry's face had taken on. "Harry? Harry, are you alright? Harry, listen to me-"
"Then what happened, Tonks?" Harry said blankly, turning his eyes toward said Auror. She continued, flustered, as Harry looked not at her but through her.
"Er, well-er, all of a sudden, the wind stopped. Then you, erm, started saying something-like a rhyme or riddle I think, though now I can't remember what exactly. Your eyes were still glowing blue as you talked, and you sounded different. But then you finished and blinked. You looked up at us for a second and we saw you were back to normal, right before you, er, passed out," she finished quickly. Lupin and Tonks gazed apprehensively at Harry now that their story was done, while both of Moody's eyes were fixed intently on the young wizard's face.
Harry, for his part, didn't know what to say to the expectant wizards and witch. What does one say when they find out their magical powers had not only injured others, but also transported one's possessed body mysteriously in a way no one could explain?
"Oh," he said.
Tonks snorted, effectively shattering the tension that had befallen those in the living room. "You have such a way with words," she said. Harry gave a slight, sheepish grin and dropped his gaze. He quickly grew serious once more, however, and asked the question that had been plaguing his mind for the past several minutes before he could stop himself.
"Why did you all come here in the first place? I thought the watch only notified you when someone else's magic was used in my general area? You know, 'outside unfriendly spells?' You said I've done all this."
Lupin sighed. "You're growing too observant for your own good, Harry. Yes, it's true that your watch notifies the Order of outside spells, and that's the part we're worried about." He looked meaningfully into Harry's eyes, leaving everyone's worst fear unsaid: an outside spell from Lord Voldemort. He'd tried to possess Harry before; maybe he'd done it again today.
Harry narrowed his eyes in concentration. He couldn't remember feeling the incomparable pain of possession by the Dark Lord, but he couldn't remember any of the other events either. Thinking even harder, he suddenly recalled feeling an energizing, cooling sensation in his scar-nothing even remotely like the debilitating, burning pain associated with Lord Voldemort. He could remember the cool very clearly now, he could almost actually feel it….
"No," he said ponderingly, "I don't think it was Voldemort this time."
The Order members looked surprised at the young wizard's intuition and diligence, even Moody. "And why not, Potter?" he asked.
Harry turned to Moody, whose eyes widened to see the glittery blue back in them. "Because," Harry said in a voice not his own, "it was I."
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AN: Ooh, that's a cliffhanger if I ever saw one. Hmm, hope you don't mind too much. I used to hate them myself, but then I realized that cliffies make past events easier to remember for the next update. So really, I'm doing y'all a favor.
…
BWA HAHAHA!
Next time: Who (or what) has a hold on Harry? What does he want with our precious Boy-Who-Lived?
Review Response (yes, singular, as in ONE [wonderful!] person reviewed last chapter):
GrimmyD: Thanks for keeping me going, and here you go!
And special thanks to hope for reviewing my other little story! The review was completely out of the blue and made me happy, especially since it came during my English final (blech _)!
