Chapter Thirty: Findings

Dumbledore looked at Harry, his horror evident on his face.

"No," he stated in a low, pained voice. "Harry, I know that I have made mistakes... but that is one that even I would not be so stupid as to make."

Harry seethed with emotion, wishing that he could tell for sure if the old man was telling the truth. After hearing the coolness in his voice as he suggested that permanenty separating Aunt Petunia from Dudley...

He just wished he could know, for once and for all... for certain...

And with that, and a look into the elderly wizard's eyes, Harry felt himself falling. He fell, and fell... and fell... through layers of frustration and anger and seething fury... through layers of laughter and joy and pride... and even the odd feeling of accomplishment.

And he found pain. Roaring, fiery pain. Pain with no end... and seemingly no beginning... until he found it. Until he saw, with his own eyes, the scene before him. A house... what had been a small house, levelled and smoking. The darkness of the Halloween night, the huge harvest moon hanging in the sky, and the sounds of people... people speaking in disjointed, rushed sentences...

And then clarity...

"They're gone, Headmaster... Lily and James... dead... but..."

"We failed them, Hagrid..." Dumbledore spoke and pain, agony, knifed through him. "I failed them. I promised Lily I would keep them safe... for Harry... I promised James..."

"But Perfessor..."

"And now, they are gone. Our chance is gone. He was the one, Hagrid... Harry... My God..."

"But... Perfessor... they found Harry..."

"What?" Shock... surprise... joy... then pain again. "Dead?"

"No, sir... spry as a spring chick... he's over there, bein' checked over... he's fine..."

"But Lily and James?"

"I'm sorry, Perfessor... I'm sorry..."

And just as suddenly, Harry was back in his chair, staring hard into the eyes of the old Headmaster, who had tears running freely down his cheeks and into his beard.

"I'm sorry, Harry... I truly am."

"No, Professor... I'm sorry..." Harry said haggardly. "I shouldn't have..."

"It's not easy to control," Dumbledore said.

"What?"

"Natural Legilimency."

"What?"

"The skill comes naturally to some, Harry."

Harry took a deep breath, then nodded.

"I understand your reaction, Harry... I apologise for being so... tactless. But... I need to know how you wish for us to proceed... Dudley Dursley is becoming a problem... and one that will not sit still for long. There will be questions asked of Petunia's whereabouts... and that is a problem of a scale that we do not want to deal with right now."

Harry nodded. "Bring him."

"Where?"

"Here," Harry shrugged.

"What?"

"He cannot go there... it would impede Aunt Petunia's recovery. He cannot go to Grimmauld Place... he would be unsupervised. Bring him here."

"But... Harry..." Dumbledore looked shocked. "There has never been a muggle student..."

"Who said anything about his being a student?" Harry laughed. "I'm sure there are places here in this castle... other rooms like the Room of Requirement... that we could make into a replica of the house on Privet Drive... tell him his mother is in hospital, and cannot have visitors yet, but he will be allowed to stay at the house if he remains indoors. Charm the place so that every time he approaches a door he gets distracted... I know you can do it, if they did it to an entire field for the Quidditch World Cup, you can do it to one little house."

Dumbledore sat back, surprised. "You mean, you object to my obliviating him, but have no problem with my keeping him a prisoner here... against his will?"

"Against his will?" Harry laughed. "Give him a game console, a television and a full refrigerator, and he'll never want to leave."

And so it was that Dudley Dursley came to live at Hogwarts. Harry did not see him, and no one else knew that he was there beyond Dumbledore, Harry and the house elves. It was necessary to keep it quiet, and Harry simply dismissed it from his mind.

They did not speak of it, although occasionally, Harry would catch the Headmaster's eye, and the old wizard would nod, give a meaningful look, and then look away. Harry knew.

He threw himself into learning, and teaching the others. And playing Quidditch. The same day that they beat Slytherin 380 – 10, Kevin Stevens produced a wispy Patronus for the first time in front of the DA club, much to everyone's shock and amazement.

And Harry attempted to teach the others... the eleven others... everything he knew. He used everything he could think of to get the knowledge that he had come by through effort and instinct into their minds, including his newfound Legilimency skill. And he prayed that they would all be ready, that they wouldn't lose anyone, when the final confrontation came.

But it was another vain hope, and Harry knew it.


Harry knelt beside his trunk, pulling things out and dumping them on the floor. He was looking for something and couldn't find it. And it was beginning to annoy him.

"What are you doing?" Ron asked from the doorway behind him.

"Looking for something..." Harry stood and strode to his bedside table. Pulling open the drawer, he rifled through the contents.

"I can bloody see that..."

"Damn," Harry muttered, moving back to the trunk.

"Harry, are you okay?"

"I'll be fine, Ron..."

"What...?"

"It's those bloody boxes!"

"What boxes?"

"The boxes I took from my mother's family vault... they're here somewhere..."

Ron looked at him oddly and turned and left without saying anything more. Harry didn't even notice.

"Yes!" He had moved aside an old pair of jeans, previously owned by Dudley and never worn any more, and found the three boxes, shrunken, and sitting on the bottom of his trunk.

Leaving the contents of the trunk spilled out over the floor, he grabbed them and moved to sit on his bed. Tapping the first one with his wand, he smiled as it grew back to it's full size.

Harry dove into it. He was concentrating so hard on the stash of family pictures and old papers that he didn't notice Ginny's presence.

"Hey..." she sat down next to him, picking up a photograph... a muggle photograph... of three little girls playing in a grassy garden. She smiled.

"Your mother..."

"And my aunts," Harry agreed, looking over at it, then back to the papers in his hands. "Nothing here."

He stuffed the papers and stray photos back into the box and shrunk it again, tossing it into the drawer of his beside table.

"Harry, what are you looking for?"

"I don't know yet, Ginny," he tapped his wand on the side of the second box. "But I'll know when I find it."

"Harry?"

"There is something here, Gin... it's bugging me... why would my mother leave those boxes in the vault, rather than bring them back to Potter Manor and chuck them in the attic? There wasn't enough stuff there to fill even that tiny vault... just the three boxes, three paintings and about two hundred galleons... hardly worth keeping the vault, don't you think?"

"Witches like to have a private vault, Harry..." Ginny said softly. "It's quite common... it means independence, should they need it."

Harry looked at her, "Independence?"

Ginny sighed. "Harry, there is no such thing as divorce in the wizarding world... you know that."

"Yes."

"But sometimes... sometimes it's so bad that... well, a witch will decide to live independently of her husband. It's done. Not often, but it is done."

Harry sat back, looking oddly at her as a strange realization came into his eyes. He stared at her.

"In case she needed to get away from him," he whispered painfully.

"Harry," Ginny looked at him. "I'm not saying that your parents weren't happy... that your mother..."

"Not my mother, Gin," Harry said softly, eyeing the boxes again. "Not my mother."

"Then... who?"

"Aunt Petunia. Mum kept this stuff, kept the money there, in case Aunt Petunia ever left Uncle Vernon. In case she needed it to get away."

Ginny looked at Harry in horror.

"And she was right. Aunt Petunia needed that, but she didn't even know it. And that means..."

Ginny glanced at the boxes and then back to Harry.

"That means," Harry continued. "That there are things in these boxes to help her remember what her life in the wizarding world was like, and to help her fit back in. And something... something here is important. I can feel it."

With a look, Ginny began to help him empty out the second box.


They found it in the third box. After the pictures and legal papers of the first, and the books and mementos in the second, the third held pieces of the lives of the three children of David and Rebecca Evans.

But mostly, it held the things that had been Petunia's. Some old books, a diary, a locket with a picture of Remus Lupin in it. And in the very bottom, under an old set of Hogwarts school robes... a wand.

Yew. Sixteen inches.