Chapter Eight of Unexpected Losses

Harry and Willow both flinched at the voice of Vernon Dursley as it filled the room. They shared a glance, and Harry dropped his arm, effectively forcing Hedwig to shoot out the window in an undignified blur of white feathers. Vernon said nothing more for a moment, but fixed his nephew in a glare that chilled even Willow to the bones. She straightened up, then, and noticed that Harry had done the same just before she did.

"I said: What. Do. You. Think. You're. Doing. Boy?" Vernon repeated, punctuating his words as if each was a sentence in and of itself.

"I-I—I was just…" Harry floundered, and Willow came swiftly to the rescue, having formulated an answer, even as the first words fled Vernon Dursley's lips. He stood in the doorway, now, filling it with his immensity, gasping for air as if he'd just run a great distance.

"He was just showing me Hedwig, Mr. Dursley. And you frightened her out the window! I've never seen an owl before. They're not common pets in America. I had asked to see her, and you frightened her into flying away!" Willow made sure to put just a little whine in her voice. Despite having stayed at the Dursley residence for quite some time, he didn't know her that well. He might be thrown off if she pouted at him.

"The bloody bird shouldn't leave its cage." Vernon spoke carefully, obviously weighing his words before he spoke. "It's a menace, and the last thing that we want is the neighbors talking about your—pet (He spat out the word as if it was distasteful)—and the annoyance of it flying about in daylight."

"You can't keep it in its cage all the time!" Willow interjected, sounding surprised. "That could cause a lot of problems for her! It's cruel!"

"It doesn't belong out in day, and that's final. When the bloody bird returns, we'll have it put in my room, where I can control where it goes and when. I thought we'd discussed this, boy." Vernon's words held a razor edge that Willow could neither deny nor define. It sent a shiver down her spine.

"Yes, Uncle Vernon. I was just trying to show Willow…" He tried to explain, but his Uncle's glare simply amplified on him and he fell silent.

"I insisted." Willow added. "He didn't want to. He said that you wouldn't appreciate having her out of her cage, but I've never seen something like her so close before. So I asked Harry to let her out for just a little bit. We weren't planning on having her fly or anything, but when you came in, I think you surprised her." Willow's voice grew quieter as she spoke, and she couldn't hold his glare, but her story was every bit as believable as she could've hoped.

"Right." He finally answered in a tone somewhere between lingering anger and suspicion. "Tell me when the bloody thing is back. Can't have any more accidents happening." Willow shivered at the implication she didn't understand. She and Harry both nodded in unison, but Vernon seemed to be ignoring the American redhead once more.

He turned abruptly on his heel and headed back downstairs again at a more sedate pace than the one with which he'd arrived. Harry and Willow shared a glance then, and Willow stumbled back weakly before sitting on the bottom bunk of the bed, feeling somehow drained.

"Thanks." Harry finally spoke into the silence, surprising Willow with the noise.

"Why did that feel creepier than Moloch?" She replied faintly, recalling the stories she'd only been telling him a few moments before.

"'Cause he's got no excuse to be that creepy? At least that guy was a demon." Harry speculated in a voice that could almost be described as vague.

"Sure. That's probably it." Willow replied, and a giggle escaped her. "So, what's with the angry-ness of your uncle?" Willow finally spoke, wondering why his attitude had turned from cold to violent overnight.

"He doesn't like Hedwig. It's not natural to have an owl for a pet. The neighbors will all talk and blah, blah, blah." Harry answered, rolling his eyes heavily, apparently his mind turned away from the thought of Terry Boot's murder.

"Does he know that you send mail with her?" Willow asked with a tinge of amusement in her tone. Harry gave her a baffled look, as if he hadn't realized that he'd just sent a letter. A look of dawning realization overcame him, and he beamed at her.

"Yeah. That's probably the main reason I'm not allowed to keep her. He doesn't want me to be sending messages to my friends over the summer. Mostly 'cause—."

"'Cause he doesn't like magic?" Willow hazarded in response. Harry turned to her, still looking shocked, and Willow suppressed another giggle at the look on his face. "Come on, Harry, it's a little bit obvious after…I don't know: a day or so. I was trying to watch a David Copperfield wannabe and he glared at me as if he was trying to set me on fire with his eyes. I'm not exactly an idiot, so it was pretty easy to figure it out.

"You went to a school where you found about something called a: Wolfsbane Potion, you had a werewolf for a teacher, and you KNEW about it. Not to mention, you ought to find some sturdier floorboards." Willow finished, again, choking on the laugh at Harry's surprised look. She walked over to her nightstand, opened a drawer, and pulled out one of his books. He took it, and opened it.

"You've been reading it?" He questioned, noting that the pages within looked more like Hermione's books would have than his own, some were dog-eared, but it was obvious that it had been well read. About halfway through the book writing slowly began to appear in the margins in tiny, neat cursive. He shot her a curious glance, and Willow blushed.

"Yeah...sorry about that." She answered, "It's just a habit."

"'The spell malfunctioned in purpose due to lack of wand. Hovering light rather than tip lit.'" Harry read aloud from the margins and the shocked look once more took residence. "You...you did it?" He questioned in a disbelieving voice.

"Well. Yes." Willow admitted. "For the most part, anyway. I mean, everything I tried I got to work, but I didn't try everything. If I had tried everything, not enough time."

"But...but how?" Harry returned. "You can't just pick up a book and start performing spells. You'd have to be a witch, and if you were a witch you'd have a wand and then you'd probably go to some kind of Wizarding School and then you'd probably know who I am and—"

"But I am a witch." Willow answered. "I'm practicing Wicca in any case."

"What is 'Wicca'?" Harry answered curiously. It was Willow's turn to look slightly curious at Harry. While she was aware that the Wicca religion wasn't extraordinarily well-known, she expected him (apparently another magic-user) to be aware of its existence.

"Well, Giles explained it as another type of magic. Instead of focusing our magic through a wand, and using the magic within your body we use the magic from the earth itself. I don't use a wand, most importantly. I attempted to do some of the magic in the book. With the Lumos spell though, the objective is to light up the tip of your wand. I wanted to see what would happen if I attempted the spell." Willow did her best to explain.

"Show me." Harry all but cut her off. He stared at her with curiosity burning brightly in emerald eyes. Willow blushed and nodded. She adjusted herself to face him more completely, and by reflex Harry copied her movement and also faced his new roommate.

She closed her eyes in concentration, and held out her hand, palm upwards, and completely flat. She kept her eyes shut for another moment, and opened them, split focus internally and on her hand. "Lu—" The door swung inwards and Willow snatched her hand away from Harry, and both teenagers immediately looked away from each other, guiltily. Willow went as far as to scoot as far away from Harry as she could.

Aunt Petunia looked in the room, her gaze caught by the quick, curious movement of her nephew and new charge. "Willow dear, you've got a phone call." She finally said. Willow shot a curious look to her new guardian. The only people who would call her were halfway across the world, and it would be too late there to call. Unless there was an emergency. She shot Harry an apologetic look, and at his nod, she followed Aunt Petunia downstairs and into the kitchen where the phone was.

She picked up the receiver and held it to her ear. "Hello?" She questioned quietly.

"Wills are you okay?" Rather than a returned greeting, the familiar voice questioned in a demanding tone.

"Hi Buffy." Willow responded instead, wondering why her friend was calling her when it was quite late in Sunnydale, California. Especially when they had agreed not to use the phone anymore, because regardless of all else, international phone calls were quite expensive for both parties, and the computer was a lot more effective for communication.

"Giles says that there's something going on with a thing and the other thing (I really hadn't been paying that much attention), but it seemed important, so as long as you aren't in any immediate mortal peril, I think it's going to have to wait before I panic." Buffy answered, and then Willow deduced that Giles was there and Buffy's tone was a little more satirical than she had at first made out. She was trying to annoy her Watcher as much as she could in as short a time. A very, very Buffy thing to do.

Willow giggled in response, and distantly heard Giles making a familiar clucking noise with his tongue in the background. "I somehow doubt that I'm in any kind of immediate danger, Buff. Thanks for the concern. Is there anything else you need? I'd really hate to tie up the Dursley's line unnecessarily." Willow snickered as she spoke, knowing that regardless of what she may have said, Buffy wasn't going to finish the conversation before she was ready.

"Yeah, yeah. Sure Wills." Buffy responded, just as Willow would have expected, and the redhead grinned. "How are things?" The blonde's voice was serious again, and Willow knew that her friend was referring to the situation with Oz. Despite partially expecting it, the question burned at her, and she suppressed a wince.

"I think I'm going to manage. Didn't Xander share?" She questioned.

"Yeah, of course, but I wasn't sure if you were being honest or trying to make us feel better. And anyway, I wanted to make sure that you didn't get a visitor in the form of unknown British persons who should by all rights be dead."

Willow immediately understood. "Xander told me. But I haven't seen him at all. Not that I'd recognize him if he wasn't wearing the same thing. It could be anyone if he's not." Buffy made a noise of agreement across the line. "I'm going to go, though, I was talking to Harry, and I think we should finish the conversation."

"You got it Wills. Just stay safe." Buffy answered.

"How'd it go tonight?" Willow questioned, meaning patrol.

"Yeah. Three more tonight." Buffy answered with a smile to her exhaustion-tinged voice.

"Good job. I'll talk to you soon." Willow hung up the phone and turned to leave the room, effectively running smack into the brick wall that took the form of Dudley Dursley. She stepped back a few times, and was once more pinned under the pondering light in Dudley's eyes. Before he had a chance to speak, she slipped around him and fled upstairs into the room she now shared with Harry Potter. He was sitting on his bed again, furiously scribbling onto another piece of parchment. He didn't look up when she entered, though he obviously noted her arrival. She could tell by his quill stopping at her entrance.

He wrote for another few minutes and then set aside whatever he had been writing and looked up at her. "Hi." He greeted her calmly. "Show me."

Willow was slightly surprised that that was all he said, but in a way, it was all she had expected. She climbed up on to his bed again. She sat cross-legged in front of him, and she took a deep breath, nervous. She had gotten the magic to work, but with Harry as an audience she was nervous. What if it didn't work? What if he thought she was a liar? In any case, it didn't seem as if he was going to give her a moment to dwell on it.

She held out her hand in front of her, palm upwards and fingers flat. She met Harry's eyes for a moment before tearing them away and focusing on the power she could feel pulsing from the earth. Ever since she'd left the Hellmouth, her magic had been working nearly flawlessly for her, and she had a feeling that it was the Hellmouth itself that so drastically affected her magic and her control over it. She also wondered if Giles knew of the affect on her magic.

"Lumos." She stated clearly, concentrating on her hand. She slowed the flow of her magic, the minutest tug on her magic worked. A small ball of light about the size of a marble hovered over her palm. It gave off a surprising amount of light for its small size, and she had to shield her eyes. After a few seconds, she gave a small tug on the magic, unweaving the spell smoothly. She, of course, could have let the magic collapse on itself, but Giles had told her that it helped with control over her magic to properly unmake her spells.

Harry stared on, slack-jawed. "You...you did magic," was all he managed before silence overcame the room. "Wandless magic....wow."

"Is that bad?" Willow questioned.

Harry shook his head in response. "It's not...bad. It's just not normal. I've done a few bits over the years...but never on purpose."

"But I've only ever used wandless magic. I wasn't aware that there was any other kind until a few months ago. Giles explained it to me before I came here, like I told you before." Willow answered, feeling tenser than she had expected she would.

"Well, Lumos is a generally simple spell to perform. Have you tried any harder spells than that without a wand? What's the biggest magic you've performed?" Harry questioned curiously, thinking of how he had blown his aunt up when she had mocked his family, and of the various other magic he had unwittingly performed: shrinking sweaters, growing his hair out overnight. Most of it had been rather small marks of his magic. But they had rarely been even as much as a Lumos in strength....pardoning his blowing up his aunt, but that was still not a whole lot stronger.

"Well, I kind of re-souled a vampire." Willow answered in a quiet voice. "It was a gypsy curse." She would have continued babbling as she sometimes had a habit of doing but not for the stunned look with which Harry regarded her. Slack-jawed, slightly buggy-eyed, and in awe, Harry looked altogether ridiculous. Willow suppressed a snicker at his befuddled look.

"What?!" was all he managed to say before falling silent again. "You...you what?!"

"A vampire, Angelus...I gave him back his soul." Willow answered distractedly, not used to telling people about the magic she'd performed. Everyone who she would tell of this accomplishment already knew. Telling someone who could make judgment on her that wasn't already aware was a difficult thing to do. Especially to someone like Harry who was a stranger to her...but he was also a wizard. And Willow really felt that she could relate to him. She felt as if she could trust him. And so she did.

"You gave a vampire a soul. I've never heard of anything like that. And without a wand...was there a spell?" Harry wondered if this was how Hermione felt when something caught her curiosity. He wanted to know every detail of every spell Willow had performed. He wanted to know why she had performed such a spell, and how she had discovered a teacher that could show how to do such a spell. And if it had not been a teacher that showed her such a spell, he wondered where she gotten hold of it.

"Yeah, there was a spell." Willow said quietly, thinking of Ms. Calendar. She had been relatively close to the teacher and the thought of her demise was still painful. "It had been cast on him before....and it was removed she said the word delicately and I had to replace it. Without his soul he was a killer...tried to have the world swallowed by Acathla."

"What's an 'Acathla'?" Harry questioned in response.

"Um...as far as I know, it's a world-swallowing statue-demon." Willow responded, uncomfortable under Harry's interrogation. Because she was being so thoroughly questioned, she decided it was only fair to have her own questions answered, so without as much as a preamble, she turned the tables against Harry. "So...what killed Terry Boot?"

Harry glared up at the questioned, not expected the redheaded....pseudo-witch (?) before him to be as sharp as she was. "Carbon mono—"

"Harry, why are you lying?" Willow's statement was calm, and Harry flinched at it. It was hard enough lying to the girl with some evidence (however false) to back him up. The news even said it was carbon-monoxide poisoning. But Willow wasn't buying it, and he couldn't lie well enough to convince her that it was the truth. Not if she challenged him.

"Voldemort." He said instead. "It was Voldemort?"

"Which is?" Willow returned, her brow slightly creased in her confusion.

"Who is." Harry corrected. "He's a wizard." Harry choked on the last word. Willow assumed that her new roommate felt that this "Voldemort" didn't deserve the title. "He's a murderer. He killed my parents." Tears burned emerald eyes as he spoke.

"Goddess, Harry, that's awful."

"He's a monster. He's the one who killed Terry Boot. Or, moreover, the Death Eaters did. Those are his followers (he expanded at Willow's baffled look). He wants to purge the bloodlines of impurities, kill all muggle-born witches and wizards and halfbloods. My mother was a muggle-born."

"What's a muggle?" Willow asked quietly.

"A regular person, someone without magic." Harry answered, with barely a pause. "Voldemort doesn't like the idea of bloodlines thinning or something."

"Does it affect their magic?" Willow questioned.

"I don't think so. One of the best witches I've ever known is a muggle-born. I've never seen her mess up a spell." Harry answered, thinking momentarily about Hermione. And then he thought of Neville, a pureblooded wizard who could barely get anything right at all without a great deal of time, effort, and practice. "I'm almost sure it makes no difference."

"Then why does he want to do it?"

"I don't know." Harry answered shortly, and Willow took the hint that the time for questions was over and climbed off his bed and sat on her own, picking up and hugging her pillow tightly. This was becoming confusing.

(a/n: uhh, please don't kill me? It's now Christmas break, and I finally have the time to get some writing done. I've just been through my very first semester of college ever, and I didn't do extraordinarily well, despite the fact that study was nearly all that I did. Hence the lack of writing. I haven't been able to sit down and work on this at all in the past few months, and while I'm desperately sorry for that as much as for myself as for you, there wasn't much I could do about it. Merry Christmas everyone, and I hope you've enjoyed this. Due to my break, and the constant rain keeping my booty in the house for at least a little while, I'm going to try to get as much done of this before I head back to school. My next semester is going to be even harder. Please review, even if all you want to do is yell at me for my lack of updating in ever.)