I. The Order of the Phoenix


A perfectly ordinary day, on a perfectly ordinary street. With one exception - a perfectly extraordinary boy, one Harry Potter. Summer was in full swing and Harry, who had only been home from school for a few weeks, was ready to leave his horrid family (if you could call them a family) at 4 Privet Drive and return to the world that HE knew as ordinary. The wizarding world, to be exact. Harry Potter is a wizard - and a famous one at that - who has been forced to live with his extremely unmagical Aunt Petunia & Uncle Vernon Dursley, and their rather obese son, Dudley, since he was barely a year old. Harry was counting the days till his upcoming return to Hogwart's School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, where he would be starting his fifth year.

As he sat weeding the rear garden of Number 4, Harry began to daydream about what new adventures he would have this year with his best friends, Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger. The past four years had brought them close to death more times than he cared to count. But in the process, it had brought them from being coincidental friends during their first journey on the Hogwart's Express to being an inseparable trio that couldn't imagine what life would be like without each other. But Ron and Hermione weren't the only people Harry was looking forward to seeing at school. He was anxious to get back to practicing Quidditch with the Gryffindor house team, but he was even more excited about seeing someone from the Ravenclaw Quidditch team...Cho Chang. He didn't know if Cho would ever be interested in him, but the possibility alone made his heart flutter...

"HARRY! Get inside this instant!" a voice screeched from the patio door.
"What now," Harry sighed as he stood up, dusted himself off, and headed back to the house. Aunt Petunia's judgmental stare met him as he stepped through the door. She looked very pleased with herself, but at the same time very annoyed at having to actually speak to with her nephew.

"Yes, Aunt Petunia?"

"Go upstairs and pack some clothes. We're going on holiday in Chester for a fortnight, and I've arranged for you to stay with Mrs. Figg." Harry nodded in compliance before making his way upstairs.

"Oh, great," Harry moaned to himself as he turned into his bedroom, "Two weeks with Mrs. Figg...it'll take me a month to rid myself of cat hair and stop smelling like old cabbage." He continued to grumble about how behind he would get on his homework (he had yards of essays to write that he hadn't yet begun) as he scribbled a note to Ron asking him to take care of Hedwig for a few days. He opened the bedroom window and whispered to the snowy white owl that he'd be back soon before she flew up into the sky.

~

The Dursley's new car reversed out of Mrs. Figg's driveway in a cloud of dust as Harry walked towards her door. He turned and looked at them speeding down to the roundabout at the end of Privet Drive. Well, at least I'll be spoken to for bit this summer, Harry thought as he rapped on the front door.

He heard someone shuffling about inside; the footsteps grew louder and halted just as a click announced that the bolt had been unlocked. The door creaked open. Harry expected to see old Mrs. Figg standing there, her silver hair up in bun and her dusty brown cardigan wrapped around her shoulders.

But the woman who answered the door COULDN'T be Mrs. Figg...could it?

~

The woman who now stood in Mrs. Figg's doorway looked to be in her mid to late thirties. Her brown hair hung loose and matched her not-so-dusty cardigan. She was wearing Mrs. Figg's apron, and Harry couldn't quite see what was poking out of its pocket...

"Are you alright, Harry?" she said quizzically, interrupting his train of thought.

"Pardon, but...who are you?" he inquired.

The woman's expression quickly changed from puzzled to distraught.

"Oh my goodness, me! I've forgotten!" she exclaimed. After pausing to regain her composure, she continued more calmly, "Come in, dear, we need to have a little chat..."
Harry nodded hesitantly in compliance before crossing the threshold into the house. The mysterious (and yet...familiar, he thought) woman shut and locked the door behind him, then led the way to the living room. They headed to opposite ends of the afghan-draped couch and, as she lowered herself onto a cushion, something long and thin bounced to the floor from her apron pocket.

As she scooped it up and quickly tucked it away again, a wide-eyed Harry whispered with astonishment, "Is that...a wand?"

Blushing slightly, the woman nervously tucked her hair behind her ears and murmured, "One thing after another...this isn't starting out how I'd hoped." She brought her eyes up to meet Harry's and began to tell him things he never would have imagined to be true...

~

"Harry, I am Mrs. Figg...well, at least, I'm the same person that you knew as Mrs. Figg. My name is Arabella Figg, and I'm one of the few remaining Aurors. Fourteen years ago I was asked to watch over you while you stayed with the Dursley's. I immediately took the assignment. It was the least I could do...after all your parents did for me..." she finished softly as her eyes began to glisten with the threat of tears.

"My parents? You knew my parents?" Harry asked eagerly.

"Yes, I met them at Hogwart's. I was in the same year as your father, James, and his two best friends Sirius Black and Remus Lupin. I didn't along with them at first - they were always pulling pranks on the girls in our dorm (well, they were always pulling pranks on anything that moved, but us especially) - but before I left for the Christmas holidays ... well, let's just say I got even. After that we all became friends. When Lily, your mum, came to Hogwart's (she was a year younger than we were) she and I became best friends by the time of the Halloween feast.

"After we all had graduated Hogwart's, we kept in touch but went our separate ways. We got together for weddings, baby showers, and such...but in retrospect we should have kept in touch better than we did. There's no changing the past, though, is there?

"After Voldemort - well, after he disappeared, Remus and I were the only ones left alive and free. We discovered at your parents' ordering ceremony that being together brought back too many painful memories...so we only saw each other when our professions demanded it."

"Sorry, but, what's an ordering ceremony? Is that the wizard equivalent of a muggle funeral?" Harry always jumped at the chance of learning more about his parents.
"Usually, no, but in your parents' case that would be a good analogy. An ordering ceremony is when witches and wizards are given titles for special deeds. There are many different orders, the Order of Merlin for example; your parents were each awarded the Order of the Phoenix, First Class," Arabella revealed with a mixture of pride and sorrow ringing in her voice.

Harry's eyes glazed over and his jaw hung slightly open as he took everything in.
"What is the Order of Phoenix awarded for?"

"As much as I want to tell you right now, I don't think you're quite ready. You've already been through a lot his afternoon. I wish I could have told you sooner who I really was, but it was better for you to think I was just a crazy old muggle. But these are different times, Harry, and we have to depend on one another if we're going to make it through."
Harry decided that she was right, but he knew he would go crazy if he had to wait any longer to ask her the question that had been nagging him for some time now.

~

"Mrs. Figg, why - and how for that matter - did you make yourself look so much older before?"

"Harry, are you sure this can't wait till later?" she sighed.

But as she looked into his pleading eyes, she knew she had to answer at least one of his questions. At the moment this one was the more desirable of the two.

"Alright," she conceded. "First of all, please call me Arabella; to my ears 'Mrs. Figg' will always be my mother.

"I had to be in disguise for a lot of reasons. The Dursley's were much more likely to trust an old widower than a single young woman. But more importantly was that if a Death Eater spotted me in a muggle neighborhood I would have put both of us in peril, because they would immediately have known that I was up to something.

"As to how, I had a friend keep me supplied with a special aging potion that is very similar to Polyjuice; hence the cabbage stench that this place has adopted. In the excitement of you coming to stay today I completely forgot to take it...perhaps changing into an eighty-year-old all these years has affected my memory," she finished with a giggle.

~

Arabella told Harry to make himself at home while she went take care of some things. She apparated out with a pop as Harry went to see what was on the muggle radio. He finally found a decent station, BBC's Radio 1, and slumped onto the sofa to think about his situation. The radio soon became background noise, but if Harry had been listening he would have heard the song that would soon become his heart's theme...

Turn it inside out so I can see - The part of you that's drifting over me
And when I wake you're never there - But when I sleep you're everywhere
You're everywhere
Just tell me how I got this far - Just tell me why you're here and who you are
'Cause every time I look you're never there
And every time I sleep you're always there
'Cause you're everywhere to me - And when I close my eyes it's you I see
You're everything I know - that makes me believe
I'm not alone - I'm not alone
I recognize the way you make me feel
It's hard to think that you might not be real
I sense it now, the water's getting deep - I try to wash the pain away from me
Away from me
'Cause you're everywhere to me - And when I close my eyes it's you I see
You're everything I know that makes me believe
I'm not alone - I'm not alone
I am not alone
Whoa, oh, oooh, oh
And when I touch your hand - It's then I understand
The beauty that's within - It's now that we begin
You always light my way - I hope there never comes a day
No matter where I go - I always feel you so
'Cause you're everywhere to me - And when I close my eyes it's you I see
You're everything I know that makes me believe
I'm not alone

'Cause you're everywhere to me - And when I catch my breath
it's you I breathe - You're everything I know that makes me believe
I'm not alone
You're in everyone I see - So tell me...
Do you see me?

~

Still lost in thought, Harry didn't hear Arabella return, and was quite startled when her voice rang out from the hallway, asking him to come and give her a hand. He jumped up and followed the sound of her voice. He skidded to a halt when he saw his trunk and Hedwig's cage resting on the floor in the foyer.

"My things!"

"I thought they might make you feel more at home."

"Thanks!"

"Not a problem. Help me take them to your room and then we'll have dinner. I'm starving."

~

Harry re-acquainted himself with the contents of his trunk, setting out a picture of Hermione, Ron, and himself that had been taken by Colin Creevey the previous year and piling his schoolbooks and parchment on the desk, before heading back to the kitchen.
It had only taken him a few minutes, but by the time he reached the kitchen table, there were steaming dishes of rice and curry (a Chicken Korma by the looks of it) on the table, a stack of hot naan bread, and a dish of mango chutney, waiting for him.

"Wow, you're faster at magical cooking than Mrs. Weasley!"

"Actually, I'm a horrible chef. I called the Surrey Tandoori in town and had them deliver," she admitted.

Harry chuckled as he piled his plate, remembering the times he had eaten there before.
"Well, I can help you with that. Petunia always made me cook. I'm no gourmet, but I know my way around a kitchen."

~

Harry began to clear the table, but Arabella reminded him that he didn't have to do things the muggle way anymore when he was with her. She proceeded to magic the dishes over to the sink, where they were scrubbed, rinsed, and instantly dried. Next, she scooped some Ty-Phoo into a cobalt blue teapot and then added boiling water from her wand to the loose tealeaves.

"I think I'm ready to know about the Order of the Phoenix," Harry prompted.

Arabella looked at him reluctantly before making up her mind, "Yes, I suppose you are. I think you'll be surprised at how much you already know."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, what do you know about phoenixes, Harry?"

Harry thought back to his second year at Hogwart's, when he had first met Fawkes, Dumbledore's pet phoenix.

"I remember Dumbledore told me that their tears have healing powers, they're really faithful, and they die and are reborn in a burst of flames," he recalled. This triggered another thought, "When Fawkes came to me in the Chamber of Secrets, there was glorious singing that made my heart swell right before he appeared - in a similar burst of flames."

"Very observant, Harry. So with the characteristics of a phoenix in mind, why do you think they have an order named after them?"

Harry tilted his head to one side while he considered her question. Perhaps someone who's really loyal? And helped those that they were loyal to? Did the bursts of flames have anything to do with it? He remembered how Fawkes had fought the basilisk deep below Hogwart's...was being brave another requirement of the order? It seemed to make sense. His parents must have been loyal to something to not fall to the dark side, and they had sacrificed themselves for him, he thought with a pang of guilt. He had heard his mother and father's voices as they prepared to face Voldemort for the last time. There was no mistaking their bravery. Unable to decipher anymore about the order, he presented his theory to Arabella.

"Very good, Harry, you've figured out the basic gist of it. Now I'll fill you in on the details:

"The Order of the Phoenix is given to someone who epitomizes the characteristics that phoenixes are known for: compassion, loyalty, purity of heart, bravery, and selflessness. Compassion for their willingness to heal those that are wounded. Loyalty because they are the most faithful of all the magical creatures. Purity of heart is often symbolized by fire; the song of a phoenix encourages people with pure hearts to believe in themselves. And you, yourself, have witnessed how brave and selfless phoenixes are."

"Do you have to die to be given the Order of the Phoenix?"

"No, but most - if not all - of the first class recipients were killed."

They sat in silence, both thinking about Lily and James Potter, neither of them noticing the tears that fell down their cheeks.