Wow. I am shocked by the enthusiasm for this story. Hopefully I'll continue to meet people's high expectations. Thank you for letting me know that you like it so much!
A few important scenes in this chapter. Also, Sirius is Irresponsible.
Chapter Three: A Touch of Sirius"Hello, Harry."
Harry blinked. He was dreaming; he knew that, because in front of him the dark figure curled in the space too small for it screamed in pain and the figure in the space only slightly larger whimpered and writhed. But for the first time, he wasn't looking at the images like a painting in his head. He seemed to be standing back from them, in a cool, dry place.
He looked around. There was a stone wall at his back, like one of the corridors at Hogwarts. It stretched away beyond the dark figures, then curved back and vanished behind them. Harry studied the floor underneath him. It was made of stone, too, he thought, but covered with sand.
He thought he should be more frightened than he was. At least, he thought as he touched the familiar weight in his sleeve, I still have my wand.
"Hello, Harry," the voice repeated, and this time Harry became aware of someone leaning on the wall next to him. He turned his head.
The figure was a young man, tall enough to be a sixth-year or seventh-year at Hogwarts, his face sharp and arresting. He had dark hair. Harry found himself looking automatically for scars, but couldn't see any. His fingers were long, though, in a way that reminded Harry of Snape's. He wondered if this man was also a Potions Master.
"Hello, Harry," the man said a third time. There was an impatient tone in his voice now.
Harry saw no reason to answer strange people who appeared in his dreams, who might be only dreams themselves. He watched him instead, and said nothing. He had his wand ready to draw in an instant.
The stranger took a step forward, and Harry drew his wand. That made him pause. He tilted his head to the side, and Harry felt a brief bolt of pain in his forehead. It was similar to the pain he had felt in his scar during the last school year, when Quirrell tried to reach the hiding place of the Philosopher's Stone. Well, that only made sense, Harry thought. This was another prophetic dream, or at least an odd one.
"My name is Tom Riddle," said the man at last. "Do you know me?"
Harry shook his head. He thought his best course for now was to stay silent and alert. He might have tried using pureblood courtesies, which put an acceptable distance between the speaker and strangers, but Riddle was no pureblood family name he had ever heard, and he couldn't be sure the man would understand them.
"I thought you didn't," mused Tom, and glanced at the two dark figures. For a moment, he blinked, as though he didn't understand what he was seeing. Then he sighed and waved a hand.
The images vanished. Harry saw another stone wall where they had been. He brought his wand and his guard up. Perhaps Tom Riddle was just a dream, but he didn't trust other people who could do wandless magic. Harry himself had only learned it because he wanted to defend Connor. Who knew what purposes, obscure or even Dark, someone else might have for learning it?
Tom turned back towards Harry, his smile pleasant. Harry wondered if the presence of the images had been bothering him, and he had banished them because of that. Then he frowned. Even if he did banish them because of that, that doesn't excuse the fact that he's doing wandless magic in my dreams.
No, it doesn't.
Harry jumped for a moment, then felt a twist of motion about his arm and glanced down to see Sylarana moving there. She said nothing else, however, and after a moment faded into his skin again, this time on his right arm near his wand. Harry let out a shaky breath. My dreams are getting rather crowded, he thought crossly.
"You aren't going to speak to me at all?" Tom asked. "That isn't very nice."
Harry heard the hard undertone in his voice, and knew that Tom was probably approaching the end of his patience. He decided it would be worthwhile to speak. If he could be sure that Tom would leave, he would not, but an attack by a powerful, peeved, apparently dream-walking wizard was not something Harry wanted to deal with.
And dreams could be real, could leave lasting effects. He had had enough nightmares this summer and last term to know.
"Hello," he said, and then waited.
Tom smiled, his bad mood seeming to vanish. "Hello," he said easily. "I know that your name's Harry Potter. But I don't know that much else about you yet. Why don't you tell me about yourself?" He leaned on the wall, a comfortable slouch that made Harry confirm his impression of him as not pureblooded. Draco could not have leaned that way. He seemed to fear his mother's voice appearing out of thin air to scold him if he so much as slumped in his chair.
"Why would you want to know?" Harry asked. He stepped away from Tom and mimicked his posture. That won him an even brighter smile. He didn't know how much he had managed to fool the other wizard, but he thought it possible that Tom would underestimate his intelligence. "I'm nobody very special, really. Just Harry."
Tom gave a different kind of smile, a quirk of his mouth that made him seem younger than before. "I think that's wrong," he said softly. "I wouldn't talk to 'nobody very special.'"
"Who are you?" Harry asked.
"I live in the diary," said Tom.
Harry shook his head. "How can you live in that boring old book?" He'd examined the diary, performing every spell he could think of short of actually damaging the book. Written words sank into the page, but that was the only remotely magical thing he'd found. The diary, which Harry hadn't even known was a diary until now, was tattered, and old, and apparently Muggle-made, and entirely blank. Harry couldn't figure out the purpose of it.
"I'm a memory," said Tom. "A dream. The book is a kind of Pensieve for me." He sighed. "I'm afraid that something happened to me the next year, something not very pleasant. I don't remember what it was, of course, since I'm still sixteen years old, stuck here, and I would have been seventeen when—whatever it was happened. But after a while I never saw my older self, and I can't feel him anymore, the way I could when he was alive. I think he's dead."
"Oh," Harry murmured. It would be rather a terrible thing, stuck in one place with no one to talk to and nothing to do—
Except that he's talking to you, isn't he? hissed Sylarana. Tom gave no indication that he could hear her, which Harry thought meant she was speaking in the dream equivalent of his inner mind. I wonder how he can do that. Ask him, and hurry up about it. I want to go play in the grass. I will hunt mice, and you will make up stories to amuse me.
"Why did you talk to me?" Harry asked.
Tom clapped his hands. That gesture doesn't fit, Harry thought. He's too old for it. "Because you're interesting, Harry," he said. "I don't know very much about you, but what I can feel of your thoughts intrigues me. I think we're a lot alike."
"Really." Harry peered at the man skeptically. Tom was guarded, like him, but Harry knew it couldn't be for the same reasons. He was the only brother of the Boy-Who-Lived.
"Yes," said Tom. "I can look around, you know, when you open the diary, even if I can't see very much. I saw the robes with the Slytherin crest on them. You're in Slytherin House, aren't you? So was I."
Harry lifted his magic quietly into place and held it there. No, not all Slytherins were evil; some, like Draco, were charming in an annoying way, and others, like Blaise Zabini, were merely annoying. And some were enormous gits, like Snape. But given everything else that Tom could do, it was a black mark against him.
"Don't you like being in Slytherin?" Tom asked, apparently misinterpreting the quality of his silence. Apparently, Harry stressed to himself, his senses alive and alert now. He still didn't trust Tom to be as oblivious as he appeared. "I loved it there. I'd had a lonely childhood. My parents died before I was born—"
"Your mother can't have died before you were born," Harry couldn't help but point out.
Tom's eyes narrowed for a moment, and then he shrugged and gave a careless little laugh that didn't fit him, either. "Well, that's true enough! She didn't. She died as I was born, and my father before that, and I was given to an orphanage." He paused, and an anger that seemed genuine filled his face. "I hated the other children there. They were Muggles. They hated me and made fun of me for doing magic."
Harry couldn't help but nod at that. The only time their whole family had ever left Godric's Hollow before they went to Diagon Alley to buy school supplies last summer was on a visit to the Dursleys, their mother's Muggle relatives, when Harry and Connor were six. Harry still remembered the terrified, half-crazed silence of their aunt, and the rude blusterings of their uncle, and how their cousin Dudley had screamed when Harry made a sweet float into the air. Harry had been very glad that he wasn't going to meet any more Muggles, not if they were all like that.
"See?" Tom said, and his face and voice softened. "You know it, too. I think that's another thing I already know about you. You're lonely, and you're powerful, and every so often you look around and see that everyone else is just so ignorant and full of themselves, and you want to do something about it."
Harry hesitated. It was true that he felt that way sometimes, but—
You feel that way hardly any of the time, Sylarana informed him crisply. Now, wake up. I desire mice and stories.
Harry stepped away, sliding along the stone wall. "I'm going to wake up now," he said. "It was—pleasant meeting you, I suppose. At least different."
"Oh, don't!" said Tom, all petulance. He took a step forward. "It took me a long time to get your attention."
"I know," said Harry. "I can come back and talk to you—"
Not tonight. Sylarana slid back up his arm under his sleeve. Mice and stories!
"—but not tonight," Harry finished.
Tom sighed and stopped walking. "All right. But leave the diary open so I can see sometimes, will you? I don't know you very well, and your brother hardly at all." He shrugged and gave a helpless little wave. "Bye, Harry."
Harry opened his eyes, and found himself lying in his bed. Connor snored in the other one. Sylarana was awake, slithering onto his chest so that she could stare him in the eyes and speak aloud.
"Mice and stories! Now!"
"I know," Harry said, not caring at the moment if he spoke in English or Parseltongue, and glanced to the side. Sure enough, the diary lay on the table next to his bed, open to one of the blank pages.
He reached over, only daring to touch the cover with the tips of his fingers, and shut it.
There were some things that no powerful, wandless-magic-wielding, dream-walking wizard needed to see.
Once he'd done that, Harry felt a few inches better, and went outside to give his Locusta what she wanted.
"Harry! How's my favorite godson?"
"Hi, Sir—" was all Harry got out before his godfather half-crushed him, swinging him up and around in a circle, then putting him down on the grass and proceeding to mess up his hair thoroughly.
I don't like him, I don't like him, I don't like him, Sylarana sang in a tone that put Harry's teeth on edge. He has twenty minutes to spend with you. That is all. Harry felt her come to life and slither up his arm to his shoulder, where she coiled. He swallowed and hoped with all his might that Sirius wasn't watching the way his robes hung around his shoulders.
"I'm fine, Sirius," he said, when he noticed that said godfather was still watching him expectantly. "I didn't know you were coming today."
Sirius grinned and winked, tilting his head towards the house. "Neither did your parents," he whispered. "Or Connor. This is a surprise."
"It is?" Harry blinked. Usually, Sirius brought Remus along on his "surprises." "Is Remus going to be here, too?"
Sirius snorted. "No. He'd fuss too much. He thinks I'm not healthy or something." He pounded a fist into his own back, then bent over and coughed gratingly. "Must be getting old," he wheezed. "I'm already thirty-two, I am! Bury me in a grave in a Muggle cemetery. Try not to cry too much. After all, I've already lived almost as long as Albus Dumbledore!" He laughed, the barking laugh that Harry had heard most of his life and associated with sudden presents and equally sudden pranks.
Harry smiled at him and shook his head. He supposed that Sirius was who Connor might grow up to be, although Connor didn't have quite Sirius's fondness for jokes. Harry also thought that Connor would need more gravity, as the leader of the wizarding world he had to become, but getting him there alive and still able to laugh were Harry's primary responsibilities.
"Wish I could make you laugh, sometimes, Harry," Sirius muttered as he straightened up. "I haven't heard you so much as chuckle since you were a baby." He brooded for a moment, then shook it off and smiled brightly, pulling a tiny object from his robes. "Ready to give them a good scare?"
Harry drew in his breath to answer, but caught his first clear glimpse of his godfather's face and wound up exhaling without answering. He could see why Remus thought Sirius was sick. His face was pale, his face bearing lines that made Harry think of Percy Weasley in Diagon Alley, and for the first time that Harry could remember, his smile didn't reach his gray eyes.
"Sirius?" Harry whispered. "What's wrong?"
"Wrong?" Sirius winked at him. "Nothing, of course! Why would something be wrong?"
Harry swallowed. "You don't look like you've been sleeping well," he ventured.
Sirius lost his smile all at once, and sighed. "Yeah," he said. "It was Daphne Marchbanks. I—I thought we might have had something special, Harry. And you know how I get when I realize it's not working."
Harry nodded. He'd been awake several times over the years when James and Remus brought Sirius back to the house at Godric's Hollow after another bout of it "not working" with some other young witch, and kept him behind the isolation wards by main force. Harry had once heard their father say that his friends were the only reason Sirius didn't drink himself to death when he was depressed. But it didn't happen often. A few more days, Harry knew, and Sirius would be flirting with someone else and talking gleefully about marrying a Muggleborn to vex the ghost of his mother, who had died of apoplexy, apparently, about her only son not following her rigid pureblood ways.
"But you're all right to play a surprise?" Harry asked.
Sirius won his grin back in an instant, and this time it did reach his eyes. "I'm sure," he said, and then put the object on the ground. He drew his wand, tapped the tiny thing, and stood back as it grew.
Harry felt his eyes widen as he realized what it was. He'd known that Sirius had a motorbike he'd enchanted to fly, but he'd never seen it. Sirius supposedly couldn't use it that often, for fear of the Misuse of Muggle Artifacts Office finding out about it, and for fear of leading Death Eaters to Godric's Hollow.
Sirius put a finger to his lips and nodded at the house. Then he stepped back from Harry and started yelling.
"Oi, Harry, what do you think you're do—Harry! They're Death Eaters! Coming through the wards! Run!"
Harry stared at him as shouts erupted from inside the house, but Sirius was paying no attention. He waved his wand and said, "Praestigiae Draconigena!"
A green smoke boiled from his wand, forming itself into the illusion of a dragon that Harry recognized as a Common Welsh Green. It turned towards the house on Sirius's low-voiced command and roared.
"They've got a dragon!" Sirius shouted, cupping his hands around his mouth. "Run, Harry, run!"
The door to the house flew open with a bang, and James charged out, his wand already spitting sparks. "Sirius, if this is a prank, I am going to—"
Sirius, laughing, grabbed Harry around the waist, sprang onto the motorbike, and kicked it into life. The dragon illusion foamed up around them and accompanied them. It would block anyone below from seeing the bike, Harry knew.
He could feel his heart pounding in his ears, his breath coming faster, and Sylarana slithering around on his shoulder, apparently trying to decide on a way to bite Sirius that wouldn't make the bike crash. He was not sure what he felt. Blank surprise was starting to give way to something else.
"Sirius! Damn you!"
Sirius laughed. Harry whipped his head around to see their father riding close beside him on his own broom, his wand still clutched in one hand. He was close enough now to see through the illusion, though, and know that it was Sirius, and not Death Eaters, who'd kidnapped Harry. James immediately began a long and impressive list of obscenities, including Muggle ones that Harry hadn't thought his father knew.
"Don't, James," said Sirius, slewing the motorbike around in a maneuver Harry wouldn't have tried on a broom, and turning them half upside-down. He ended up facing Harry's father, holding Harry securely in his lap. "Little children have big ears."
James snapped "Finite Incantatem!" and the dragon illusion broke apart and melted away. He steered the broom forward, fuming. Harry held grimly onto the bike's handlebars. He was sure that he would fall off before his father could rescue him, with the way Sirius was howling with laughter, his head bent and his arms clasped around his belly.
Just as James touched Harry's arm, a bang and a loud scream came from the house beneath.
James whipped his head around. Harry joined him, feeling his heart speed into a frenzy and his magic snap into place around him.
Connor. That was Connor.
James flew straight back down to the ground, shouting out obscenities again. Sirius followed him, fast enough that Harry felt the wind sting his ears. He clasped his godfather's hands, silently willing him to go faster. Anything could be happening to his brother, and he was stuck in the air on a bike, playing a stupid joke!
James landed first, but Harry flung himself off while Sirius was still five feet from the ground. He rolled, taking the fall the way he'd learned to in Quidditch, and then raced for the front door. His wand was already in his hand. Sylarana clung to his shoulder and hissed out a melody of complaint.
Harry entered the kitchen just in time to see a frightened-looking house elf vanish with a crack. A hovering mass of Connor's school books and robes dropped to the ground with a complementary crash.
"What happened?" Harry asked, turning to Connor, who stood backed against the wall, and Lily, who stood in the doorway.
His brother shook, tried to answer, and then started crying. Harry immediately went forward and took him in his arms. Connor clung to him, and Harry let his tears soak the front of his jumper while he looked to his mother for an answer.
Lily spoke slowly and calmly. "That house elf appeared and started talking about how Connor couldn't go back to Hogwarts this year, that it's too dangerous for him. Then he tried to hurt his school things. He kept me from entering. I was afraid he would hurt Connor, if necessary, to stop him from going back." She closed her eyes. Her face was white. Harry could guess why. He'd be surprised if his wasn't the same way.
James and Sirius came tearing in then. Lily explained the story for them, this time adding that the house elf had called himself Dobby and said that he belonged to a powerful pureblooded family who intended to try and hurt Connor.
Amid Sirius's angry growls of vengeance, and James's many scattered hugs for both his wife and his sons, Harry held his brother, and crystallized his rage, carefully packing down and tamping all his emotions into one shining block of anger.
I won't let anyone hurt you, he promised Connor, who'd finished crying but showed no impulse to move away from him just yet. Not Voldemort, and not Tom Riddle, whoever he is, and not Dobby or Dobby's family. Not Draco, if it comes to that. Not anyone, ever. I'm so sorry I was away today. I won't be ever again. I'll be right here.
He looked up when he felt a hand on his shoulder, and saw his mother staring down at him with those eyes that were mirrors of his own.
"Watch over him," she whispered. "I trust you even more than Sirius."
Harry nodded, accepting both the explicit message in her words and the implicit one: he was forgiven for not being there today when Connor needed him to be.
"Come on, Sirius! We're going to be late!"
Harry studied his brother closely as Connor ran on ahead through King's Cross Station, now and then turning to shout impatiently at his godfather, who seemed determined to take his time strolling through the Station and talking with their parents. It had been two weeks since the incident with Dobby, and he sometimes doubted whether Connor was really all right. He'd had his first nightmare just a few days ago, and crept into Harry's bed for the rest of the night, much to Sylarana's displeasure. Harry had had to stay awake the rest of the night and entertain the Locusta to make sure she didn't bite Connor.
But Connor seemed aglow now, running in place and dancing with impatience when he couldn't run. Maybe it was just going back to Hogwarts, but he'd been healed of some of his pain.
Harry was glad of that. It gave him time to think about the vows he'd worked out during the last days of summer, a whole new set of them to go with the ones he'd had since he was a child, sworn to protect Connor and stay in his shadow.
He was not going to act Slytherin. If Draco softened the image of the House for him, Tom Riddle, with his endless inane conversations during which he tried to learn more about Harry for no reason he would state, had solidified it as one Harry would rather not belong to. And then there was the memory of Snape, and what he'd tried to encourage Harry to do: abandon Connor.
Harry permitted himself a small smile. Snape had given him extra homework over the summer to encourage his Potions talent. Harry had learned other things from the homework, though, things that he thought Snape wouldn't have wanted him to learn. He looked forward to employing them in the Potions class.
He was going to be as Gryffindor as he could. That meant not lying as much, and walking a fine edge between encouraging Connor to do more heroic things and apparently not encouraging Connor at all, acting like an ordinary student. Harry was confident he could do it. The strange attack by Dobby had given him a new resolve. Never again was he not going to be there when Connor got attacked, and his methods last year, all of which had relied on Slytherin cunning and deception, hadn't worked, so he had to try new ones anyway.
So he would get to know his brother's friends, too, Ron and Hermione and Neville Longbottom and the other Gryffindor second-year boys, and the half-giant Hagrid, and the Weasley twins. He would make them see him as more mundane and less irritating and Dark than they might think him. Then he could spend more time with Connor without anyone questioning him about it.
And he would put away as much of his potential Dark talent as he could. He would ignore Tom Riddle. He would speak with Sylarana only as much as he had to to prevent the whole school from suffering a plague of Locusta venom. He would work on defensive magic rather than offensive. He'd asked their mother for books on medical magic, and planned to start studying it as soon as he could. That would be of the Light, surely, a talent for healing and not for killing.
Harry knew he wouldn't slip from the Light, that his commitment there was firm. But it was important that other people see him that way, or he would spend all his time suspected of being Dark—and getting noticed.
That is very Slytherin of you, said Sylarana, in that bored tone she adopted when everyone in the world except Harry knew something.
Harry ignored her. He could, without trouble, when she sounded like that. She sounded bored more and more often. Harry hoped he would wake up one day and find himself without her, since she would have wandered off to more interesting pastures.
Sylarana flexed; she was curled about the place where his right arm joined his shoulder like a huge bracelet, and Harry could already feel her whenever he shifted the path of his trolley a little. This was harder, indicating her irritation. I am never going to get bored of you. You speak with serpents. That is rare. You are my human, and I am going to defend you from other snakes who might try to take you away.
Harry sighed. I know, he told her in his thoughts.
"I can't get through!"
Harry looked up, blinking. Connor was standing by the barrier that led to Platform 9¾, his hands clenched at his sides. He looked back at Harry and waited a moment until a crowd of Muggles had passed by. He was chewing his lip, his eyebrows pulled into a frown.
"Watch," he whispered.
He stretched out an arm and ran at the barrier. His arm reflected off it as if it were solid.
Harry stared. The platform barrier was made to be passable to any wizard. He'd never heard of it doing this before.
He stepped up next to it and pushed with one hand. He couldn't feel anything but solid brick. He turned back to his parents and Sirius, who had noticed something was wrong and sped up a little.
Sirius reached them first, dashed a hand into the barrier, and stared for just a moment before smiling. "Well, I am going to be teaching at Hogwarts," he said, "and it's my responsibility to insure that all the students get there on time."
"Yes, it is," said Lily, her eyes icy. "That means that you have to ride the Express. And as it's going to leave in five minutes—"
"Don't be so picky, Lily," said Sirius, holding up a placating hand. "I meant that I have a way that Connor and Harry can get there on time." He pulled out what Harry just knew was the motorbike. Instinctively, he looked at their father.
James wore the quiet, grave expression that made Harry pay more attention than any of his rages. "No tricks, Sirius," he said. "I want my boys to reach school safely."
Sirius lost his smile briefly, and nodded back. "No tricks," he said. "I wouldn't take any more risks with Harry and Connor than I would with my own sons, if I had any."
"Are you sure that you're all right to drive it, Sirius?" Lily asked. "Your face—"
"Another bad night," said Sirius lightly, though Harry could see his face tighten when he said it. "I promise I'm all right to drive it, Lily. I brought James and Remus back from our drinking bout our last night at Hogwarts safe and sound, didn't I?" He grinned at James. "Drank you under the table that time."
"You spiked my Firewhiskey," said James, but he was smiling, too. He nodded at Lily. "Let them, love. This might be the only chance that they ever get to ride it while Sirius is being responsible enough to trust with them." He gave Sirius a stabbing glance that said he hadn't forgotten or forgiven the fake kidnapping he'd played with Harry. Sirius wore a half-second look of remorse before breaking back into his smile.
"Someone might see them," said Lily, but Harry thought she was wavering, not least because Connor had joined the match with a silent pleading look.
"The motorbike has a Disillusionment Charm," Sirius told her. "And we can follow the train once we're past the barrier," he added, playing what was obviously a trump card.
"Fine," said Lily, with an explosive sigh.
Connor almost squealed and hugged her around the waist. "Thanks, Mum!"
After that, it was a matter of finding a quiet corner where the Muggles couldn't see them, shrinking Harry's and Connor's school things, and setting Hedwig and Godric free to fly to Hogwarts. Harry asked Sylarana if she wanted to crawl, and got nothing but an irritated squeeze in return. Connor was bouncing up and down.
Sirius grinned at them, restored the motorbike to its original size, and then climbed aboard. Harry and Connor sat behind him, Harry relaxing as he noticed the charms to keep passengers in place.
"Bye, Mum!" said Connor, waving frantically. "Bye, Dad!"
"Goodbye, boys," said James, smiling at them. "Stay safe. Don't forget to write."
"Stay safe," Lily echoed, and met Harry's eyes in a private message. He inclined his head in a nod to her, and then nodded to their father, too.
"Enough farewells, they always depress me. Let's get flying!" said Sirius, and kicked the bike.
It roared into life, and they sprang forward, then left the ground as the Disillusionment and Silencing Charms took effect. Connor was whooping with excitement. Harry looped his arms around his brother's waist and held him safe and secure.
It really will be nice, having Sirius at Hogwarts, he thought. Connor and I will have a better year with someone who can make him laugh. He's going to need it when Voldemort attacks again, as I'm sure he will.
Then Sirius said, "Look back, Connor. Are your parents out of sight?"
"Yes," said Connor, an undertone of mischief creeping into his voice.
"Good," said Sirius, and sent the motorbike into a faster plunge. Connor shouted himself hoarse. Harry leaned his head forward and clung on.
Gryffindors, the both of them, he thought fondly.
Yes, Sylarana agreed, her tone not nearly so complimentary.