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The ride back to London was a long frustrating journey sitting with Ron, Hermione, Neville and Ginny and pretending that everything was fine and he wouldn't rather be anywhere else that with Ron's overbearing jealousy and Ron's little sister's uncomfortable hero worship and close observation, which had only got worse since rescuing her in the Chamber. Hermione was a welcome if irritating distraction from the redheaded pair, demanding to borrow everyone's notes for all the classes she'd missed and then criticising the quality of the notes and quizzing about all the details they hadn't written down. Harry did his best to keep distracted asking Neville about his summer plans and his greenhouses and gardens at home. He, Dean and Seamus had managed to meet the night before and go over their plans of where to meet up once they were out of sight of Kings Cross station so he didn't need to get away from the others for any reason other than frustration. He was trying to read but he didn't have anything on him that he hadn't already read, and the book on Charms (chosen mostly not to excite Hermione's curiosity) wasn't holding his attention.
"What're you studying for, the year's over," Ron complained.
"Why are you reading that? It's not like you missed the classes so it's a bit late for you to be trying to catch up on this year's work," Hermione said.
"Just reading through to make sure I didn't miss anything, the classes don't always cover stuff the same way as the books," Harry said, smiling slightly when he saw Hermione flinch. She's used this argument many times to try to get their year mates to do the prereading for classes but now not having attended the class she was faced learning from nothing but the textbook and her friends inadequate class notes, which was upsetting her, particularly in Charms and Transfiguration where the professors were very intuitive about what extra instruction students required.
Harry exited the train keeping a healthy distance between himself and Dean and Seamus so people wouldn't realise they were leaving together and headed to the muggle entrance intending to catch the train to Dean's.
"Wait a moment Harry dear," Molly Weasley called. "We will take you to meet your aunt and uncle. I want to have a word with them."
Harry groaned and Dean moved closer as if he was going to intercept them. "Looks like it's plan B," he grumbled quietly shaking his head slightly to Dean.
Dean gave a slight nod bid goodbye to Harry and the Weasleys as he moved away. Seamus called to him, Neville and Ron that he'd see them next year and followed Dean without a backwards glance.
Harry checked his pockets that his shrunken trunk, wand and knife were all in easy reach and waited with Mrs Weasley until the rest of the family arrived.
"Is Harry coming home with us?" Ginny asked enthusiastically. Harry was surprised to see her suddenly looking so cheerful.
"No Dear, he's going home with his aunt and uncle. I just want a word with them before they go," Molly said calmly.
'Just want to make sure I'm handed over into their custody on Dumbledore's orders, more like. Good thing I have an escape plan or their interference would get me badly beaten again. I wonder if that is their intention? To rile up the Dursleys and make things worse while I'm stuck with them so it feels like they're rescuing me at the end of the summer or if they're just so thick that they think threatening Vernon would frighten him off enough not to touch me instead of encouraging him to beat me more,' Harry thought cynically as he followed seemingly obediently behind the overbearing woman.
Sure enough, Molly's overbearing attitude ordering the Dursleys to take better care of Harry and her casually mentioning several magical items, infuriated Vernon Dursley who then shot death glares at Harry.
"Don't blame me. This ambush wasn't my idea. I never said anything about the way you lot treat me," Harry said defensively.
"It would serve you right if we left you here, boy," Vernon snarled trying to both yell at Harry and avoid making a scene at the same time.
Harry didn't respond. If it wouldn't have resulted in the Weasleys taking him home and keeping him prisoner at the Burrow for the summer Harry would have been perfectly happy to be left at the station.
"Well get your things, boy. We haven't got all day," Vernon snapped.
"I have what I need for the summer," Harry said shouldering his backpack.
"You've finally learned not to bring that magic rubbish into my house," Vernon said with satisfaction, not considering the possibility of shrinking charms or wondering what Harry had done with his trunk and owl cage. Petunia frowned at the backpack suspiciously but didn't say anything.
Harry climbed into the back seat and Vernon took off, yelling about the impertinence of that red headed woman thinking she could tell Vernon how to treat the freak. Once they were well out of sight of Kings Cross and any watching wizards Harry cast sleeping spells on Petunia and Dudley and pulled out his knife.
"I'll make you a deal. You drive me to Victoria station and drop me off and I will do my very best to make sure you never have to see me again," Harry said firmly, hoping that incentive would be enough that he wouldn't actually have to threaten them.
"Give me one good reason why I should," Vernon demanded.
"Look in the rear-view mirror," Harry said calmly, holding the knife to the sleeping Dudley's throat.
"Gently now, you wouldn't want to hit a pot hole and jerk my arm unexpectedly."
Vernon looked and shakily pulled the car over.
"Don't turn around! Just because I didn't want to hurt him unintentionally doesn't mean I won't do it. Keep your hands on the steering wheel, if you make one move towards me, I will hurt him," Harry threatened, infusing his voice with magic so Vernon would take him seriously and believe every word he said.
Vernon turned even paler and for a moment Harry had concerns whether he was well enough to drive anywhere safely.
"Calm down, Dudley's safe for the moment but it's up to you how long that will be true. Either you drive me to Victoria station and drop me off without doing anything foolish or I will slit Dudley's throat. You cannot reach me from there before I kill him and neither he nor your wife will wake up in time to help you. When we get to Victoria station I will get out of the car. Dudley and Petunia will sleep safely for another hour or two and wake up unharmed when I release the spell once I'm well away from here, they won't have any memory of anything other than taking a pleasant little nap," Harry said determinedly, counting on Vernon not knowing that the spell would wear off on its own or that killing him would also release it, he needed Vernon to believe he needed to be left alive and conscious to reverse it and wake up his family.
"What if they come looking for you?" Vernon asked, truly shaken by the boy's emotionless tone as much as the words. He had no doubts that if he tried anything that the wretched boy would follow through on his threats and kill his son.
"There are tracking charms on my backpack and the stuff inside it. I'll leave it here with you to take home. There's nothing in it I want to keep, so feel free to throw it out or destroy it if you like but it's in your best interests not to destroy the charms on it. They'll be less likely to come looking for me if they think that they know I'm locked up at Privet Drive. Take it home with you and shove it in the cupboard and forget about it. If they do come looking for me, it won't be my problem. You won't know enough to tell them how to find me. Do what you like with those that come looking for me. Move house so they can't find you, borrow Marge's 'Ripper' and set him on them or buy a shotgun and shoot them in the balls for all I care," Harry said wearily.
"You don't care?" Vernon asked.
"Those people know exactly how you treat me and in spite of the pretence they put up at the station just now, they don't actually care. That performance was all about making sure I left with you and you didn't leave me somewhere, not about trying to improve my life in your home. So why should I care about them? They will probably retaliate against you for attacking them but I don't care about that either. I wouldn't care if they tortured you or they turned you into farm animals and sent you to the slaughterhouse to be killed and turned into pizza toppings, you never taught me to care for anyone. I am the wizard you raised me to be, you shouldn't be so surprised," Harry replied, still without any emotion.
Vernon just stared at him aghast. After a few minutes of doing nothing, trying to calm himself down enough to drive, he pulled carefully back onto the road and Harry was pleased to see him making the turns to take them past Victoria Station. Not pleased enough to relax and put the knife away though since the threat to Dudley was the only thing keeping Vernon from killing him at the moment.
"Since I'm in a good mood and you did what I wanted I will warn you that without me there the wards Dumbledore claims to have set on the house to protect us all will fall if they haven't already since I spent so little time there last summer. Not all the people who come looking for me will just be wanting to pretend to rescue me after a summer of your less than loving care or to return me to school. Some of them want to kill or torture me and they won't hesitate to kill you and your family if they believe that would cause me pain. It wouldn't by the way since you've never been family to me, but you might have difficulty proving that to them, and they enjoy torturing muggles like you so they might kill you anyway," Harry warned him once Victoria station came into sight.
Vernon pulled into a no standing zone at Victoria Station and Harry got out with a cheerful wave, quickly walking across the pavement before Vernon could decide to run him over. Once Vernon had left, he jumped on a train and travelled a few stations before getting out and finding an optometrist offering walk-in appointments and 60 minute glasses and had his eyes tested ordering glasses and contact lenses then went to a clothing store and in the change room he cast the strongest finite he could at himself, the contents of his backpack and his trunk, accidentally restoring it to its full size, then quickly bought a couple of pairs of shorts and trackpants, several T-shirts and a hoodie, discarding all of the clothing he was wearing along with his old glasses and the broken pieces of his fake wand. He wasn't sure if any of this was necessary, especially since he didn't see anyone he recognised or anybody wearing robes or the type of clothing available on Diagon Alley, but he wasn't prepared to risk leading anybody to the Thomas's.
The train to Dean's didn't leave from Victoria station, in fact there even the link to the right station wasn't particularly convenient, that was a misdirection to try to protect Dean and his family in case anyone tried to get information from Vernon, so Harry caught the train that would connect him with a train that did, taking the time to walk through the park and collect a suitable stick to transfigure into another fake wand and arriving at the station near Dean's about an hour after Dean and Seamus did since the two boys had gone to Diagon Alley and done some shopping of their own. They'd waited for him and the three of them made their way to Dean's flat to spend the first two weeks of the summer.
"You have any trouble?" Dean asked.
"Mrs Weasley riled up Vernon until I thought he was going to have a stroke right there in the station, or flatly refuse to take me home at all. Which might actually have been her goal so she could drag me home with them for the summer. Luckily, I managed to convince Vernon that I hadn't put her up to it. The sleeping charm and the threats worked beautifully. He couldn't wait to get rid of me. I think I just about had him convinced to move house too but he'll probably have changed his mind by now and stubbornly refuse to let wizards drive a respectable man away from his perfectly respectable home," Harry replied.
"Do you think he will have calmed down enough for you to spend the last few weeks of the summer there?" Dean asked.
"I all but threatened that someone would come and turn them all into pizza toppings and let him be eaten by hundreds of unsuspecting respectable muggles so I seriously doubt it. I'm not going back there, I'll find another place to stay," Harry replied snarkily.
Seamus burst out laughing but Dean took it more seriously.
"You're not going back to Hogwarts either, are you?" Dean asked quietly.
"The less you know of my plans the better," Harry replied shaking his head.
"Is there anything we can do to help?" Seamus asked.
"I don't think so, I wouldn't mind letting Neville and maybe Hermione know that I haven't been kidnapped but it honestly isn't worth the risk of one of them telling someone that you knew I wasn't coming back. And I honestly don't know if you could trust Hermione not to tell anyone, that might take a vow which I'm sure she wouldn't make and even asking for one would give away that you know more than you should. Whoever she tells will probably think I've told you where I was going. You'll be safer if nobody knows you were in contact with me over the summer," Harry said.
"We will miss you mate, and not just to pull all our arses out of the fire when things go to shit," Dean said.
"You never know, without me there to be a target for all the crazy plots you might have a normal year, without any dangerous situations," Harry suggested.
"I don't think that whoever set the basilisk loose was targeting you and the basilisk itself couldn't target anyone in particular. That would have happened whether you were at Hogwarts or not," Seamus argued. "If you hadn't been there, then Ron's sister could have died. Do you really think that Ron could've rescued her without you or Hermione to help him?"
"If the basilisk couldn't target anyone in particular then for all the victims to be muggleborn, someone had to be controlling it," Dean said shakily.
"Someone was, but she wasn't actually fully in control, something was also controlling her," Harry replied cryptically.
"Could Ron, or Ron and Hermione have saved his sister without you?" Seamus asked not prepared to let his question be ignored even if he wanted to know more about what Harry said to Dean as well. He wanted to make his point that they wouldn't all have been safer at Hogwarts without Harry.
"I don't think so, they couldn't even have got into the Chamber without a Parselmouth and I doubt that anyone else was ignorant enough to out themselves as one," Harry said, wondering whether he should tell his friends the whole story about what happened. He decided that if they were going back to Hogwarts then they deserved to know how dangerous this year had actually been. "I think that Lucius Malfoy deliberately targeted the Weasleys, his choice of victim may have had more to do with the feud between the Weasleys and the Malfoys but the fact I was with them probably didn't help. The rest of the school merely was in the way, though I don't think he knew exactly what the diary he slipped into Ginny's school books would do. I find it hard to believe he'd put his son at risk like that, it the Basilisk had got out of control and entered the Great Hall, everyone would have turned to look at it and risked being caught in it's gaze, it could have killed half the school before anyone managed to kill it."
"A diary? What are you talking about?" Dean asked.
"Ginny had an old diary that wrote back to her and eventually drained enough power from her to possess her. She found it in her second-hand school books after Lucius Malfoy touched them and sneered at them before getting into a fight with Mr Weasley in Flourish and Blotts the day we did our school shopping last summer. But the diary contained something unspeakably evil and it was Ginny acting under the influence of the diary that set the basilisk loose. The diary was Voldemort's and it was draining her life energy to try to come back," Harry said. He briefly described the ritual scene in the chamber, his conversation with Tom Riddle and what had happened when he destroyed the diary after killing the basilisk.
Seamus and Dean listened eagerly and made him describe the battle with the basilisk as well.
Unsurprisingly it was Dean that recognised the problem. "Could the basilisk sense a difference in old family magic and new magical lines or smell the difference between muggleborns and halbloods or purebloods?" he asked.
"I don't think so and Tom Riddle probably wouldn't have known either, except for the children that look a lot like their magical parents or who have old family names he recognised and he couldn't depend on that. I hope that Ginny didn't know what would happen to them when she started pointing out who was muggleborn and that she'd pointed all the victims out to him before the first attack. She said she didn't remember anything she did but she must have had some control to be ble to communicate her knowledge with him," Harry said sombrely.
"But you don't think she was telling the truth?" Seamus pointed out.
"The three of the four students who were attacked were not only muggleborn, they were also the students who were annoying me the most early in the year, and it could be argued that the fourth, Penelope Clearwater, just happened to be with one of the other three and was collateral damage. Or she could have been targeted as one of the few muggleborn prefects after they all turned a blind eye to what was happening to me. It's a bit much of a coincidence," Harry pointed out.
"Ginny wouldn't have known Hermione annoyed you, would she? Do you think that she noticed?" Dean asked.
Harry shrugged. "I don't think she's that observant but if she didn't notice then it could be even worse. Assuming that I was interested in dating and found Ginny attractive at all, which girl in the school would you say was the biggest obstacle to me asking Ginny out?"
"You think she chose Hermione because she was jealous," Dean asked.
"That or because Hermione had had the diary for a while when Ginny tried to get rid of it, and had worked out how to speak to Tom. Ginny stole it back from her, I don't know if Tom would've targeted her because she would be a threat to him if she saw Ginny with the diary and told a responsible adult about it, or Ginny was worried that Tom might have told Hermione something she wanted to keep secret," Harry replied.
"That implies that Ginny was acting in her own best interests," Seamus said frowning.
"Maybe she might have been. If she chose Hermione out of jealousy it was definitely Ginny not Tom making that decision but the diary could've been making decisions to prevent being found and removed from her," Harry said. "Without questioning Ginny with a truth spell or potion there's no way to know for sure but I'd be an idiot to trust her."
"But she stole the Diary back, could it still have been controlling her while she didn't have it?" Dean asked.
"I don't know, we could try to ask one of the professors at school this summer they're more likely to give us a straight answer but they might not be able to tell us anything without seeing the diary to know what it was," Harry replied.
"I'm not trying to get rid of you but are you sure you want to spend the summer with us before disappearing? Would you have a better chance of getting away if you left now?" Dean asked.
"It's a calculated risk, I was safe at both your houses and at Scoil Draiocht last summer and I'll blend in better in the muggle world if I'm not a year behind in my nonmagical education, and I hope that this year I will grow enough over the time compression not to be recognised from a distance or draw attention to myself because people think that I'm too young to be travelling on my own," Harry replied. "I'm fairly sure we've managed to hide the fact that we're friends well enough that nobody would look for me with either of you, and if there's tracking magic on me or my things, I would rather not lead anyone to my final destination. At least if they find me with you, they'll only think that I'm trying to avoid spending time at the Dursleys."
"Will we be able to contact you at all?" Seamus asked.
"It's better if you can't," Harry replied. Though he really meant that it was better if they thought that they had no way of finding him. He knew that Dean would eventually remember that his mother had been sending on mail to a muggle overseas and that Harry would probably have kept in contact with his friend in America since he'd gone to such efforts to keep in contact with him over the past two years, but he wanted to keep Spencer safe and the easiest way to do that was for the Thomas' to forget or overlook that method of contacting him which meant giving them another way. "I'll keep my email address so you can contact me that way without knowing where I am."
"But that's only when we're not at Hogwarts," Dean said.
"Yeah, but that's a good thing. It's safer for you that way," Harry replied. "If you need to get word to me urgently, you could always write to your mum and ask her to send me an email."
Amala Thomas and her husband welcomed the boys warmly. It was obvious to Harry that they would've liked some time alone with their son before Harry and Seamus arrived and he was sure the Finnegans would have liked to see Seamus at the start of the summer as well, but practicalities it wasn't sensible for Seamus to go to Ireland and come back again and Harry literally had no other safe place Amala would approve of him going. So, he subtly forced Seamus to request some time on the computer to email his family and claiming to want an early night and encouraged Dean to stay up and talk with his family once the dishes were done.
Amala saw through his manipulations and smiled gratefully at him, her eyes a little sad as she realised why he saw what the other boys had overlooked. Perhaps Seamus had noticed his feelings as well because he insisted that Harry use the computer to email his friend first even though Harry thought it would be the wrong time for Spencer to get the message.
A/N: Thank you to all those who reviewed followed or favourited this story for your support.
Please stay safe everyone.