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"Harry, ey? Just Harry?"

"Potter, I'm Harry Potter."

"Potter. Harry Potter," the old man repeated his name slowly as if tasting it on his tongue. Suddenly he started to laugh loudly, his belly quivering. It was a rough sound, not really friendly.

His laughter stopped as abruptly as it had started and grey eyes narrowed in on Harry. "What's your middle name boy?"

"J-James," Harry said perplexed, wishing he hadn't knocked, wishing he had just kept walking. The man clearly wasn't all there.

"Harry James? Yes, yes… James… I think I remember. It's been a long time, a long, long time." He reached out a hand, quick as a snake, to touch Harry's head.

Harry was too scared to object and too tired to move and simply allowed the old man to pat his head, or feel his hair or whatever it was the old man was up to.

"Yes," he'd said and laughed roughly. "Real Potter hair, and in my woods. Say, what is a little Potter wizard like you doing in my woods?"

"I'm sorry sir," Harry said, as this was what his aunt and uncle always wanted to hear when they were angry with him. "I'm sorry. I didn't know this was your wood, I didn't know it belonged to anybody. I was just running down a street and then I was here and-"

"Running away, were you?" The man interrupted. "Ooh, what are your parents going to say? What will they say? A little wizard running away to my woods…"

"Um, my parents are dead," Harry said quietly.

"Interesting... And you didn't like where they put you, so you ran away?"

Harry nodded.

"Well come in then, boy. It's getting dark already. You can stay for the night. I'm Al."

One night became two, then three, then a whole week and soon they had an unspoken agreement that Harry was allowed to stay as long as he helped Al around the house and garden. Oh, and Harry promised to buy the old man an elf when he was too old to care for himself. Harry agreed to that too, even though he knew that elves didn't exist. But he liked living with Al better than living with the Dursleys and he wasn't going to ruin his new life over something like that, so he kept his mouth shut.

There were quite a lot of things Harry remained silent about. It seemed the old man was as obsessed with magic as the Dursleys were with normality. He often talked about a magical world, about potions, wands, witches, wizards, and muggles. The latter were what he called normal, non-magical people. Al didn't like them at all.

On his third day, when Harry was tending to the vegetable patch, Harry had asked him why he didn't simply buy his food in a store. There had to be a town or at least a small village somewhere nearby. This simple question led to a 20-minute rant from the old man.

"I might have a condition, but I'm not lowering myself to that," he spat, his grey eyes narrowed angrily at the startled child. "I got my standards. Of course, a wizard like you won't understand, think I'm just the same. Think I'm no good. Oh, but I got my standards, my pride. I'm no muggle."

Harry never raised the issue again. If there was one thing he had learned while living with his aunt and uncle, it was that it wasn't advisable to argue with the people that had power over him.

At the Dursleys, this meant never questioning their irrational hatred of all things abnormal, at Al's it meant accepting that he believed magic was real.

Al's hut wasn't big. It had a small kitchen with a wood-burning stove, a table with two chairs and a shelf for the dishes, a bedroom for the Al that Harry wasn't allowed to enter, a bathroom, and a small but cozy living room where Harry slept on the couch. It still wasn't his own room, but it was better than the cupboard under the stairs.

All in all, Harry thought his living situation had really improved since coming here. Yes, the old man had some very weird quirks, but he didn't get drunk every day like Vernon, didn't make Harry go to school with a bunch of stupid, bullying children and all things considered was also better company than the Dursleys had ever been.

They didn't talk much about their respective pasts. Al seemed to think Harry's parents were a witch and a wizard too, and by the way, he always condemned the 'muggle world', Harry felt it, saver, no to mention that he'd been living with these so called muggles all his life. If Al liked to believe that Harry was a wizard with magical parents, then it was better not to disagree if Harry wanted to stay. He also never mentioned the Dursleys by name, out of fear Al might one day change his mind and call them to get him.

The one thing that disturbed Harry a bit was the hunting. Al liked to eat meat, and as he was unwilling to buy it in a store, he went out to hunt for it himself. With a wooden bow and arrows.

Sometimes Harry felt like he was sent back centuries, like this little part of the woods Al occupied had been left untouched by the course of time. Al had no phone, no telly, no microwave, and as it turned out not even a shotgun to go hunting.

It was an amazing adventure, like living in a book.

For countless times, Harry had watched Al disappear into the woods with his bow and arrows, only to return a few hours later with a deer, rabbits, or pheasants.

Sometimes they prepared the meat over an open fire and sat outside till late in the night. Harry liked those times. In the glow of the campfire, Al opened up. He told Harry amazing stories about speaking rabbits, hopping pots, goblin rebellions, about a magical castle called Hogwarts where ghosts roamed the halls and suits of armor came to life.

After evenings like that, Harry often had to remind himself forcibly that none of it was real. It was all too easy to lose sight of reality when living in the woods with a man like Al, far away from civilisation. Harry would like nothing more than to believe in Al's stories about dragons and wizards, but he had learned early on, lying in his dark cupboard, wishing for a knight in shining armor to save him, that life just didn't work like that.

"So Harry," Al said one evening in mid-August, when Harry had been living with him for about two months, "tell me about your accidental magic."

"About my what?" Harry asked perplexed. Accidental magic? Did Al want to have proof that Harry was a real wizard? What should he say? That he had fought a dragon? Made a cauldron dance?

"Your accidental magic. The things you made happen, the things muggles," he spat the name, "couldn't wish to understand. Bit slow on the uptake, aren't you?"

"Am not!" Harry said indignantly. He wasn't slow, just not as crazy as Al. Harry thought about what he should say. Maybe fighting a dragon was laying it on a bit thick. Suddenly he remembered the incident when aunt Petunia had cut his hair really short, and the one where the mean teacher's hair had suddenly turned blue… But that wasn't really caused by him, was it? That was just a coincidence.

"Um, well, on time, somebody cut my hair too short, it looked really ugly and I didn't want to go out like that, the next morning, it was back to its normal length," Harry said.

Al laughed heartily. "Vain little thing, you are. What else?" Al's eyes had an eager gleam in them as if he was starved for these stories about magic and mystery.

"Another time I was running away from a bully, and suddenly I was up on a roof. But I never climbed up there, and there was no ladder."

Al whistled in approval. "Accidental apparation. Now that's not something you see every day."

Harry told two more stories, about the teacher with the blue hair and about the pullover that shrunk when Petunia wanted to force it on him, and the longer he talked, the more he realized that there really had been some weird things happening in his life.

Could it be that he was the reason for them? That he was a – he hardly dared to think it, much less say it out loud – a wizard?

No. Definitely no. Wizards did not exist. The solitude didn't become him, it seemed. He was definitely going crazy. Magic wasn't real, the Dursleys had told him so numerable times. Or was it?

.

A loud noise startled Albus awake. He'd fallen asleep while reading, again. He stood up and went to the window. An owl was waiting outside. He opened the window to let it in, and with a sigh, took the letter from its outstretched leg.

'Harry James Potter' the envelope read, nothing more. No location. Albus had made the magical quill, that addressed the letters, write Harry's letter multiple times over different days, but the outcome was always the same. No address, just a name.

Without an address, the owls weren't successful either and always returned with the letter after one or two days.

This led Albus to consider three options: One, Harry had been taken in by a wizard and was somehow kept out of their reach. Two, he was living on the streets and didn't stay in the same place long enough for the letter to find him. Three, – an option Albus refused to believe – Harry was dead.

They had searched London and its suburbs for weeks, and even notified the muggle authorities when their efforts had remained fruitless for too long.

By now, the whole wizarding world knew that Harry had gone missing. Fudge was in a right state, telling everyone who would give him the time of the day, that this incident had nothing to do with his government, that it under no circumstances should be blamed on him. The remaining Death Eaters now also knew of Harry's disappearance, and Albus couldn't help but doubt the motives behind Lucius Malfoy's offer to help sponsor the search. At least this offer reassured him somewhat, that Malfoy also didn't know of Harry's whereabouts.

The prophet was running stories about Harry almost daily, and every day new people came forward who claimed to have seen Harry in one place or another.

One witch, a young, round-faced woman, even swore on her mother's grave that she'd seen Harry in the magical district of Paris, playing cards in a pub with two young veela.

Unable to stop himself, Albus had even investigated that claim. Of course, it hadn't led anywhere, but at least he'd been able to stock up on his favourite French candies, which was made this trip more successful than any of his other expeditions.

Harry's disappearance troubled Albus immensely. Not only because he suspected that Harry still had a destiny to fulfill, but also because Harry was just a young innocent child, that right now should be excited about the joining wizarding world and not living in mortal danger.

He heaved a deep sigh. Harry was his responsibility. He owed it to Lily and James to ensure that their son didn't die a senseless death.

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