A/n: As long as some people read this I shall continue bravely on. So thank you to all of you :) But I have to say though that I AM obsessive about this storyline now so I would write no matter what. It's taken a life of it's own. I hope you are enjoying it.

I also still wonder who people would like to see Harry with. It's a tie between Ginny and Draco. So it seems to be down to the simple question... Straight or Slash? Interesting...

This chapter was quite hard for me. A lot of rewrites... so I hope it came out okay. Please enjoy and review. :)

Chapter 5

I stepped out of a strange fireplace into what could only be described as an archaic living room.

All the furnishings in the room looked as they had come from the eighteenth century, in design and in the care that had been given them. A fine layer of dust had settled over all the pieces. Under the dust though it was obvious that they were al fine pieces, probably worth a pretty penny. But apparently Harry didn't share that opinion. I dusted myself and exited the living room, not waiting for Cairn to follow me.

I came out into the hall way. It all shared the same state as the room I had just been in, though the dust hadn't been able to settle everywhere in hall way, likely due to the fact that people walked through here on a regular basis. The dust had no chance to settle.

My sense of curiosity got the best of me when I noticed a cloth hanging from a wall. My hands started to part it when a horrible wailing came from behind it, which preceded the horrific shouting that then occurred.

"DISGUSTING! A muggle in the Black home!" I parted the curtain a little and stared in horrified shock at th moving portrait of an old woman, regal in her appearance, but who was glaring at me with a ferocity that actually shocked me. I dropped the curtain back into place but she kept shouting at me. Thankfully I didn't know most of the words.

At that point Harry came out of a room across from the one I had exited before and looked rather amused at me. "I see you met Sirius' mother. She's not too fond of people who aren't... well Blacks." He smirked up at me as I quickly ran down to join him. "Luckily for me, Sirius was never a real Black."

I nodded dumbly, even as I sneaked a look at the covered portrait. Without even knowing Sirius Black, I felt tremendous pity for his childhood. The portrait was bad enough, imagine living with the real thing. For once I doubted the ability of a mother to show love. That one I doubted knew the meaning of the word.

"Everything is set then?" Harry looked at me, expectation shining in his eye. There was a flash of relief when I nodded. I thought he probably had expected me to back out after all this time. I had thought of it, but I had promised as well. "Where is Cairn...?" He looked immediately concerned.

I blinked and walked back into the living room, Harry trailing behind me, looking around hoping to see him in the room, but he wasn't there. "He was right behind me at my flat. He should have come through right after me." Confusion was audible in my voice, and I couldn't stop a small spark of panic run through me at the fear I saw in Harry's face. He knew something that I didn't. Immediately I started to worry about the young man who I had basically adopted.

"He might just be playing with my fridge...?" I said, but I didn't sound very convinced, and Harry certainly wasn't. He ignored my comment and headed to the fireplace, grabbing a handful of floo powder held in a cauldron next to it.

"Stay here. I'll be right back, with Cairn." He said, a fierce determination in his voice. I nodded at him, and watched as he called out my address and was gone in a flash.

Pacing didn't help calm me down, or lessen the worry, and after a couple of minutes, which I thought were an eternity, I decided to stop waiting. I couldn't stop my mind remembering what Cairn had told me before about his torture by the hands of the death eaters, and it wasn't helping me stop worrying. Waiting is something that I intensely dislike, I'm not very patient. And apparently I'm not very cautious either, since I was now grabbing a handful of the floo powder, and just like Harry moments before was using it to go back to my apartment.

My knees buckled and I collapsed to the floor in my fireplace, uncaring at the dirt covering me now. My hand gripped at the stones on the fireplace, trying to desperately dig myself out of what I was seeing. Stones stayed where they were, and I stayed where I was, staring, horrified at what was in front of me.

During a trip to Africa, I had seen a few simple rituals to bring someone back from the dead. All that had occurred was a few simple twitches of the corpse, before it laid back dead once again. The locals called it a resurrection, I just called it gross. I didn't see the point, but then with so many rituals the point has been lost over the years.

I was amazed though at the temporary movement, that was until a professor at NYU who taught about aboriginal rites and rituals informed me what was really going on. They used some strange mixture in these rituals, and apparently the chemicals that they used caused certain tremors, reflexes to appear in the corpse. I didn't really know what he had been saying, it was all too scientific and technical for me to truly get. Either way it was nothing to be amazed over, there was no person in the dead corpse making it move, instead it was just a chemical causing a temporary, and fleeting, appearance of movement. It never lasted more then a few minutes, but it was enough for those small tribes to think they were accomplishing something.

After I learnt the truth about what was actually going on, I was positive that real resurrections didn't occur. Nothing I had seen would lend itself to proof of that, certainly not a twitching dead person... But I did have a change of thought.

Last summer I went to China to do some research for a book I was writing. I didn't know exactly what I wanted to do it on, but then that was typical of my writing endeavors. I would choose a location, go there, get to know the place and see what was interesting. Then I would take that interesting idea and build a book around it.

In the distant, supposed uninhabited area of China, near the Mongolia border, I witnessed something that I suppose was interesting. But I think perhaps interesting isn't the proper word, it doesn't have the emphasis I would need for what I saw. I mentioned to my translator that I had witnessed a few "resurrections" in Africa and South America, and that obviously none of them were real. My translator agreed but then decided to change my perception. He brought me to a little village, where a girl had just died. The cause had been some disease that I am sure would have been curable anywhere other then there... but that wasn't the point. The point was that this village had what I can assume you could call a witch doctor.

They were going to try and raise her body...

I'm not sure how my translator managed to do it, but he got me the privilege of seeing the ritual. And I did indeed witness it. It was like nothing I had ever seen... Certainly not the mumbo jumbo that had occurred in Africa with their resurrections.

Instead this one seemed more...official I suppose you could say. The girl's lifeless body was centered on a design that had been etched into the floor by the witch doctor. The design was nothing I had seen, some circles, chinese words... I don't know. She was placed there, and then they threw something in the air, and started chanting something. Blood was given and then...

And then my nightmares started...

The girl started to move. Not the twitches I had seen before, but actual movements. Nothing natural, her body looked like what she was, a corpse, flesh hanging off her, the stench of death reaching my nose. I was amazed though by what I saw, and in fact I thought it was a miracle, until she made the noise. Low in her throat a guttural groan came out, a noise that made my body still in an instant. So much pain and anger was in that one noise. Added to the slow, jerking motions of the rotting corpse in front of me, and I couldn't handle it anymore. I ran out of that room and lost my lunch. Due to that I was banned from that village.

Resurrected corpses apparently can't live for too long. My translator explained to me that right after I left the body stopped moving, all noise stopped. This was part of the reason I was banned for the ritual. Apparently my abrupt departure had disturbed something. So I was blamed for the lack of success. If you can call a moving, moaning dead girl a success.

I couldn't find out what they had done, but in truth I didn't want to know. Perhaps in that moment I lost my ability to calmly dissect facts, witness the strange and unusual. From then on I put myself completely into my teaching job. My occult interests stayed on what I already knew, the safe subjects. This was something I wanted to forget.

But I never forgot. It was the most horrible thing I had ever witnessed... until now.

My throat was dry, numb, clogged by something. I heard dimly, an echoing scream fill the room. My throat wasn't clogged anymore, the person screaming was me. Harry heard me and turned, running over to the fireplace, putting himself between me and the sight that was on my floor. Pulverized meat, the left overs from a deli. That was what lay ahead of me on my living room floor. It was an unrecognizable disease on my home, even as I recognized a leg and an arm in the flesh lying there, a baseball cap lying toppled over to the side.

"God. Aine, I told you to stay at the house." He said it gently, even as his hands dug painfully into my shoulders the nails biting in deep, letting me know that despite the calmness in his voice, his body was anything but. "Aine?" He shook me slightly, and my eyes drifted away from the quivering corpse of what I had to assume had once been Cairn Murkhart. Memories of the failed resurrection I had seen last summer entered my head, added with this, I turned my head and lost whatever contents I had in my stomach all over the fireplace. Harry ran his hand up and down my back as I continued to heave, nothing left though to come up. Finally I stopped, resting my forehead against the cool stone.

"I sent him here this early because I was worried that Voldemort had gotten wind of my plan. That he might have heard about you coming to see me. I didn't want to waste anytime past what I had promised." There were tears in Harry's eyes, one blink and they were running down his face. "But I didn't think he'd come here, risk being found out too soon. So I sent Cairn... a squib. I sent him to his death." He shook his head, as if too erase the memories in his head, turn back time perhaps. Take back what he believed he had done to Cairn.

A hand reached out and grabbed Harry's arm tightly, I realized it was my own a moment later.

"Harry... You had better not blame yourself for this." I whispered, my voice still a little raw from being sick. I didn't like Voldemort before this, but this was getting too close to home. This WAS my home. I had liked Cairn. He might have been too fidgety, and a looked a bit like a weasel, but he had been so sweet, he had looked like a child when he had been looking into my fridge. I knew his childhood had been destroyed by Voldemort, but he still had tried so hard to live on with all that had happened to him. I had been surprised with what I had been told, but his presence had helped calm me with it. Cairn was four years younger then I, but he was still a child, who I had wanted to protect today. I hadn't known him for very long, but I had adopted him as my little brother, even if at the time we hadn't been too serious. It was serious now.

I was only now realizing the reality of this situation, my situation. I was in the middle of a fight with a dark wizard who would kill anyone in his way. He hadn't just killed Cairn. No, he had decimated his body, leaving nothing to even recognize the small man by. Only the torn remains of a hand and leg, a bloody baseball cap, even identified that bloody mass of flesh as what once was a human.

"We need to bring Sirius Black back to life." I croaked out, pulling myself up from the cold floor of the fireplace. I avoided looking at the destruction that was my living room, and instead stared determinedly into Harry's emerald eyes, looking frail and childlike. The tears had stopped running, leaving tracks on his face. I was only two years older then him, but I reached down and pulled him up, wrapping my arms around him like I would have for a child. Today I was acting like the older sister. Some sister I was though, I couldn't even protect one of my 'little brothers'. "I'll definitely bring Sirius Black back to life. And he'll know where the horcrux is. You can destroy it, and Voldemort permanently this time." He sniffed, but stayed quiet in my arms for a few moments, before pulling away, and the fragile child was gone. He smiled at me, once again the young man who had already defeated the dark lord a number of times.

"Of course I will." He turned back to the remains of Cairn, and pulled out his wand. With a small movement, the body was gone, the blood, everything. I swallowed a bit painfully, thankful to not see a reminder of death anymore. "Let's get back to England then. We need to finish this..."

Neither of us had bared the forethought to bring extra floo powder, worry about our friend had cancelled out sensible thought.

"I suppose we could take a plane back to England..." I said softly, still avoiding looking at even the place where the body had been. This caused a small laugh to erupt past Harry's lips. It wasn't a happy sound.

"Hold on to me. I apologize for this, but we have no other choice. I do not have the time to spare on a plane..." He wrapped his arms around me, which I quickly did as well closing my eyes as well. I had no idea what he was talking about, but right now I was not in the mood to argue.

Time seemed to pull around us, and when I dared open my eyes again it was to see the old furnishings of 12 Grimmauld Place. My eyes were open, but all of a sudden the room started to spin, nothing staying in the same place. I dug my fingers into Harry to keep my balance, but I couldn't stop myself from turning away from him, my stomach once again tumultuous, I started to gag again. Whether this was from what had happened or the trip back, I was unsure.

"I'm sorry about that..." Harry led me over to the couch, dropping me onto it gently. Dust rose up from it where I sat. "The first time one apparates causes quite a lot of discomfort." He pulled a piece of chocolate out of his robes, giving me a weak smile. "Remus taught me to always carry some chocolate, it works wonders on most things."

Chocolate melted on my tongue and caused the swirling room to stop, and even my stomach to stop it's upheaval.

"Better?" At my nod, Harry stood up determination set on his features. "Good, then we'll get started."

Just a few hours I might have been angry at being pushed like this when I was so obviously NOT okay. Now though I bared no ill will toward the young man in front of me. A few hours ago I didn't know exactly what I was getting myself into. Now I stood up, firmly aware of what I was going to do, what I had to do and why it had to be done.

Harry's reasons might have been vast, to save the entire world.

I just wanted revenge for one tortured young man who had become my little brother.