As much as she hated hospitals, Harriet thought to herself, at least it was quite a step up from damp, dark dungeons. Another plus, she wasn't tied up.

Harriet sat up with a sigh. Most people probably had higher expectations than not being tied up in a dungeon; when she dreamed of escaping the Dursleys when she was young, before Hogwarts, this life was not quite what she'd imagined.

"Ah, good morning. How are you feeling?"

The nurse was checking her vitals and making notes on her chart, only giving Harriet the smallest of glances.

"Great, considering," she said with a slight shrug. "Otherwise with a killer headache."

"Ah," the woman said, "yes, your medical file had a notation that you didn't want painkillers."

Harriet had gone through a small stage of addiction to sleepless dream potions – another reason Hermione had thought world travel would be good for her, so she had asked her Doctor to note that she didn't want anything addictive given to her.

"At least give me an ibuprofen, or something like that," Harriet requested curtly, holding her head.

The nurse nodded and came back shortly after with a small cup with pills inside and a glass of water. Thanking her, Harriet swallowed the tablets and water.

"Alright. When can I leave?"

"We would like to keep you until this afternoon for observation, but after that you may leave. The FBI agent who brought you in left his card. Would you like us to inform them that you're awake."

Harriet wondered if that was something only the rich and famous got or if all patients got the choice on whether the FBI was alerted to their consciousness.

"Certainly, please feel free to let them know I'm awake and aware enough to answer their questions."

The nurse nodded and left, presumably to make said phone call.

The wait for the agents was interminably long – mainly because no one had thought to give her a book or anything to entertain herself with. And performing magic on camera wouldn't be the best idea she ever had (not her worst either, to be fair, but that was a low threshold to cross.

A knock interrupted her mindless reverie and Harriet jumped at the opportunity for something – anything – more entertaining than counting ceiling tiles.

"Please, come in."

It wasn't one of the team she had met before but rather a normal police officer.

"I'm here to take your statement, Ma'am."

Well, that was a damn shame, Harriet noted internally even as she sat up obediently. It would have been far nicer to have one of the hot FBI employees here. That had to be one of the criteria for employing them – people feel more comfortable around attractive men and women so you could only enter the Academy if you met the hotness quotient.

Yes, gossiping with Ginny and Hannah had been a terrible influence on her, Harriet would freely admit, but not really one she regretted. While she had certainly had a little crush on a few boys throughout her time at Hogwarts (notably Cedric and Tom Riddle, neither of whom had a good death), Harriet never really had time to explore crushes, love and generally admiring other people for their physical and mental attributes rather than assessing them on their likelihood to stab you in the back (and Draco Malfoy had grown up hot – when the hell had that happened?).

Her statement, as it turned out, was mainly due to procedure as most of it, apart from her original capture, of course, was caught on tape. God, she hoped they hadn't heard half the stuff she'd been saying to herself – or little Tommy. And they'd also heard her talking to herself; she was lucky they hadn't thought there might be something more obviously wrong with her.

Apparently with the capture of the killer, the BAU team had been recalled and it was deemed that the Police was more than sufficient to handle interviewing her for the record, which, well, fair enough. Still, a damn shame.

Getting out of hospital was nice and Harriet figured she needed a small respite from her travelling adventures and, enjoying the spending money she had obtained through her ladyship, purchased a small house near Aquia Harbour, less than 10 miles from the FBI in Quantico. And yes, after her latest kidnapping, that may have been a factor in her decision-making; because, although she had to rescue herself once again, the team had been polite, competent and actually listened to her. Common decency, in Harriet's experience, wasn't all that common, actually. Rescuing herself wasn't the problem – if all else failed, Harriet had magic, after all. But what bothered her was the long aftermath – in England she'd been questioned for hours and hours and had spent nearly two days at the Police station with repeated return visits for 'further questions' wherein the Detective in charge somehow tried to pin the blame on Harriet for being kidnapped. Because, being rich and a lady, she simply must have skeletons in her closet.

Not that he was wrong, exactly. Harriet had a lot of skeletons – just not in this world. And snapping the ladyship out from under Vernon and Petunia Dursley, who lived together even in this world, and had tried to take the title before she came into the picture – well, that was just the delicious cream frosting on her cake. But it was still biased investigating and insulting to boot; so having people who actually listened, well, that was worth a lot in her books.

Plus, Harriet did need a homebase in this country – because, despite having left England behind, her various managers had still managed to get a hold of her and forced her to do paperwork to approve spending and investments. As much as she loathed paperwork, though, she had yet to find someone she trusted enough to ask them to take care of her finances, so the burden would, for the moment, stay with her.

Surprisingly, or not so surprisingly, considering her new vicinity to Quantico, Harriet met people from the BAU under different circumstances than expected, that is to say, not during another abduction.

Instead, she met five of them at the local LARPing event.

A new friend from the local animal hospital, Jennifer, had invited her along and it had sounded fun and interesting.

What she hadn't expected was to meet the BAU there by way of a little child crashing into her legs and nearly sending her to the ground.

Apparently, both Agent Hotchner and JJ had small children who were running around (and into people like herself) with a lot of enthusiasm. Morgan and Reid were there with a voluptuous blonde, all of them at least semi-dressed up for the occasion.

It was nice, seeing people who worked together that close even in their off-hours. Naturally, when they all exclaimed their surprise at seeing her alive and well again, the children picked up on it.

"Did my daddy help you?" the little boy who had run into her asked and before she could tell him that he had, Agent Hotchner sank down to his knees so he was at eye-level with his son.

"I did not," he started. "And do you know why?" The boy shook his head with wide eyes. "Because she saved herself and another boy first."

"Wow!" The hero-worship was now clearly pointed in her direction, but for once, Harriet didn't mind so much. Giggling slightly, and following Agent Hotchner's lead, she too lowered herself quickly to the boy's height.

"Sometimes the princesses get tired of waiting for their prince to come rescue them," she explains then winks mischievously. "And sometimes the princesses just think that tackling the dragon themselves would be far more fun."

Morgan sniggered in the background and the little boy was laughing loudly as well – job well done, Harriet mentally patted herself on the back.

"And your father did help me," she corrected the man's earlier denial and watched as he looked genuinely surprised. "Sometimes adults think they know better and don't want to listen to what you're saying," she started and was unsurprised to see the child nodding along. Most kids had met someone like that by that age.

"But your daddy, he wasn't like that. He listens. And that's very important, isn't it?" The child nodded eagerly. "So your daddy helped me a lot."

Just like that, the hero worship was off her and back on his father, as it should be (if only the Wizarding World had been quite as easy to deter and manipulate). The FBI agents exchanged a few looks over her head and while they invited her, she waved them off. Harriet had no intention of stalking them, essentially. She liked the security of having them close to her homebase, but had no intention of invading their private lives (Harriet could tell you from personal experience there was nothing creepier).

From then on, it was like a barrier had broken and she met them all the time – Morgan at the local Veterinarian hospital with his dog; Reid at the local University investigating courses she could pursue and somehow stumbling into his guest lecture; Rossi at a book club. She met some of them at a night club, spotted them at bars or restaurants – sometimes with mere hours between sightings and sometimes weeks.

It got to the point where she started feeling uncomfortably like they might really start investigating her for stalking the longer it carried on, so Harriet decided that maybe it was time to return to her travelling ways – she had two FBI phone numbers on speed dial by now anyway in case of emergency.

Somehow, in a fit of nostalgia missing her friends, Harriet had applied for a job half-way down the country in Denver as a librarian and got it. Thanks to shrinking charms, packing charms and expandable pockets, the moving cities thing only took about ten minutes.

The difficult part was getting settled; it took her the better half of three months to find some vague acquaintance-like friendships with people she connected with in the library. She had yet to meet anyone outside of the BAU that she wanted to be close friends with – friends like Hermione or Ron had been.

But she filled her time in other ways; part of it was trying to help at-risk youths and homeless (sometimes both), which is also where she met Jamie after two months of living in Aurora. Jamie was a fifteen-year-old run-away from home. Harriet had always been threatened with this scenario by the Dursleys but was remarkably at a loss on how to help in reality. She came with food, money and juice – offering to adopt them or bring them to the UK and adopt them and even her offering of a home had been rejected and sent Jamie away for weeks at a time on occasion. It was still difficult to get the young teenager to accept anything Harriet offered, but they were becoming closer after several months of daily visits – which was also how she met Rosa, a thirteen-year-old homeless kid, Nikki, a sixteen year old who was selling herself on the streets to provide for the one-year-old child she had and Darren, an eight-year-old abandoned by his parents and looked after by the teenagers and Harriet, when she was permitted.

The group was still testing her, Harriet knew, and none of them trusted her to have good intentions or, at least, not to change her mind half-way through, so any time she spent with Darren was strictly monitored, and the kids were still checking anything she gave them for drugs or poison. Jamie, the one who knew her the longest, was, at long last, slightly warming up to her. Harriet had spent the majority of her time working at the library researching at-risk youth, drug addiction, homelessness, psychology and anything else she thought could contribute and help her.

The problems came when Rosa disappeared – Harriet reported her missing at the Police station but had been pretty much disregarded. Nevertheless, she'd made sure her report was filed and there was a lookout for the teenager.

But when Sammy disappeared, too, a kid the others knew, Harriet started looking more into it – not just newspaper articles, obituaries, hospital records (magic made it so easy to circumvent and convince people to help her with information they wouldn't normally give out) but also asking youth centres and homeless people for further information. Harriet gathered another three missing homeless people and, once again, returned to the Police.

Jamie had scoffed at her seeking official aid – Police never helped, they told her, but Harriet had to try.

Jamie was right.

The Police suggested the kids had been returned home or ran away somewhere else because Harriet was asking too many questions.

Detective Johnson dismissed her.

But he had yet to meet Harriet – so she did what she always did; she dug her heels in. This time a room in her house ended up with a timeline, dates and all her research on the case so far, trying to recreate a timeline. She also hired a portrait artist and dragged Jamie with her to get portraits drawn of the missing kids. Nikki was missing by now as well and Jamie was taking care of Nikki's babe. Harriet returned to the Police station the same day, handed over a folder with all the information she had gathered, portraits included, and used her title to gain access to the station chief – the man had been a politician, rather than a cop, subservient and eager to get into her good books. Chief Harris agreed that crimes were clearly occurring and agreed to investigate, which was the only reason Harriet returned home.

What Harriet hadn't expected, but maybe should have, was that the portrait artist she'd hired for the pictures? Well, he was apparently incensed that she dared to investigate the crimes he was responsible for, crimes against 'useless drains of society' and voila, her second kidnapping since she came to the US.

Luckily, the first hit, while a surprise, only dazed her and Harriet managed to put up a fight, thrashing her living room in the process, before he managed to get her with chloroform. Let it be noted that Harriet hated chloroform – it gave you the mother of all headaches. Chloroform and a hit over the head? She'd rather be dead, thank you very much.

By the time the BAU team landed in Denver, Harriet had already been taken.

Sorry guys, got stuck with this story a bit. Hopefully only one more chapter to resolve everything.