As the familiar walls of their home reappeared around them, Molly cursed Dumbledore, the Fates in general and, in particular, the stupid Muggles who had aged her youngest son before his time. The look on his face was one she had seen of young men in the wars, back in the first reign of You-Know-Who; all the pain of life and love, of empathy and compassion, stark on the too-young face. The fierce desire to protect the life of a friend, even with your own. Looking at the gash on her son's face, Mrs. Weasley was glad it had not come to that. But… A dark thought came to her, and she pushed it back as suddenly as it had come, knowing she could not afford to think about that now. "Get him upstairs, Ron," she said briskly, hiding her confusion. "Now."

"Mum, he needs a Healer…"

"I'm calling Poppy now. Try to make him comfortable. Go!"

"Harry?" Ron whispered as he carried him up the stairs. "Harry, you all right?" He knew how ridiculous the question sounded, but he didn't care. A rush of protectiveness overwhelmed him as he felt the warm weight of his tiny friend in his arms. He couldn't shake off the memory of how Harry had looked last term, always energetic, always so full of life. But now…A chill went through his arms at how limp the body he carried was. Harry looked like the picture of death. His face wore a deathly pallor, his jet-black hair hanging limply in great shining slabs off his head, matted with blood. He's so thin… he thought. Have they been starving him as well?

Finally Ron arrived at the door to his room. Pushing it open with his shoulder, he set his teeth and, trying to be as gentle as possible, laid Harry down onto the bed. But as soon as his back touched the mattress, his body convulsed and arched, a tiny whimper escaping him. Ron jerked him back, feeling the spasm in his own body. "Oh Harry…" he found himself murmuring. "Sorry, Harry… sorry, I didn't mean to hurt you.." Anger flared. "…if I could just get my hands on your filthy relations now…" Slowly, carefully, he eased Harry down onto his side, which as far as he could tell held no injuries. Gently he raised the dark head and slipped the softest pillow he had under the bruised cheek. His fingers brushed the awful gash on Harry's temple. Pomfrey's taking her sweet time, he thought angrily. He shuddered again at the thought of the sharp metal buckle he had seen striking his friend's thin face, completely oblivious to the fact that his own cheek was bleeding from a similar blow.

Harry's eyes fluttered open and Ron jerked back in sudden embarrassment. "Harry…"

But Harry was still out of it, his eyes struggling to focus. "Sirius…" he mumbled. "They've got…" He struggled to get up, but could do no more than twitch.

"Just take it easy, mate, all right?" Ron said, "All right?" No answer.

A bushy-haired, frantic figure burst through the door to his room.

"Ron! Is Harry all right? What's going on? Your Mum told me there was something wrong, something about Harry's relations, I got her to Floo me here, Madam Pomfrey's on the way, she said Muggle injuries aren't that hard to heal…What happened?"

Relief washed over Ron at the sight of her. If anyone could help, she could. As he turned from the bed to face her, Hermione glimpsed Harry's face for the first time. He was starting to look more like a war casualty every minute, as his face puffed up and his eyes began to swell shut. The gashes and dried blood didn't help. She promptly went white. "Harry!"

His drowning green eyes latched onto her instead of Ron. "Sirius… They've got him.. tell Dum…"

"What?" Hermione bolted from her frozen position by the door to drop to her knees beside Harry's bed. She exchanged a look with Ron, who relinquished his position to her and perched on the bed next to Harry's pillow, the fingers of one hand lightly touching the black hair. He shrugged and shook his head.

"What you on about, mate? Sirius is fine! Who's been telling you rubbish?"

"Not…rubb…th.. p.police…" Harry gritted his teeth in what looked like agony, "Muggle police. Uncle Vernon told them… he came to see me and they saw h…ah…" He gritted his teeth and his body shook in a convulsion.

"All right, mate, it's all right.." Ron gripped Harry's shoulders and supported him through the spasm until it passed. Hermione slipped a hand into Harry's and held it tightly.

"So you were with Sirius when they arrested him? Is that how you got hurt?" Hermione asked gently, trying to understand.

"No, Hermione, it's not like—" Ron began.

Harry turned frustrated eyes on her. It seemed to be hard for him to pull himself together. With desperate control, he rasped, "They… told the police. The Muggle police… arrested him tonight. Jus' b'fore I got here. Ah." He gritted his teeth, and this time his head arched back and he gasped with the pain.

Ron had opened his mouth to say something, but snapped it shut when he saw Harry convulse in pain. Slipping from his perch on the bed to kneel next to Hermione on the floor, he slid an arm underneath Harry's head, looping it round his shoulders, careful to avoid his back. Harry's head lolled in the curve between Ron's neck and shoulder, and for a moment he feared Harry was going to pass out again. "Where on earth is Pomfrey?" he grunted. His heart hurt. Hermione made a small sound as tears spilled down her cheeks.

"'M all right, H'mione…" Harry turned to Ron. "Ron, we've got to…"

Ron exploded. "He's all right, Harry!" He slipped out of the impromptu embrace to look Harry in the eye. At his friend's blank stare, he continued. "He is! I was just going to tell you that! I don't know what those… relations of yours have been telling you, but Mum was chatting with Sirius on the Floo not half an hour ago, just before… we came to your house. He was asking about you! If they told you anything else about him, it was a big fat lie!"

Any reply Harry might have made was cut off by the bustling entrance of Madam Pomfrey, closely followed by Molly Weasley. "Oh my goodness gracious me!" she exclaimed on seeing Harry's face. Setting her bag down, she turned to Harry, still propped up on his elbow. His eyes had not left Ron.

"Are you sure?" he asked. Ron could feel the depth, the urgency, in his gaze.

"Turn over, Harry, please," said Pomfrey, and turned him gently onto his stomach. She began to sweep her wand slowly over his blood-encrusted shirt. But Harry's pleading eyes never left his best friend's.

"Look, mate, I'll get him on the Floo for you if it makes you feel better," Ron volunteered. What had those Muggles been telling Harry? Wasn't it enough to beat him, did they have to break his heart, too?

"No!" Harry said quickly. Ron could see the belief slowly settling into him. "I don't want him to see me..." He trailed off in embarrassment… "like this," he finished lamely.

Hermione let out a strangled cry. Ron's head whipped round to face her, and followed her gaze. She was staring at Harry.

Ron gasped. He'd had been so wrapped up in his talk with Harry that he hadn't noticed Pomfrey remove his friend's shirt.

Harry had quite literally had the skin whipped off his back.

If the damage had looked bad under clothing, on the bare skin it looked absolutely terrifying. The welts had run together until the result resembled raw meat more than a human back. Clear liquid oozed steadily from the pulped flesh. If Ron didn't know better, he'd have sworn that he was looking at an Incendius Curse victim. Besides the terrible damage, his bare chest and shoulders, as well as his face and neck, were littered with bleeding cuts from the Muggle thing he had seen Hary beaten with.

Hermione was still making whimpering noises, her knuckles pressed into her mouth. His Mum was scarlet with a nameless emotion; rage was his best guess. Pomfrey was trying her best to look professional, but she appeared as though she was going to be sick. Ron himself felt as though waves of heat and cold were traveling through his body, and suddenly felt ill.

"…Ron?"

"Sorry," Ron was jolted back to Harry, who was still nattering on about Sirius.

"Promise you won't tell him anything about this. He'd go and do something mad, like break into the Dursleys'." At Ron's murmured promise. Harry seemed to calm down. "But I do want to talk to him. Later, all right?"

"I'm sorry, I'm going to have to ask you all to leave," Madam Pomfrey gently shooed them out of the room.

On his way out, Ron looked into Harry's eyes, simply and sincerely. "'Course."

As soon as the door closed behind them, Hermione turned to him with wide eyes. "What happened, Ron?"

They sat in the corridor, leaning against the wall, as Ron sketched out to her the incident with the letter and their arrival at Privet Drive. When he got to the part about going into the living-room, he hesitated. "We opened the door…er…"

"Well, go on!"

Hermione was lovely, but he sometimes felt she was a bit relentless in her search for information. "I'm trying! Well, we opened the door…"

"You've already said that!"

"Well, I'm saying it again, all right? We opened the door…"

"Ron, will you get on with it!"

"I would if you didn't keep interrupting!"

"I wouldn't interrupt if you'd get on with…" Hermione took a deep breath. "Ron, this is silly. We're worried about Harry and taking it out on each other. So you went into the living-room and somebody was attacking Harry?"

Ron took a deep breath. "His…relations."

"They were attacking his relations? Who was attacking them? And where was Harry?"

Ron ground his teeth in frustration. "Look, nobody was attacking his relations!"

"But you just said they were! Ron," Hermione said authoritatively, "you're not making any sense."

Ron exploded. "I'm not making sense! I like that! You won't let me get a word in edgewise, you keep interrupting me…" He huffed in frustration and pushed the hair out of his eyes. "How am I supposed to…"

Hermione gasped. "You're hurt!"

Her eyes seemed to be boring a hole into the side of his head, and a moment later her fingers, feather-light, touched a spot on his temple which, he only now realized, was throbbing. "It's bleeding," she said in a tone so tender that he trembled with an emotion he couldn't quite place. Today had been a day of shocks and he was too punch-drunk to react right now. "Who did this?" she asked in that same tone that was thoroughly confusing him.

"Harry's uncle," he managed to force out, which had the effect of making her hand drop limply from his face.

"What?"

"I've been trying to tell you," Ron sighed patiently. "We found Harry's uncle whipping him with – with his belt. Buckle end," he felt obliged to add. "He was lying on the floor and – and –" When Hermione didn't interrupt, mouth hanging open, he found words and went on: "His cousin - big fat boy - was treading on his hand. I think he'd broken it." Her hand crept up to her mouth in shock. "His aunt was just standing there. Watching."

"Oh… oh…" He could see Hermione's mental gears turning as she processed this new information.

"Nobody attacked them, Hermione. They were alone in the house and just… just beating him."

Her face was agonized. "And he was… letting them?"

"Well," Ron shifted uncomfortably, "he wasn't exactly… he'd, er, fainted, I think."

Hermione's face twisted, and before he could decide whether to pat her comfortingly or find something soothing to say, she buried her face in Ron's shoulder and burst into tears. "How awful, Ron!" he managed to make out. Ron put an arm awkwardly round her shoulders as she sobbed. "His own family!"

"Yeah," he grunted, feeling a lot like blubbing himself. It was often a pain in the neck having such a big family – Merlin only knew he'd wished more than once that he'd been an only child – and granted, growing up with the twins taught you to be careful, even wary – but he couldn't begin to imagine what it might be like to have the adults in your life, the ones you expected to take care of you, actually enjoy hurting you. "Yeah," he muttered automatically over the lump in his own throat, patting Hermione vaguely as she cried. His heart went out to Harry as it had never done before, not even when he had seen him as a tiny speck in the sky dwarfed by that Hungarian Horntail. To think that every time he left him at Platform 9 ¾ he was seeing him go back to a life of… His mind recoiled from the thought and he remembered, with painful clarity, how there were bars on the window of Harry's room. How Harry had once confided in him that he had used to live in the cupboard under the stairs. He pulled the crying Hermione closer to him, wishing he could hug Harry like that, bloody well protect him if need be—

"…like to come in and help?" Madam Pomfrey's voice cut through his reverie. It was a toss-up which of them had bolted to his feet faster, himself or Hermione. He saw a strange expression flit across Pomfrey's face – sort of reassured amusement mixed with concern – before he all but shouldered past her to get to Harry.