The moment that Simmons raised her wand hand into the air, a giant triple-decker purple bus screeched to a halt in front of them out of thin air and the door opened.

A young conductor in a matching purple uniform jumped out of the bus and said, "Welcome to the Knight Bus, emergency transport for the stranded witch or wizard. Just stick out your wand hand, step on board, and we can take you anywhere you want to go. My name is Stan Shunpike, and I will be your conductor this morning."

"Nice to meet you, Mr Shunpike," Simmons replied. "By everywhere, does that include across the pond to the States?"

Shunpike looked at FitzSimmons strangely for a second, fully taking in who was standing in front of him and where the bus had pulled up to, before dropping his professional manner and asking suspiciously, "Aren' you two school age? Shouldn' ya be on the 'Ogwarts E'spress?"

"No, we shouldn't," Simmons replied authoritatively, knowing that most of the time acting like you had permission was as good as actually having permission. "Now can this bus take us to the United States, or is 'everywhere' limited to Great Britain?"

"Yep, sure can," Shunpike answered proudly, puffing out his chest a little. "Anywhere you like, long's it's on land. Can't do nuffink underwater. But ov'rseas is fine. Cost you extra, though. Seventeen sickles, a whole galleon, as opposed to the eleven sickles if you stay in Britain."

"No problem," Simmons answered, pulling two galleons out of her jeans pocket and handing them to him.

Then she gave him the address of the front doors of The Hub, and she and Fitz climbed onboard. In the end, they had changed their minds and decided that if they were going to arrive at Shield claiming to be wizards, they were going to do it looking the part if anyone could see them which included arriving in a giant, triple-decker purple bus, instead of having the Knight Bus take them somewhere simply close by in order to protect the location of Shield like they had originally planned.

Inside the bus they found an assortment of mismatched chairs, many of which were lying on the ground, having fallen over at some point before the bus arrived at Hogsmeade train station. And once the bus got rolling, it was the jerkiest, most unpleasant ride that FitzSimmons could ever remember having been on, and they had got the Zephyr One into space using the gravity waves of a gravity storm seventy-four years into their future. But after several stops across Great Britain to drop off the passengers on board before them, and to pick up a few new passengers as they went, being thrown back and forth and all around at every stop and start, the bus disappearing here and reappearing halfway across the country or in their case the world with a loud bang, the bus screeched to a halt in front of the main entrance of the Shield Hub.

As FitzSimmons stepped off of the bus with their trunks, nobody outside of the bus around them seemed to notice them, or the presence of the giant, purple, triple-decker bus sitting there on the street. But as they made it up to the automatic sliding glass doors of The Hub the doors smoothly slid open for them, and the two agents out of time walked into the familiar building.

They walked up to the front desk and Simmons said to the guard on duty, "Agents Simmons and Fitz, from twenty years in the future. We're here to see either Director Fury or Agent Coulson."

The guard stared at them in disbelief for several seconds, before finally asking, "Do you have your badges?", clearly expecting them to be loonies who had nothing, or else really crappy fake badges that obviously weren't security badges for anywhere, anytime.

But as FitzSimmons had arrived on the train in the same clothes that they had been wearing in the lab before the 0-8-4 transported them there, even if Simmons had had robes materialize over her normal clothes, they were both able to pull out their Shield 2023 lanyards and place them on the desk.

"Those aren't badges," the guard said, staring down at the lanyards.

"Yes, well, there will be several 'restructurings' for multiple different reasons between 2014 and 2018, and with every restructuring comes new badges, lanyards, or other forms of identification, depending on Shield's standing at the moment with the world's governments," Simmons answered. "But those are the primary form of identification and access to secure areas in 2023, so at least look at them before giving them back to us — and be thankful that we didn't come from Director Mace's color-coded security clearance era called the 'Spectrum of Security'. It's a disaster no one understood. And while the end of Mace's stint as Director of Shield came under, shall we say, unfortunate circumstances, no one was sorry to see him gone."

"Just call up Nick Fury, he'll be interested to see two people who claim to be Shield scientists from the future regardless of whether we're for real or not — also, we can do magic, because that's a thing," Fitz added.

The guard continued to look at them strangely, but he did pick up his phone. Surprisingly easier than they had expected, they soon found themselves being shown into a conference room similar to the one that they had first met Agent Coulson in years before, when Simmons drug Fitz into the field and onto a plane with her. FitzSimmons had to wait in the conference room for a while after that, but eventually Directory Nick Fury himself walked into the room, as imposing as ever. FitzSimmons immediately stood despite technically being at a higher level than him when they came from, as Fury was officially dead and technically not part of Shield anymore, though everyone would have immediately obeyed any order he gave if he'd ever come walking in giving orders.

"I was told you two are Shield agents from the future," he said as he sat down and motioned for them to do the same, giving no indication whether he actually thought that possible or not.

"I am Agent Jemma Simmons," Simmons replied.

"And I'm Agent Leopold Fitz," Fitz said.

"And we really are from thirty years in the future, the year 2023 to be specific," Simmons continued. "But as that is clearly not a story you would have any reason to believe, even with our badges" — here they both took their lanyards back out and tossed them across the table to him — "we know the locations of several top secret, don't exist bases that at the very least will make you believe that you have a grave security leak, and at the very best will make you actually believe what we're saying.

"The first of which is Providence, an underground base in the Canadian wilderness in the province of Ontario at the coordinates of 49°27'41.0"N 80°03'40.0"W, ran by one of the Koenigs at least by 2014, though I honestly can't remember which one, they all blend together. Second is another secret base that of course doesn't exist that Coulson will name The Playground ran by one of the other Koenigs. Then there's the Lighthouse on Lake Ontario, which I assume you would know about, even though Agent Coulson didn't. The Labyrinth in the Pleasant Hill Public Library in California that only the Koenigs knew the location of until we had to access it with Coulson. And the last one I have written down is the Guest House, the research facility built into a mountain that was never officially a Shield facility, and at some point at least is listed as a collapsed World War 2 bunker in the Archives of the Triskelion, the file of which looks like an encryption but is actually a topographical map using numbers and letters — at least in 2014 when it's all on computers, you may not have had that done yet."

Then she pulled out a piece of parchment, scribbled the locations of all of the bases that she had just listed down on it, and slid it across the table to him.

"Sorry about the fact it's parchment, that's part two of things you're going to have a really hard time believing about us, that comes after you accept the first part."

Fury took the scrap of parchment and looked at it, with the slightest hint of his one visible eyebrow rising in surprise that they knew the locations of five secret bases that no one in Shield should know the location of.

"You've certainly proven a point," he said, sticking the parchment in his pocket so that it couldn't accidentally fall into anyone's hands. "So what's your story?"

FitzSimmons proceeded to give him an abridged, spoiler-free overview of their career in Shield in the world that they came from, trying not to say anything that could change the future to the point where their own careers would no longer happen, even if they doubted that this world was actually theirs, or possibly even real since it came from an 0-8-4. But time travel was always a tricky situation, so they wanted to be as careful as possible.

Finishing up their back and forth story, Simmons concluded, "And that is of course a very watered down version of what happened without several very major points being mentioned, since we can't let you know everything that happens and risk you changing it and preventing our lives in Shield from ever happening — time travel rules, you know."

"Okay, so let's assume I believe you," Fury said when they were finished. "What now? Why are you here, why can't you go back, what do you want from Shield while you are here, and what was the second thing you said I wouldn't believe? And I'm not saying I do believe, but I've encountered or heard of a lot of strange things in my time in Shield that most people would never believe, so time travel isn't really all that much stranger."

"We can't go back because an 0-8-4 sent us here, and we don't know how to reverse it yet," Simmons answered. "And it also gave us the special abilities that are the second thing you wouldn't believe. And that is that the two of us are now wizards. Or witch and wizard, I guess. But point is, we can do magic now, though mostly only on a twelve year old level — we did spend a lot of time learning more advanced self-defense spells, of course."

She and Fitz both pulled out their wands, and Simmons cast the transfiguration spell to turn Fury's ink pen into a very large needle while Fitz cast Wingardium Leviosa on the conference call telephone sitting in the middle of the table, levitating it into the air. Then they proceeded to go through a few dozen more spells that they had learnt over the preceding year, until Fury finally said, "Okay, okay, you can either do magic or are the best illusionists in the world, which is impressive in its own right. But why are you here telling me all this?"

"Because we need a place to stay during the summer, and possibly several succeeding summers, and we want to work on integrating magic and technology, because they're very inconsistent at the moment," Simmons answered.

"We really just need a place to hide between school years," Fitz added. "Simmons just said that we needed to be doing some kind of 'job' so you'd take us in, and that's what she came up with. More for us to take back to the magical world than to bring magic into the normal world, though."

"Yes, technically the magical world is a secret and we're not allowed to tell anyone outside of it that it exists — International Statute of Secrecy, signed in 1689 — but you're all about secrets so we are comfortable telling you, and Coulson if he had been the only one around today," Simmons said. "However, we don't think it's a good idea to bring magic to Shield to try to use, both because of the time travel and changing the future issues, and the fact that we've seen Shield through the years and what they've tried doing, and quite frankly we don't trust Shield with magic — we barely trust them with alien technology most of the time. The magical world, on the other hand, could really stand to learn how to incorporate technology. Because they signed the Secrecy agreement in 1689, and basically haven't changed since then. But magic and electricity are very inconsistent as to when they work together and when they don't, which is part of what we want to study, along with figuring out how to drag the seventeenth century medieval wizarding world into the upcoming technological twenty-first century."

"And are you wanting to work here, or in some other Shield facility, or do you just want a place to live that you can do your work in there?" Fury asked.

"A living place we can work out of would probably be best, so no one else sees that magic exists, but that's a lot to ask for, I know," Simmons answered.

"Tell you what. I will give you a place — there's a nice safehouse of Romanov's that is never used because it's not Shield's, it's her's that was formerly a Red Room safehouse that has since been forgotten about — and in exchange, I want to come by a few times and see what progress you're making," Fury replied. "And I won't try to convince you to let Shield have any of it, or try to steal it — not that we could replicate it anyway without a witch of our own — and I can sort of understand the complications of time travel and trying not to incorporate anything that didn't exist in your timeline before, but I do want to see what you can do."

"We accept," Simmons nodded.

"Then allow me to show you to your new summer home."

~FS~

Meanwhile, as FitzSimmons were convincing Directory Fury that they were time traveling Shield agents and wizards, Ron Weasley was on the Hogwarts Express train like every other student, looking for Harry to sit with like his mum had told him to do as frequently as he could.

But he had lost sight of Harry and Hermione as everyone had bustled out of the Great Hall and all of the first years had headed to the boats, and while he'd spotted them here and there along the boat ride to the train, he hadn't been able to catch up with them on the platform and board the train with them, so he didn't know which compartment they had found to sit in. Which meant that he now had to search up and down the train in order to try and find Harry. But every compartment he looked in was noticeably Harry-less, and after three passes up and down the train enough people were staring at him like he was crazy that he finally had to return to the compartment that Neville, Dean, and Seamus were sitting in, unable to find Harry.

He left the compartment several times during the trip to use the bathroom and walk the corridor again looking for Harry, but as Fitz wasn't on the train, and Harry Potter hadn't existed since Fitz arrived on the train ride north, he never found Harry or Fitz, and eventually the train pulled into Kings Cross Station and he was really free from school work for the summer.

Mrs Weasley was beginning to panic.

All of her clan had come through the barrier of Platform Nine and Three-Quarters, but Harry 'The-Boy-Who-Lived' Potter hadn't come through with her son Ron like he was supposed to, nor had she seen him come through at all and she had been paying very close attention, needing to properly introduce herself since she hadn't had time to the previous fall when she had told the Savior of the Wizarding World how to get onto the magical platform, and make sure that he made the connection that she was the amazingly wonderful mother who had sent him a Christmas present when he had doubtlessly received none of his own, having no family — though she would soon take care of that, making him part of hers.

But Harry resolutely persisted in his absence, until finally she turned to her youngest son and asked, "Where is Harry?"

"Don't know — never could find him on the train," Ron answered. "I told him he had to come visit us over the summer when we were still in the Great Hall waiting to leave, and said I'd see him on the train, but then I never saw him or Hermione once I got on the train. And I looked, a lot."

"And Hermione is the muggleborn girl you mentioned in several of your letters that you never saw him apart from?" Mrs Weasley asked, quickly glancing furtively around the station to see if she could spot any such girl and her parents.

If Harry was always with her — a situation that would need to be monitored carefully to make sure that it didn't get out of control since Harry was going to marry her perfect daughter Ginny one day, the two were meant to be together, soulmates like her and Arthur — maybe he was still with her and they had somehow slipped through the barrier together behind some other, taller students, and she had impossibly missed them.

But while she didn't spot any muggleborn girls who looked like they might be Hermione as she glanced around the muggle train platform, she did spot two pairs of adults of interest. One was a purple-faced, mustached, furious-looking man who was almost as fat as she was (though that she was too oblivious about herself to realize), standing with a thin, bony, horse-faced woman, and a fat child about the same age as Ron and Harry, who she assumed must be Harry's family, noticeably without Harry. The other was an attractive-looking man and his wife standing together slightly nervously, looking highly out of place amongst the wizards who had swarmed the muggle platform to get their children (not that the first pair didn't look out of place as well, but they were an entirely different kind of out of place). Deciding these two were the most likely candidates of being the parents of a first year muggleborn, she walked over to them.

"Hi, my name's Molly Weasley. Are you waiting on someone to come from Platform Nine and Three-Quarters?"

"I'm Mrs Granger, and this is my husband," the wavy-haired brunette answered. "And we're waiting on our daughter, Hermione."

"Then you must have seen her mention Harry Potter in a lot of her letters — my son, Ron, over there, red hair, is also a first year and he said that they hung out a lot together," Mrs Weasley said.

"We actually only received one letter from her at Christmas, and she didn't say anything about anyone else at the school," Mrs Granger replied. "Shouldn't they be coming out by now, though? Seems like just about everyone else has."

"That's actually the reason I came over," Mrs Weasley answered. "I wanted to say hi to Harry since my son is friends with him, and was hoping that maybe you had seen him with your daughter if they spent a lot of time together, and had maybe got off the train together. But I see that your daughter hasn't arrived yet, either." She paused for a second, before continuing on, "It looks like just about everyone else has come through, though, so let me step onto the platform and see if I can find your daughter for you, and Harry as well. Make sure nothing happened to them."

Hoping that no one tried coming through the barrier from the other side at the same moment as she went through from the muggle side, as there wouldn't have been room for both her and anyone else to go through at the same time, Mrs Weasley stepped through the magical barrier onto the magical platform. As expected the platform was nearly empty, only a few older students left saying very personal and thorough goodbyes to a specific friend of theirs of the opposite sex — couples scattered around the platform getting in one last good snog before not seeing each other as much or at all over the summer.

But what there wasn't was a lost Harry Potter for her to rescue and mother hen and show how much better her family was than the one that he had to return to each summer and had lived with for the ten years before starting Hogwarts.

After combing every inch of the platform and even looking in all of the windows of the train that she could, she finally pulled out the big guns and sent a patronus message to Dumbledore telling him that Harry Potter was missing, possibly kidnapped by some muggleborn girl that he'd supposedly spent a lot of time with at the school. Of course, that took time to travel to the headmaster, so until then she had to return to the muggle train station empty-handed.

Walking over to Mr and Mrs Granger, she told them, "I couldn't find your daughter or Harry, but I sent a magical message to the greatest wizard there is, the Headmaster of Hogwarts, and he will have them found in no time, I assure you."

"So what do we do in the meantime?" Mr Granger asked. "Someone's bound to get suspicious eventually if we just stand around here waiting all day for the headmaster."

"And what about Harry's parents?" Mrs Granger asked. "They've got to be getting worried sick as well."

Knowing better than to brush the Dursleys off as not actually being Harry's parents, as those two fine souls were no longer on this earth, hence Harry's fame, Mrs Weasley replied, "I will take care of telling the Dursleys. And if you two just want to go home, Dumbledore will bring Hermione to you just as soon as he's found them."

The Grangers looked highly doubtful that this is what they wanted to do, looking skeptically at the overly brightly smiling witch, before finally coming to the conclusion that there really wasn't anything useful that they could do at the train platform, as it was clear that their daughter wasn't going to be coming through there.

"How do we get in contact with you or this Dumbledore person if we need to?" Mr Granger asked, having absolutely no reason to trust these wizards who had lost his daughter in the first place.

Mrs Weasley sighed internally, her plan to get rid of the stupid muggles and let the wizards who actually understood things take care of the situation not working as hoped, before quickly coming up with a solution that should appease everyone, or at least dump the problem on Dumbledore's plate when he arrived. "If you want to walk through the barrier and wait on the magical platform, just don't stop and don't be scared you'll crash into it, that's very important — best do it at a bit of a run if you're nervous. But I know Dumbledore will start his search there, and you can talk to him. He should receive my message in the next fifteen minutes, and then he'll be here pretty much instantaneously."

Mr Granger nodded unsurely, but Mrs Granger seemed to find this agreeable enough, as she pulled her husband towards the barrier. As soon as they were through and no longer her problem, Mrs Weasley walked over to Harry's relatives.

"You must be Harry Potter's family," she said.

"In a manner of speaking," Uncle Vernon grunted irritably. "Where is that boy? We haven't got all day."

"You can go home — Dumbledore will bring him along shortly," Mrs Weasley answered, wondering how much of a struggle she was going to have to get the relatives of the most famous wizard in the world to go home without the boy-hero.

So it was with great surprise that she stared after Uncle Vernon as the land walrus immediately turned around and walked away, his wife and their son following after him, none of them asking a single question or protesting in the least, almost as if they didn't care that their hero of a nephew wasn't coming through where he was supposed, and that 'someone was going to just bring him to them at some unspecified later date', though she did hear Harry's uncle mutter under his breath as he walked away, "Just like those people. Made us waste all this time driving up here just to bring him to our house later. Shame he couldn't have got lost or gone somewhere else."

Shaking her head not understanding how the man could be acting like that with such an amazing hero in their care, she turned back to her own children and beckoned them out of the station to head home to the Burrow to wait for news from Dumbledore on Harry's safety.

~FS~

Twenty minutes after the Grangers walked onto Platform Nine and Three-Quarters, a tall, old man with a pointed hat perched upon long flowing silver hair, a matching beard and mustache, half-moon glasses, a long, crooked nose, and royal purple robes suddenly appeared out of nowhere.

"Dumbledore, Sir?" Mrs Granger asked, causing the man to notice her and her husband. When he nodded, she continued, "We're Mr and Mrs Granger, Hermione Granger's parents. Mrs Weasley said you were going to find our daughter and Harry Potter?"

Mrs Weasley's message had mentioned something about that ultra-smart muggleborn girl being with Harry, this must be her parents, somehow told how to get onto the magical platform.

"Yes, yes, that I will," he said in his strong, in-charge voice that he usually reserved for convincing Minister Fudge to do something. "But there was no need for you to wait here. I will bring your daughter to you as soon as I find her, I promise."

"And how exactly do you plan on finding her?" Mr Granger demanded. "And how do two students get lost on a train in the first place, and why weren't there any adults here to make sure everyone who was supposed to be on the train got off, so it didn't take an hour before anyone started looking for two missing students? Or at the school to make sure they got on the train in the first place?!"

Ignoring all of this, Dumbledore pointed his wand at the train and said, "Homenum revelio."

When nothing happened, he turned back to the Grangers and said, "They are not on the train. I've already sent out messages to everyone at magical locations that they might have tried to go to after somehow missing the train this morning, and I am going to go back to the Hogsmeade Station that the train left from and start searching for them from there. But I assure you, I will have them found in no time at all — they are just two twelve-year-olds with only one year of experience in the magical world, they can't have gone far. So if you two want to just go ahead and go back home, I will have her back to you in no time, I promise."

And with that he twisted and just disappeared into thin air, leaving the Grangers standing all alone again on the magical platform, staring at an empty train platform. With literally nothing else to do, they slowly walked back out into the normal world and headed home, Mr Granger muttering under his breath that he was going to call the police and report their daughter as missing if she wasn't home by sundown.

Meanwhile, Dumbledore was a country north looking around the very empty Hogsmeade train platform, where Harry Potter certainly was not. Despite his reassurances to the Grangers, he had heard just how incredibly smart Harry and his female friend were in their classes, and personally thought that they could have got quite far on their own if they had been planning this for a while — which given Harry's understandable desire not to return to his relatives' despite the fact that it was for his own safety — they probably had been. It also meant that finding them was likely going to be rather challenging, as they were both social muggleborns, which meant that they had a much better understanding of the muggle world than any of his searchers who weren't in the Aurors, and he really didn't want to have to report this minor mishap to the Ministry, who already questioned his way of running Hogwarts — losing the most famous child in wizarding history certainly wasn't going to earn him any brownie points with them if they ever learned of it.

The problem was, he really didn't know how to search for the two. He'd of course cast Homenum Revelio over the grounds as soon as he'd arrived, but as expected it had revealed nothing, leaving him at square one. But as he thought over where they might have gone, he remembered that they would have had to travel there, and that they were far too young to apparate unless they had an adult helping them, which he certainly hoped wasn't the case, as then he really was in trouble — almost as much trouble as if there was an adult not helping them, and Harry had been kidnapped by a rogue Death Eater. But travel was traceable, so that was the place to start. Madam Rosmerta hadn't reported anyone in Hogsmeade seeing them, and they hadn't boarded the Hogwarts Express, which left only one other means of transport — though how a muggleborn and Harry could have found out about the exclusively magical transportation, he had no clue.

But that was the Knight Bus.

Sticking up his wand hand, the purple bus screeched to a halt in front of him. Shunpike jumped out and was about to start his spiel, when he saw who it was.

"Dumbledore, Sir, how can we help you?" he said in surprise.

"I was wondering if two students, a boy and a girl, both first years, happened to catch a ride on here this morning?"

"Sure did," Shunpike answered cheerfully. "I's surprised as 'choo to see two students on Train Day, but the girl said they weren' supposed to be on the train, and knew where she wanted ter go. So we jus' did our job and took 'em where they needed ter go."

"And where did they ask you to take them?" Dumbledore asked, his hopes rising.

"Ah, sorry headmaster, but 'fore they got off th' girl payed us not ter tell," Shunpike answered. "Ev'n asked if there were some magical promise so we couldn' tell, and payed us enough ter do it, too. She did say ter tell anyone if they asked that they'd be back at 'Ogwarts in th' fall, though."

And right back down again his hopes crashed. Even he couldn't break a magical promise not to tell, meaning that he had to do this the hard way and find them himself. The problem was, his experience, and the experience of everyone whom he could employ, was in finding wizards, not muggles, and these two seemed to be hiding in the muggle world. He had no clue why they could possibly be hiding, what on earth they thought they were accomplishing by it or how they thought that they could survive for three months on their own, but apparently they thought that they were doing something, and it wasn't what they were supposed to be doing to keep Harry safe. Finally Dumbledore decided that he would wait until the next morning to make sure that the two didn't show up someplace magical where his spies were, before telling his people to start searching in more muggle places, and try to deduce where the Dursleys might have taken him as a child that Harry would run to now. As for Mrs Weasley, he would just ignore the Matriarch and any more patroni that she might send him until he had something good to tell her.

~FS~

Over the rest of the summer two groups of people were searching for Harry Potter and Hermione Granger.

The first of course was Dumbledore and his people searching for the Boy-Who-Lived, and the muggleborn if she was still with him. The second was the British police, who were searching primarily for a twelve year old, bushy-haired girl named Hermione Granger, though it was possible that there was a similarly aged boy with her, they just had no description of him to search for. However, despite both of their best efforts, neither party was able to find head nor hair of the two, as they were in America in one of Natasha Romanov's nonexistent ex-Red Room/KGB safehouses trying to make magic work more consistently with electricity.

Who wasn't searching for either lost child, however, was the Dursleys. In fact, they were quite glad that Harry was gone, as it meant that they finally no longer had to house or feed the leech. And while they wished that they had known that he wasn't going to be coming back when he'd left in the fall, so that they wouldn't have had to been anxious all year about his return for the summer, at least he was gone now and would hopefully never be coming back, and they would never have to see the wretched offspring of Petunia's good-for-nothing sister ever again.

Meanwhile, when Harry persisted in not being found, Mrs Weasley eventually concluded that Dumbledore was a complete and utter fraud and couldn't find a wart on a hog, but as she had no money, resources, or friends with resources, he was still her best chance of rescuing the Boy-Who-Lived from whatever horrors he was going through at the moment and bringing him safely to her at the Burrow — possibly after a short stint at his relatives that Dumbledore was always insisting must be maintained for some unknown reason. But she made sure to never mention to Ron that Harry wasn't found and safe, so that her son would continue to send letters to the Savior-of-the-Wizarding-World in hopes that Harry would let Ron know where he was in one of his letters. And Ron wasn't the only person sending Harry mail, as on Harry's birthday Hagrid also sent Harry a gift and a letter, equally unaware that Harry wasn't where he was supposed to be.

But none of these letters, gifts, or bribes of delicious home-baked pastries (from Mrs Weasley for Harry's birthday) ever reached Fitz, due to a singularly interesting magical creature who was planning his debut into the story of Harry Potter's life in the most life-altering way that he possibly could. And hero-Harry's birthday was the perfect time to strike.

FitzSimmons walked from their living room where they had been snuggling on the couch watching Doctor Who, to their bedroom to have a few rounds of sex before going to sleep so that they could get up bright and early the next morning and begin working on magic all over again, just for the mood to instantaneously die when they walked into their bedroom. Because something was already sitting on their bed, and it wasn't a smoking hot Black Widow super spy.

Fitz yelped slightly as they both stared at the creature in shock. It was a small creature with large, bat-like ears, bulging green eyes the size of tennis balls, a long, thin nose, and was wearing what looked like an old pillowcase with rips for arm holes and the open end of the pillowcase serving as a skirt/dress/toga for its legs.

As soon as it saw them it jumped down off of the bed and bowed deeply, squeaking in a high-pitched voice, "Harry Potter! So long has Dobby wanted to meet you, sir. Such an honor it is."

"Uh, hi. What are you?" Fitz replied, dumbfounded.

Simmons slapped him lightly on the chest, before saying to Dobby, "Hello, Dobby. I'm Hermione, and this is of course Harry. What can we do for you?"

She wanted to ask how it had managed to get into their safehouse undetected, but she figured that the answer was magic, and so didn't bother.

"Do for Dobby?!" the creature wailed. "Never...never ever…"

"Um, did we offend you?" Simmons asked in confusion. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean —"

"Offend Dobby!" the elf choked out. "Dobby has never been asked what could be done for him by a wizard — like an equal. Dobby has heard of Harry's greatness, but of your goodness, Dobby never knew."

Then he burst out in tears, which FitzSimmons took to be their cue to sit down on the edge of their bed and wait for him to work through whatever it was.

When he finally had, and was standing there with his great eyes fixed on Harry in an expression of watery adoration, Simmons said, "Dobby, why don't we start at the beginning. What are you, and why are you here?"

"Dobby is a house elf," the house elf replied. "And Dobby has come to tell Harry...it is difficult, sir...Dobby wonders where to begin…."

"I usually prefer starting at the beginning, but if time travel is involved sometimes you have to start at the beginning of the future or the end of the past," Fitz supplied, earning him a slap to the back of the head from his wife.

"Start wherever you like," she told the house elf gently. "We're here to listen."

"Dobby knows that Harry Potter is valiant and bold, that he has braved so many dangers already!" the house elf squeaked. "But Dobby has come to protect Harry Potter, to warn him...Harry Potter must not go back to Hogwarts."

To Fitz's great surprise, his wife almost immediately said to the house elf, "Okay. No problem. We won't go to Kings Cross Station and take the train up to Hogwarts this fall."

Fitz turned to stare at her in surprise, but a flash in her eyes told him not to question it, so he turned to Dobby and nodded, saying, "Yes. What she said."

Dobby, meanwhile, looked briefly shocked himself that they had agreed so quickly, before pulling out a few envelopes from the inside of his pillowcase clothing. "Then Dobby can give you these."

"Oh — didn't know anyone would be writing us," Simmons said in slight surprise of her own, taking the letters from the house elf. Looking at the scribbles on the outside of the letters she said in an undertone to Fitz, "Ron and Hagrid." Turning back to Dobby, she asked, "Is there anything else?"

Dobby shook his head, making his long ears flop all about. "No, sir. All Dobby came to say is that Harry Potter must stay where he is safe. He is too great, too good, to lose. If Harry Potter goes back to Hogwarts, he will be in mortal danger. There is a plot, a plot to make most terrible things happen at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry this year. Dobby has known it for months, sir. Harry Potter must not put himself in peril. He is too important, sir!"

By the end, Dobby was trembling all over.

"Well, we wouldn't want to put Harry in peril," Simmons replied gently. "He is very important to me, too, Dobby."

Nodding his head violently in agreement, ears flying all over the place, Dobby said, "Dobby wishes all the best to Harry and his friend," before disappearing with a loud crack.

FitzSimmons just sat there in silence for several seconds processing everything that had just occurred, until once he was sure that the house elf wasn't going to reappear, Fitz turned to his wife and asked, "What was that about saying we weren't going back to Hogwarts? I mean, sure, we can probably teach ourselves as good as most of the professors can, and a whole lot better than Snape, but I thought we wanted to go back."

"Of course we're going back," Simmons answered like it was the most obvious thing in the world. "I simply gave the strange creature the answer that he wanted, except if you notice carefully, I never actually did. I don't know what Dobby's endgame is here, but it seemed best to make him think we're going to do exactly as he wants, so he could go report back to whomever he serves that he completed his mission. But like I said, I never actually lied to him. I only told him we wouldn't go to King Cross Station or take the Hogwarts Express up to Hogwarts this fall, because we're taking the Knight Bus directly to Hogsmeade Platform, and then that we wouldn't want to put Harry — though it applies to you as well, of course — in peril, because I really don't want to put you in peril. We do it all the time because it's our job, but neither of us wants to put the other in danger. And then of course you are very important to me, being my labmate, best friend, and husband, all of which made it sound to Dobby like we are going to do exactly what he said, without ever actually saying that we would."

"Oh." Fitz looked at her in surprise for a second, before finally saying, "That whole thing was weird."

"Indeed..." Simmons mused as much to herself as to her husband. "The question is, is he right, is there some plot against Harry Potter this year at Hogwarts, or does someone just want to keep Harry from going to school for some reason, be it a joke or to try to kick him out of the wizarding world?"

"You think Dobby could be an enemy agent?" Fitz asked.

"I don't know what to think," Simmons answered. "He had an almost reverence for you, but who knows how good house elves are at acting, and just because he reveres you doesn't mean he couldn't also be betraying you. On the other hand, he really could be trying to protect you, and there could actually be danger at Hogwarts this year, though why he's telling Harry and not the professors I don't know, unless he knows as well as we do that the professors there do absolutely nothing to protect the students, so in order to protect Harry, he had to deliver his warning straight to Harry himself. Or he's doing both in order to be as safe as possible, and in a few days we'll be receiving a letter from Hogwarts explaining how they have been warned of a threat against Harry's life, but that they have extra precautions in place now to keep him safe and that he still needs to show up at the train station like normal on September First. I highly doubt it, but it's theoretically possible."

"Well, if there really is a danger there this year, that is just more reason for us to be there to shield the other students," Fitz said. "So what should we do about what Dobby told us? Should we try to tell someone ourselves to make sure they know?"

Simmons thought for several seconds, before finally saying, "Let's tell Professor McGonagall when we get back, and she can tell anyone she thinks should know. From the perspective of giving the authorities time to try to find the danger before school starts it would be better to tell someone now, but we have no owl to send a message with, and we have no clue where the magical hotspots in the States are to find an owl or someone to report it directly to. So I think telling Professor McGonagall as soon as we get back is our best bet."

"Sounds good to me," Fitz replied. "I don't want to have to try to explain all of this to a professor at the moment."

"I do want to research house elves at some point, though, to see what we're dealing with," Simmons said, before turning and wrapping her arms around Fitz's neck. "But right now, I want my husband to kiss me senseless."

Fitz didn't need to be told twice.