There wasn't any time to react.
There just wasn't.
One moment Harry was trying to glare down the four dangerous strangers standing on his doorstep and the next moment there was a fifth and all hell broke loose.
He only got a brief look at this new one. The resemblance to the other dark-haired boy was obvious. Except this one was older than Harry, with deep lines on his face and straggly long black hair. Everything else was lost into a featureless mass beneath a long black cloak with a pattern of dark red shapes on it. Except for his eyes. His eyes were red.
Harry had only ever met one other person with red eyes, if you could call him a person.
Red eyes and black hair, but this wasn't him. It couldn't be. Even as those familiar feelings of hate and anger and fear and hopeless determination swept through him with such a speed and force as to leave him breathless, he kept repeating it to himself. It couldn't be him.
Not now, not yet, not here.
But Harry didn't have time to panic beyond that.
The fifth figure was moving. He only barely managed to see it, years of playing Quidditch having honed his eyes to follow even the fastest of motions. Or what he thought was the fastest. This man moved faster than any broom Harry had ever seen. One second he was standing across the street and the next he was crashing into the dark haired boy in the middle of Aunt Petunia's lawn. The sound of screeching metal filled the air and Harry inhaled sharply and tried to jerk back. Too fast. This was all just too fast.
Harry's fingers tightened around his wand. But before he would even raise it the pink haired girl was at his side, one of her pale small hands resting lightly on his forearm. "Please, Potter-san, you are going to have to trust us!" she whispered quickly.
He didn't have to trust anyone and he'd learned the hard way not to. But somehow, things had changed. The dark haired boy and the light haired boy in orange were now in the middle of the yard, facing off with the man with red eyes, standing between him and Harry. The girl's hand was soft and hovered loosely over his arm. She wasn't grabbing at him the way his Uncle would. She was asking.
And every instinct in his body was screaming at him to get as far away from the red-eyed man as possible. His wand was warm in his hand.
Red-eyes caught his over the shoulder of the dark haired boy and Harry knew just as completely that he'd never be able to cast something fast enough.
Everything shifted suddenly, again. A red and black blur darted right, then left as one of the two teenagers moved to intercept it. The other threw something shiny and undoubtedly sharp at it, and the shape shifted again.
It was still heading straight for Harry and the girl.
This time Harry grabbed her arm and started to push himself back. It probably wouldn't be enough, but he had to do something. Hopefully he could pull the two of them back behind the limited shelter of the house and bushes.
Something exploded the ground right in front of them and Harry flinched back. He screwed his eyes shut and lifted his free arm to shield his face. He expected to feel heat of some sort, or possibly shrapnel, but was thankfully only pelted with lumps of dry dirt and clumps of grass.
He cracked one eye open.
The white-haired man was in front of them now, close enough that Harry could almost feel the heat coming off of him. It tingled down his spin like magic.
Then the girl was unraveling some kind of scroll. Hermione used scrolls on a rare occasion, but they never looked like this one. This own was backed with some kind of red fabric and was covered in odd oriental looking symbols and wriggling lines and circles. He only had a moment to glance at it, to feel it humming before the girl tossed it from one hand to another so that it arched up behind him. She shouted out something he couldn't understand.
It didn't sound like Latin, but the effect was very similar.
The humming changed to warmth and light and a high pitched whistling noise and then pop!
It was a spell. Some kind of spell. And it was trying to take him away from Number 4 Privet Drive.
Harry panicked. He forgot about trusting and tried to jerk back, tried to push it away. Blindly, instinctively, he tried to pull into himself while at the same time pushing everything else out.
For a heartbeat, it seemed to work. Everything just stopped. The warmth was still there. In fact, it and the pressure were only getting worse, but the feeling of moving, of being hurled from one side of the galaxy to another stopped. It hurt but he was stopped.
And no sooner was he able to even think that, than he was suddenly moving again. The pressure pushed in and the heat swooshed out and then he was on his knees in the dirt throwing up what little breakfast he had had.
His stomach clenched violently, his head pounded and his vision waved. His entire body felt both stretched out and twisted up so badly that everything just hurt. He dry heaved again, spat, heaved again, and moaned.
That was so much worse than any portkey or Apparation he had ever experienced.
"Potter-san?"
The girl was kneeling by his side, and before he could even shove her away to protect himself she reached out and laid one hand on his forehead. Everything glowed green and the pain stopped. He half sighed, half moaned in relief and fought the urge to curl in tighter about himself until he resembled nothing more than a small pitiful ball. Whatever she was doing, no matter how potentially dangerous it might be, he hoped it never stopped.
She made a small noise and supported his shoulder with her other hand. "I've never seen someone react so badly to a transportation jutsu," she commented.
Harry wasn't exactly sure what a "jutsu" was but he could guess. Jutsu. Voodoo. Spell. Thing that made him feel like he was dying.
"For a moment I thought it wasn't going to work," the girl continued calmly, sound very much like Hermione reflecting on a class assignment she wasn't completely happy with. "I would never think a scroll given to us by Tsunade-sama herself would be faulty, but I think I almost lost you there. How very, very odd. I'll have to ask her once we've returned."
Harry only understood half of what that all meant. Something had gone wrong and that's why it hurt so bad. He had a feeling he knew what it was, but he wasn't going to volunteer that information right now. "Where?" he croaked once the heaving stopped.
She removed her hand from his forehead, but kept the one on his shoulder, effortlessly holding him up. "Fire Country, just outside the border of the Hidden Village of the Leaf, Konoha. Our home village."
Harry shut his eyes and tried leaning back. His wand was still in one hand, the familiar wood almost painful hot against his skin. He quickly shoved it away inside one of his pockets. No one seemed to have noticed it yet, and it was probably best to keep it that way. Besides, it gave him two hands to rub at sore eyes with. "Fire Country?" he repeated slowly. "Not in England?" It was, perhaps, not the most eloquent of statements, but his mind was still fuzzy despite whatever wonderful spell she'd done to take away the worst of it.
The pink haired girl was kneeling beside him, her green eyes studying him carefully and her bottom lip caught between her teeth. She couldn't be much older than he was, but with her hair pulled back like that and with the gloves and boots she was wearing and the very deathly serious expression on her face, she made every other girl he'd ever met seem childish.
"I know this was very sudden, Potter-san," she said. "But we had to get you out of there. That man was going to kill you."
Harry snorted. Who wasn't? "I figured that part out," he replied less sarcastically. Snapping at her wasn't going to get him anywhere and he was supposed to working on not yelling at people. Controlling his impulses. Being more grown-up.
She stared back at him for a moment before nodding slowly. "My name is Haruno Sakura. You may call me Sakura-chan, Potter-san," she said. "I am a ninja of Konoha, along with my teammates we left behind. We were sent to find you and protect you from that man."
Harry blinked and struggled to process all of that. Sakura-chan. Perhaps -chan was a little like -san, though he still had no idea what it meant. But it couldn't be too bad if she was calling her self that. Ninja. Okay, that was just too weird to even conceive of. Ninja? Like those funny looking guys in bad Asian movies? Sakura-chan certainly didn't look anything like one of them, and neither had the blond boy with her. The white-haired man might, if ninja wore army vests. The dark-haired boy and the red-eyed man he could imagine. Which brought him back to the next important question.
"Protect me?" he asked dumbly. "Why would you do that? And why does he want to kill me?" He didn't look like a Death Eater, but maybe Voldemort was widening his recruitment.
Sakura-chan sat back. "That's kind of complicated, Potter-san," she replied quietly. "It might be something best left explained later, once we're in Konoha. I will promise you this," she continued, her voice dropping very low and serious. "We will protect you. I can promise you that." Then she smiled brightly. "So don't worry, hmm?"
She pushed herself up to her feet gracefully and held out her hand to him. "Come on, Potter-san. We ought to move away from this place, just to be safe. We can start walking towards Konoha and I'm sure the others will catch up with us shortly."
Harry stared at her hand, at her face, and the tightness around her eyes. "Will they be alright?" he asked, not that he knew what they could do about it if they wouldn't.
Her smile slipped just slightly and her eyes focused on him just a bit more sharply. "Hmm. I believe they will be," she said slowly. "Yes. Kakashi-sensei's too good to die, Sasuke-kun's too stubborn and Naruto's too dumb. They'll be fine. They each have a transport scroll too and should be right behind us."
Harry sighed and reached up slowly to take her hand. He had no other choice. He would have to trust her not to kill him and trust the others not to die. He was in a country he'd never heard of, with people he had no idea what to expect out of. It left a distinctly helpless feeling in his stomach that even Sakura-chan's bright smile and soft hands could do anything to soothe.