Well hello there. Thank you for all of your lovely reviews. I am hoping that I haven't lost you with how long it's been. The last three weeks have been . . . crazy. I was in the path of the hurricane (no damage to my house though). So the plant that I work at shut down completely (which if you know anything about the factory world is a big fucking deal). There was then start up and flooding. Overall it was a shit show. I like this chapter, though I took the cowards way out and haven't put in Sirius yet. He, like Ron, is difficult for me to write. I'm going to give myself time to figure out what I want him to do. Please keep telling me what you think and asking your questions. I try to answer them as best I can, either in my notes or in the story.

O~~~~~~~~~~O

Private Drive was as pristine a place as it ever was. All the gardens were perfectly groomed and each house had a new coat of paint. Families were quiet since it was dinner time and each one was now sitting around the table eating the perfect Sunday roast. Fuck, Harry hated it here.

He was walking up to Number 4 with his trunk dragging along behind him. Snape lead their group, looking menacing in his black suit, tightly buttoned, and billowing coat that was so similar to his robes Harry had done a double take. Alex walked one step behind and one step to the right. His pace was relaxed, though easily keeping up with his husband. He was wearing a white shirt with a light grey vest, matching trousers as well. He walked with his hands in his pockets and a small smile on his face like he was just one happy thought away from whistling a tune. Harry wished he could be so relaxed. Or even be able to fake a third of the happiness Alex was.

Packing up everything he had at the Snape-Dawsen household was a sad experience. First he packed everything he had brought. All of his old clothes, school clothes, textbooks and quidditch gear. Then he reverently packed up the new things. All of his new clothes, bottles of potions that he had made with Snape that he was allowed to keep a sample of, and books. He was tempted to steal the blanket from the end of his bed. To pack up the soft fabric and pull it out on nights where he felt sad and be enveloped in the light smell that would now be associated with home. In the end he left it there, closed up his trunk, and left the room.

Snape rapped sharply on the door twice. It was wrenched open by Vernon Dursley not a moment later. His face was red, from anger or the exhausting walk from the kitchen to the door Harry didn't know. His pig eyes glimmered with anger when he spotted the group and he huffed his unhappiness.

"What do you want?"

"Did you not receive my letter?" Snape queried, tone flat and uncaring.

"Threw it in the fireplace." Vernon blubbered back.

"Well regardless. Mr. Potter is here to be picked up by some people from his school. He will be waiting on the front porch for them and should be gone before 8:00." Instead of saying anything Vernon slammed the door shut, rattling the house as he did. Harry snorted in derision, leaning his trunk against the stoop and sitting down.

"What a repugnant man." Alex commented, flicking dirt from under his fingernails without a care.

"Probably the nicest thing you could have said about him." Snape replied.

"Well I am British. We have manners even to those who don't deserve it." Snape didn't comment, instead he just hummed in consideration and turned back to Harry.

"I will be leaving now. The Headmaster is still not aware of your departure from this place nor my involvement. Within the hour people will be arriving to pick you up. I think they will be using a portkey to bring you to the new location." Harry tensed, his heart pounding at the thought of having to touch a portkey again. But in his ineffable way Snape had already knew what he was thinking and had a familiar bottle in between his fingers. Harry took the calming draught and put it away in his pocket. "Now you are still in danger so Alex will be staying with you in his animagus form. Remember the others do not know about him so it would be prudent that you don't reveal his presence to anyone." He said with a tone that finished with 'if your tiny mind can handle something as simple as that'.

"Thank you, sir, for everything." Harry said softly, trying to speak past the knot in his throat. Snape looked at him with an unreadable expression. For a moment it looked like he was going to say something but instead he just pulled his coat around him.

"No need to get so sentimental. We will most likely be seeing each other in the next few days. And if nothing else you will return to school in a month and you will most likely be seeing more of me than you would like to." He sneered. Harry huffed a laugh at the typical response, sharing the humor with Alex who was standing off to the side. With a quick nod to his husband he disappeared with the sound of a car backfiring.

"If he weren't a Slytherin I would wonder where he go this flair for dramatics." Alex commented, grinning at Harry.

"I thought Gryffindors were supposed to be dramatic." Harry said, sitting down on the stoop.

"Gryffindors are bold. Slytherins are dramatic." As if to make his point Alex turned on the spot, flowing into his fox form. The little beast gave a joyful bark, turned twice and gave a floppy tongue smile. Harry laughed, gripping his sides. He watched as Alex began to run around the yard, diving head first into hedges and launching himself off of rocks. He ran around manically, acting more like a pup than a fox. Harry was smiling so much that his cheeks hurt. He was almost happy to give his cheeks a rest when Alex flopped onto his back in front of him, panting in little whines.

"I think you might be a bit out of shape." Harry podded him with his foot. The little fox glared back but there was still the twinkle of humor in it. Harry let them lapse into silence. The only sounds around where the gentle sounds of nature moving, leave rustling and the breeze singing, as well as the quick pant of the winded lawyer.

"I wanted to thank you." Harry said after quite a long time. "I don't know if I would have been able to survive the summer without you. Or hell, the entire year. You and Professor Snape helped me with so much. I don't think I would have been able to survive my own mid this summer." Alex sat up, fixing large eyes on the boy. He padded up, dropping his head on Harry's knees, and stared at his face as he spoke.

"Watching Cedric die was . . . horrible. You think that you can handle watching someone die, you know, before you actually have to do it. You expect to feel sad. To feel grief immediately and then maybe for a while afterwards. Maybe if it were a gruesome death you would feel disgusted. But to actually see it. Its. . . terrible. Maybe it's because I saw it when I was fighting for my life but I didn't feel sad. To feel so empty inside. Like I was hollow from the neck down. And then, even worse, I felt like that for days after. For a longtime I thought that I would never feel anything, the same way that I never felt true grief for my parents because I never met them. And that thought made me feel sick. Instead of feeling sick I felt nauseous."

He remembered talking about it with Draco just days before he left Hogwarts. He had left his house in search of companionship. He didn't want the pity from those in his house. Hermione was kind and soft, but her tiptoeing around his feelings only served to aggravate him more. Snape would have not been so soft with him, but he would analyze Harry. Pull him into a conversation that would end up in tears or something equally horrifying. So when Draco had happened to wander by, Pansy had been bothering him with Witch Weekly personality quizzes, and offered Harry a game of chess he accepted.

Harry wasn't great at chess. He wasn't terrible and with enough concentration he could pull of a mostly successful trap against a less skilled player. Harry knew that he wasn't an idiot and had some amount of cleverness to him. But his mind did not work well on long strategy. He was more of a quick thinker. When the decision needed to be made in a second, when the threat was right in front of his face. That was when Harry let his Slytherin side out. Chess wasn't like that. If you weren't playing ten moves ahead you were behind. It needed a vast knowledge of strategies and moves. Along with the ability to understand the thought process that your opponent used. So Draco was never surprised when Harry used his queen to jump straight into the fray, battering across the board with his bishops. Though Harry was always startled to find piece after piece being swiped from him by a knight or a rook that hadn't been moved for five turns, laying in wait.

The two of them had pushed two tables together in an empty class room. Setting up the board in the middle and sitting on top with crossed legs. They jumped from topic to topic, ignoring the angry cursing from Harry's pieces and the jeers from Draco's. As they talked Draco smoothly steered the conversation to what had happened and how Harry was feeling about it.

"So Potter, how's the head? Been crying a lot recently?" He said it with a little smirk. Harry scoffed at his causal way. Still, he told him. About how everything felt blunted. How Snape had said that he was in shock.

"Fine. I guess it hasn't hit me yet. Kind of freaks me out that I have been this calm. To be honest. I wish I felt like normal people do." Harry nudged a pawn forward towards its doom.

"That's stupid." Draco commented, tapping his knight on the head to move him to take a different pawn.

"What?"

"It's stupid to want to feel the same as normal people."

"Why would it be stupid? Normal people can feel their sadness and get over it. How is that bad?"

"Feeling the same as normal people means that you have only had experiences like normal people. Which in itself is not a terrible thing, but you lose your advantage. You don't feel the same because you haven't done the same. Numbness is self-preservation. You keep your feelings under lock down because it is a disadvantage. When you are trying to save your own life you can't just burst into tears and eat ice cream. You don't feel grief as deeply because it would be debilitating. Grief is a wall that you run at, it's always going to stop you in your tracks. Having the ability to avoid that wall, to slip around it and keep moving. All it proves is that you have had to fight and have survived. Feeling normally would mean you never had that experience which gave you the ability to control those emotions. So when something really did happen, you would probably fail. Considering that your adventures normally come with a high fatality warning, I doubt you would still be here to whine about it."

"So it may help me at the time." Harry acquiesced. "But why does it come back? If anything I would prefer that it never came back. If I'm not going to feel like anyone else, why can't I just not feel at all?"

"Really Potter. I was in the process of believing that you had some intelligent thoughts. Don't ruin it for yourself." He snarked back, rubbing his chin as he thought.

"For not wanting to feel? How is that bad?"

"To not feel is to be worse than dead." He said it with full intensity, looking up to make sure that he had complete eye contact with the startled Gryffindor.

"Worse than dead?" Harry questioned.

"Far worse," Draco dragged his thumb across his lip in consideration. Whether it was about his aborted move or the conversation Harry wasn't sure. "Have you ever heard of sensory deprivation, Potter?"

"Not really?" Harry shrugged.

"It's when someone is deprived of all their sense, though I'm sure you could have figured that out. It is a common type of torture. You are blindfolded so you can't see anything. You're bound so that you cannot move. Ears plugged so that you cannot hear. Mouth gagged so you cannot speak. Do you know what happens to your mind when you start stripping away your sense?" Harry shrugged again.

"It eats away your brain. You hallucinate. You hear and see things that aren't there but can do nothing to react to them. Anxiety takes control, exacerbating the fear and restlessness. You lose the ability to focus, to remember, and sometimes even speak. In desperation you scream and cry, struggle and beg. Given long enough, the mind completely shuts down. The body yearns for stimuli and when it can't it tries to create it. It will destroy itself trying to give you the sensation of feelings. Your soul is the same way. Instead of sensations like touch and sound, your feelings are the sensations that it craves. If you try and eliminate your emotions then your soul will react the same way. Eating itself trying to recreate what you are trying to eliminate. You have seen what happens to those who are kissed by dementors. A person without a soul is a person who is worse than dead. A horrific punishment to be sure. To ask for that fate . . . it would just be better to be suicidal." Draco sneered.

"How do you do that?" Harry sighed in an exasperated tone.

"Do what?"

"Have answers to obscure questions so in-depth you could write an essay on them without a moment's notice. Speak like you are reading poetry or an old novel." Draco chuckled.

"It is because we are different people. You see a problem and you react with action. Thrust yourself forward into the issue with your body and your wand. Just like your queen." He followed the comment by nudging his bishop to take Harry's queen which has been threatening his king. Harry cursed but accepted it, he never was able to keep his queen till the end of the game. "I like to think things through. I understand by stringing the words together until they make sense to me. This happens to be something that I have thought about before. To yearn to be emotionless. To have that protection against emotional pain the same way that you can take a potion and stop physical pain. We have had similar enough lives, you're asking the same questions I have asked before. The poetry part? That is the unfortunately a result of my upbringing. Mother insisted on the poetry and it is infectious." Harry had laughed along with him. It comforted him a bit, that the other boy had similar thoughts. Even if he wasn't feeling like a normal person, the things he was feeling were normal to people in comparable situations. They eventually steered the conversation to safer territories. The idea that he did not want to have any emotions had been quelled.

"It wasn't until later that I finally felt the grief." Harry continued after he removed himself from the memory. "And it was so overwhelming, and yet so far away. I didn't know how to handle it." Harry thought back to the night when it first hit him. It was just as Snape had predicted before, that the shock would wear of and the grief would quickly come in and fill that chasm in an overwhelming tidal wave. He had woken up sobbing uncontrollably. So much so that he could barely draw in any breath at all, panicking at the feeling. Not for the first time Harry wondered if Snape was psychic because it wasn't too long that the man was sweeping into the room. With a brusque, no nonsense tone he walked Harry through a number of breathing and relaxation techniques until he was finally calm enough to breathe and talk normally. To his relief Snape acted the same way that he always did when he was confronted by the crying boy, which happened far more often than Harry would admit to comfortably. With a calm presence and a mellow sympathy he pulled Harry out of the spiraling despair long enough that the boy was able to stabilize and pull himself out completely.

"If I had been here." Harry motioned to the stock photo perfection of the neighborhood. "If I had been stuck in this place all alone. Forced to deal with the grief, with the agony, all on my own. No sympathy from my guardians, no contact with my friends." Granted he didn't have any contact with his friends over the summer, other than the odd meeting with Draco. The fact still annoyed him a lot. "I don't think I would have made it through this with all of my sanity. So thank you."

Alex didn't comment. Not that he could have if he had wanted to, being a fox at the moment. Though that was one of the reasons that Harry had chosen that moment to make his little speech. It was easier on his nerves when he wasn't speaking to a person but just to an animal, which is why he spoke so often to Hedwig. Any answer back, whether it be confrontational or placating would make him uncomfortable. It was easier when the audience could not respond at all. Alex seemed to sense this because he didn't really make any indication that he heard the speech. Instead he yawned, showing all of his pointy teeth, before giving Harry's hand a small lick and lying down for a nap. They stayed like that for fifteen minutes, quietly taking in the night. Harry glanced at his watch and was happy to see that the time was moving quickly. He decided now was the time to take the calming potion that he was given. There was no way he would be able to put hands on the portkey if he didn't have the potion in his system. Suddenly Alex's ear perked up, catching a noise that Harry hadn't. Like a bolt of red lightning the little fox disappeared under a bush, vanishing like he had never been there. Not a moment later Harry heard a small amount of rustling. His wand slipped into his hand and he held it close to his arm so it would look like he was unarmed but could still attack in a moment. It was a habit he had picked up from watching Snape do it so many times. Not that he thought he was in danger, Alex wouldn't have run off if that was the case, but it was better to be paranoid than dead. Snape would have been proud.

"Potter. Why are you waiting outside?" A gruff voice demanded. Three people were approaching the house and the leader was Mad-eye Moody. Harry immediately straightened in response to his old professor. Then he remembered that he never actually met the man who was standing before him. This Moody had apparently been locked in a trunk when Harry was at school. They found him while he was unconscious in the hospital wing. He was then immediately moved to St. Mungos for treatment. Rumor had that he barely stayed a day, refusing every potion and every spell.

"I was waiting." Harry replied, a little annoyed at the accusation in his tone. Behind him stood Arthur Weasely, who waved at him with a quick hello that Harry responded to in kind. Looking behind them was a young lady with bright bubblegum pink hair.

"Wotcher Harry. I'm Tonks!" The woman, Tonks, announced with a wave. She stumbled over a crack in the side walk with a dramatic waving of arms. Harry stood and shook the proffered hand with a little enthusiasm.

"You shouldn't be outside." Moody growled, fixing his magic eye on Harry before scanning the area around them. Harry wondered if he could see Alex in the bushes. But Alex was smart and wouldn't get caught that easily.

"I'm inside the wards. I doubt being behind a wooden door would really protect me all that much if the wards stopped working." Harry sneered a little. Oh damn, he really was turning into Snape. Moody just fixed his gaze on him again, brows furrowing in aggravation.

"Well it doesn't matter either way." Arthur said in his placating way. "Harry it is good to see you. Are you ready to leave?"

"I am." Harry said with a smile and a small amount of forced enthusiasm. He grabbed his trunk and took the few steps that was needed to get him to the little group that stood at the edge of the yard.

"We need to go. I can feel their eyes on us."

"You're paranoid Moody." Tonks laughed, ruffling her hair as it shifted to a bright white with yellow tips.

"And I am still alive." He growled back, thumping his staff on the ground.

"But not whole." She quipped back, glancing heavily at his leg and then his eye. Harry had to hide his smirk behind his hand.

"Well then let's be on our way." Arthur interrupted again. He held out an old notebook in his hand for them all to touch. Harry hesitated for a moment, not long enough for anyone else to notice but it was there. Still he put two fingers on the book, his heart pounding wildly as a trickle of fear seeped into his veins. The pounding in his ears was so loud that he didn't hear anyone say the password that activated the portkey.

The world swirled around him in a blend of water colors. The pressure pulled at his feet and chest, trying to rip him away from the worn leather. The magic kept his fingers attached, making his finger joints feel like they were being pulled apart from each other. His stomach clenched and rolled, causing pressure to move up from his chest into the back of his throat. His heart was still pounding, pulsing into his forehead making his head hurt and his body break out in a cold sweat. He knew that he was not going to land in the cemetery. There was no way that he would end up with his feet in that freezing grass with the headstones emanating that bone chilling cold. That didn't stop his traitorous mind from pulling up those images in the front of his mind.

Suddenly his feet his the ground, shaking his body and rattling his bones. The air was chillier here, and wetter too. He took a look around and saw the tall town homes in the dim light. However he stood in front of an empty lot, a few piece of concrete with metal sticking out covered in green moss and little yellow weeds.

"Here we are." Mr. Weasley said with his normal cheeriness. Harry pressed his palm to his stomach quell the rolling. He wasn't going to throw up but he knew that if he had not taken the potion he might have. Snape must have added some mint as a stomach soother. He would have to ask him later.

"Here?" Harry questioned, looking at the lot the red haired man mentioned.

"Right, I forgot." He held out a slip of paper that was covered in familiar writing.

The Black Manor resides at 12 Grimmuald Place, London England.