Saving Harry

WARNINGS: Religious Fundamentalism, Sensitive Subjects Mentioned, Future Lemon - things of varying sexual nature until that point, homosexual/slash relationships, intense bullying, varying degrees of abuse. If this puts a stick in your ass and offends you, turn back now.

Concept and Story heavily influenced by premise of Steven King's "Carrie". I heat chicken nuggets on review flames. (also Britslang for this chapter, 'Old Bill' and "Bobbies" means police :) )

A/N: Would like to add that the actions of the adults involved in Harry's life at this point are narrowly based off what I've known and experienced, the system DOES and probably HAS changed, but I'd like to stress that we have a very bad method of dealing with 'suicide/abused kids'. So please leave the nitpicking of what happens to Harry during the aftermath, at the door. Every domestic is different in it's way, and for one as extreme as this, leave leeway.

Also yes, I did just change pen name [DementedWitch is now Audacia's Quill]

Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter [Warner Bros. do] nor do I own Yu-Gi-Oh! Or the great concept of Carrie by S. King

Chapter Five

To say he had merely crossed one street with glass embedded into a badly hurt ankle and leg, was discrediting Harry to how far his magic and his panic had pushed him to walk until he'd pounded on the first house that he laid eyes on which had Number 4 completely out of his peripheral vision. If he had gone straight across, it was entirely debatable if anyone would have let him in, despite his state. There had also been the horrible fear that Petunia would catch up to him, grab him by the ankles and drag him back to hell. It was as if every embedded belief in his body had been put into a stasis, like his bones were forcing him into self-preservation as he tried to run from the inducers of the awful bloodcurdling fear that lived in Number 4.

He had no idea who the aged woman was, having never been this far into the neighborhood before. He tried to be neither seen nor heard, though used to be plenty talked about until Petunia put the spotlight on herself. There were some people that didn't even know about the raven-haired resident of Number 4, but this woman was unfortunately one of them. But it may have played in Harry's favor, as she did not see a no-good religious little whack-job that still went "off the rails", no, she saw a wrecked teenager pulling shards of glass from his injured leg, crying and reeking to high heaven of petrol.

She called the old bill, naturally.

The police had come over in what sounded like swarms, when in actual fact it was just a single car with back up on hand for what sounded like an intense domestic-aftermath. Harry could hardly feel the time slip by as he fingered the piece of glass in his hand, a shard from the window that he'd limped across the street with, embedded in his skin that he'd pulled out.

The police pounded on her door as she tried to tend to Harry, who sat on her sofa like a dumbstruck creature, blood sliding down his leg.

"I'll get it!" came a male voice from upstairs "-bloody hell mum, what's going on? Who called the old bill?" the voice was familiar though far more informal then the one Harry's mind was thinking of.

The woman seemed to stammer out her shouts, still in some shock herself, trying to warn her far-too-old-to-be-living-at-home son to stay upstairs. Her efforts were in vain when she heard heavy plodding down the stairs and him going through the other room to open the door for the police, unawares as to what was going on.

"Good evening officers," that voice was familiar.

"May we come in? We received a call that the boy is here?" one of the policeman said, and before the twenty year old could answer, his mother came in from the kitchen and pulled the police inside, ignoring her son's befuddled look.

"He's in the living room,"said the woman, paramedics seem to swarm in just behind the police, good Lord, how many people were called? Wondered the confused older male. Even more confused about them coming for someone in their house that he was unaware of, he quickly did the mental addition that his mum must have called them, though as to why, that was a question itself.

Which answered itself when he saw Harry Potter in his living room.

Those vivid green eyes behind damaged glasses, that knew too much cruelty from peers and adults, the boy who wrapped his secrets in his overly large school uniform. He felt his jaw hang loose comically as he watched paramedics approach the sofa and begin looking at cuts on his legs as bobbies sat on the other sofa chairs.

"Harry?" managed the shocked man.

"Mr Broderick?" came the equally shocked response, from a scream-ached throat.

One of the policemen - a short stubby man with brown hair and directly infront of Harry from his seat, cut the moment like a knife.

"Perhaps you could answer a few questions lad?" They said things to comfort Harry, but none of them stuck or meant anything really, until the other let slip that his relatives had been less then compliant when they'd gone to check the shattered window on the way up, and pieced together the 999 call made earlier, with the Dursley's window. David had given chase and was being apprehended by the backup and Petunia was under questioning. Originally, David had still been seething and had been rude to the police, his perfect facade more broken then his upstairs window, the chase that ensued had been originally from trying to get away for being charged for being aggressive toward an officer.

Now it seemed that the Dursley's were being chased up on something far more, with child abuse being uncovered, the shattered window and angry Number 4 residents directly linked to the boy that had staggered across a block to a random house, narrowly escaping a horrible domestic.

Mr Broderick later pieced up how Harry had managed to end up on his mother's sofa, and learned a whole lot more as Harry hesitantly answered questions about his relatives, and finally explained why he smelled of petrol.

"Student of yours?" whispered the woman, Agne Broderick, bringing in cups of tea for all. Mr Broderick - William Broderick, nodded numbly.

It was surreal, horrible and yet surreal.

It only seemed to feel like reality when Harry uttered those words that became forever indented into his mind.

He tried to burn me alive.

Harry was taken into the NHS children's ward, despite being a teenager there was a great lack of beds and it took hours before he received an x-ray of his legs. In the mean time he had doctors and outside people coming in and out. He heard something about 'social services' now and then, but was too numb to care.

He'd finally did it.

He finally told on the Dursleys, and now, his life was in the hands of the state.

Mr Broderi-no, William, Harry reminded himself, adamantly stayed by Harry's bed side. Visiting hours were discarded as many parents would stay with their children in the ward, so William stayed with Harry in his, so that he would not feel alone.

He was still reeling inside, but it answered questions - why the Dursley's never took an interest, why they were never at a parent's evening, and why they'd never pick up the phone whenever called by the school. Harry never quite realized just how much some teacher's had noticed, he'd never quite realized how much William had or the true depth of the importance of each little two second conversations at the end of English were.

"We'll do the papers, we'll have you stay with us," it was like William knew that Harry had nobody.

Well, he did know, mentally corrected Harry - he had access to the fact he had no other living relatives way before he ended up in hospital. He knew through the school after a curious inquiry or two.

William Broderick spoke with such conviction, that Harry felt a small wash of relief.

Even though it was surreal enough that his twenty-year-old English teacher still lived with his mom, was currently in a tweed shirt and jeans, trying not to bawl.

"I'll make some calls in, I won't be going into school and neither will you, social services have some questions," said William "-and then they'll be paperwork for me and my mother,"

"They'll discharge you when they've looked your leg over some more and after we've confirmed some provisions for you," said William assuredly, trying to get the rust of dryness out of his throat, the whole time, he'd tried not to let himself cry slightly as he wondered how he could have let the depth of the Dursley's abuse slip right by him.

"You'll be okay,"

Harry sighed and felt a strange sense of relief, like one long battle was finally over.

"This isn't the police station," said Petunia dumbly in the back of the police car, fear swelling inside of her as she wrung her bony hands. The car with David Dursley in it trailed behind them, heading for a white building after many of twists and turns. The building itself had only become visible after she'd heard something foreign drip from the mouth of the driving officer, and her body froze as several figures came out of the front door, looking very imposing. She was all but thrown at them along with her husband, who was inches from foaming at the mouth, but was effectively silenced when she let out an uncontrolled, ripping scream as the figures drew out an all-too-familiar device. Several slender, rigid sticks of wood had been drawn from their sleeves, and her wrists became bound by magic, as were David's, the metal cuffs used by the muggle officer, dropped to the floor with a clatter.

"Petunia and David Dursley you're under arrest on the charge of abusing a magical minor, you have the right to remain silent, I suggest you use it," said an auror coldly, pushing them into the building.

"You're staying in the squib custodial block," said the other one with a dark expression "-and if the records match up to the one's we have, of the poor child under your care," the auror hushed under his partner's look and whispered the rest angrily.

"You can expect the worst,"

When the alarm went off on Dumbledore's desk, it was a surprise, he hadn't had any activity from it in years, it sat next to the stacks of letters from a soon-to-be-student that would riddle his mind until he finished his muggle term and would come to Hogwarts. Late yes, but better late then never.

He'd always expected a burst of huge accidental magic to set off the alarm on the Dursley household, but instead, were many suppressed heavy shivers of power that ran cracks through the curious magical gizmo, that resembled a re-calibrated foe glass. Cracks that Dumbledore had never noticed, the very cracks that Harry had slipped through.

Imagine his surprise when he gets an urgent fire-call from Ministry auror and Order of the Phoenix member Kingsley Shacklebolt about the arrest of Potter's guardians.

He choked on his lemon drop when he learned that in all the years he hadn't checked on them, Petunia had remarried.

The lemon drop came flying out of his mouth and stuck to his beard when he heard the charges on which the Dursleys had been arrested on.

Officer McAdam had to be sure when he saw the boy in the house, shaking, covered in petrol with a lightning bolt scar, that felt all to familiar, like he'd heard of it from somewhere, in a revered fairytale he hadn't heard in years.

Then he boy had told him his name, and it all came flooding back to him and he ended up calling the magical world for the first time in years about the abuse of Harry James Potter, the legend told to every wizard, witch and squib in Britain.

And he thought he'd seen it all in his job.

They didn't wonder to much why Harry wasn't in school, but they were worried, they all remembered the loud and yet mysterious circumstances in which he'd infamously jumped out of a window to run away. But Ryou, Yugi and Marik had worried when they heard the sound of sirens and the quickly spread news of the Dursleys arrest, then Isis had looked out of the window and commented about a black-haired teenager being bundled away by paramedics, injured, shaking.

Marik ended up talking to his older brother in Odion the night after it had happened.

Marik could not sleep that night, none of them could.

It ended up in an unplanned, bleak turn of conversation, with Marik doing most of the speaking as they all sat in the unlit kitchen, at dark, when Odion had only gotten up to get a glass of water that night, but all three of the insomniacs kept him up with a tale of guilt.

They told Odion about the scrappy boy at school, Harry Potter.

The one who'd they'd been hanging out with when they had come back home at sun-down that day.

That boy they hadn't talked in depth about when Isis had asked if they'd made friends.

By the end of it, Odion could see a forced maturity in the boys that he did not want to have to see, reflecting in their eyes and burdening on their shoulders, on Ryou's and Marik's more then Yugi's, but all three of them sharing the same guilty conscience. They told him how it was Harry that had been bundled away and been at the center of whatever commotion happened that day, how it was likely something horrible had happened.

By staying silent about what was going on in the world of Harry Potter, Marik could not help but feel that they had inadvertently taken part in something horrible.

Odion could not offer a word of comfort, a slight shell-shock coming over him from the strangeness of the conversation, but finally broke the tense silence and round-table kitchen conversation when he reached a decision.

"We will visit the local hospital in the morning, I'll inform Isis about what you've told me brother, we will make sure your friend is okay,"

If it wasn't already too late.