Harry's breath was coming in labored, his shirt sticking uncomfortably to his flesh as if it were a second skin.
He wasn't aware of Ron, Hermione, or any of the others near him. Still, in the small place of his brain that wasn't in complete override with adrenaline, fear, and expectation, he was certain that his friends were in the same chaotic state that he was in and that they were also running like all hell from the spooks that chased them, and the mayhem that was crashing in crystal form all around them.
He panted heavily, dimly aware of Death Eaters popping up around him and then immediately drifting away into smoke lest they wanted their skulls crashed into by a glass ball. One appeared before him, his black, crackled glove stretching out to Harry's face as if to grab him by the hair when Harry raised his wand in a confused scuffle and directed it at his face and threw a curse at him. He missed, but the Death Eater disappeared quickly enough.
He was caught off guard when a body crashed into him to his right, a body that he thought belonged to one of his friends, but soon enough, he realized it belonged to an enemy.
Being too slow to recognize this, the masked Death Eater managed to clasp his arm in an iron grip, and Harry was left trying to wriggle away and simultaneously run. He could do no such thing.
Another Death Eater came upon his left, and he heard a feminine voice - he thought it was Hermione's, but he couldn't be sure - call out his name in desperation.
Flinging himself back to keep himself from being taken by a second Death Eater and thus being completely incapacitated, he fell down on the floor.
The first Death Eater lost his grip on him, but then everything was falling atop them, and they still had some sense of preservation, so they disappeared into the background.
Falling, Harry landed on the hand that was holding his wand. He heard the painful, resounding crack of the wood, and when he tried to support himself with his other hand, he accidentally touched a glass ball. And that was the end of that.
Harry found himself flung into the nauseating flurry of confusion that was traveling by Portkey.
Though his rational mind questioned how in the world it was that he had activated a Portkey, his instinct and natural reaction to situations saved him, and he held his breath through the duration of the trip.
Although that usually did it, this time, the ordeal took far longer than he could have ever expected, and he was running out of breath to hold.
The trip also seemed to be hurting him physically: something that had never happened to him before. He felt as though he was being pressed hard on all sides like the Portkey was trying to squeeze the life out of him, or at the very least leave a couple of bruises.
He released his breath one second before the traveling ended and vomited hard into the air. He landed unceremoniously on his back, the sick landing in his eyes, his hair, and all his clothes. He choked, and, blind, he rolled off his back and hauled out all the contents of his stomach until it was empty. Once he was done, his glasses dusty for some reason, he groaned and flopped down beside his vomit.
He was only dimly aware of his surroundings or the fact that he wasn't where he was meant to be. Surely that was to be expected since he had landed here through a Portkey, but this trip had left him completely incapacitated, a weakling rolling on the floor.
If someone had planted that Portkey to take him someplace and kill him, like what had happened last year, then he would've been an easy game.
He spat on the ground one more time to get all the vomit out of his mouth and forced himself to recognize his surroundings, instinct finally kicking in after what seemed like infinity.
He propped himself on his elbows and sat down uncomfortably, taking off his - obviously - cracked glasses and wiping them off carefully on the inside of his shirt, which was the only place where he wasn't completely filthy with dirty brown dust.
As he wiped his glasses, he became aware of music in the background and the chatter of people some ways off.
But the music was strange, like some old-timey, jazzy tune that Harry couldn't recognize. Before he could even look around, he guessed he was lying in some street somewhere. It wasn't really that hard to imagine. He put on his glasses but still couldn't see well through the cracks, and that was when he realized how naked he felt without his wand.
He patted all his pockets and then frantically searched the floor around him, looking for it, and when he finally found its familiar, smooth wooden surface, he sighed with relief. His relief was short-lived, however, because he soon felt the horrid break right down its center and remembered the terrible cracking sound it had made as it broke on the floor when he landed.
He cringed at it, remembering in his second year when Ron had broken his wand and all the terrible troubles he had had trying to perform magic with it, and all the bad situations he had gotten into because his wand didn't function properly.
It occurred to Harry that he was covered in vomit and dust, strewn on some dirty floor. God knew where his wand was broken, weak, and pathetic.
The urge to hurry himself up and find known territory possessed him. He prayed that the Portkey incident had been a simple accident and that he would find his way back in no time - but there was something about that violent journey that sent goosebumps crawling down his flesh: something didn't feel right, it was even in the very air of the place that he found himself in.
But he didn't think that he had any time to get on some mystical roll right at the time, so he braced himself, tapping his wand against the broken bit of his glasses. "Oculus reparo," he muttered for what must've been the hundredth time, but he was always bad at it.
He needed Hermione for situations like this. Did Hermione need him right now? Did Ron? What was happening? His profound sense of urgency came from being totally disconnected at a crucial moment. He felt guilty for not being there for the people he cared about and instead of wallowing in some filthy street and not trying to find a way back to help them.
After all, it had been him that had convinced them all to join his stupid army, and now he wasn't there when they were all in danger. The glasses clicked in his hands as though they had been fixed, and though the glass was mostly alright, the wand had broken one of the legs on his glasses.
No matter - that he could work with. He shoved them onto his face and took a look.
There was really nothing much to look at. He was lying just off the side of some dusty street that looked so incredibly shabby and unkempt, like some dirt road off the middle of nowhere, that he questioned whether he hadn't landed in a random village very far away. Screams and giggles erupted from cheery voices some ways off, and to this tune, he stood on wobbly, weakened knees.
The sudden heat of where he was fell over him like a sheet of stale fire and oppressed him immediately - but did that even mean? It was cold and damp when he had left, and, at this time of year (and usually), it was probably cold in the entirety of England, whereas here, the weather seemed like that of a swamp's. A mosquito landed on his neck.
He swallowed hard. Could he really have landed in a completely different country? The thought petrified him: he was already a dimwit at finding his way around his own country, let alone returning to it from someplace he didn't even know the name of. A stone dropped in his stomach, that bad feeling he had had at the beginning festering like a deep wound within him.
Almost falling once more but gathering all the strength he still had, he finally stood erect and looked at his surroundings when an ancient motorcar that looked more like a carriage than a mechanic vehicle rounded the corner and honked at him, not even bothering to stop.
He stumbled out of the way as the driver popped his head out and cursed at him unintelligibly. Frazzled and unsteady, he thought of the car, the road, the old-timey music. The feeling grew and would not rest, and his inner exhilaration became more and more inflamed with each second that passed.
He was about to walk away when he noticed something on the ground where he had landed, untouched by the car and not even slightly dusty. It was the black orb - the Portkey - that had gotten him here, glowing with a purplish sheen to its black depths.
Harry walked over to it and picked it up without thinking too much of it. After all, what could it do? Send him someplace else? No, he knew from experience that though its magic might not have been extinguished completely, it wouldn't work anymore unless it was charmed once again and set someplace else. Holding it in his hands, he noticed that aside from the indigo hue it had, it seemed like there was something like golden sand shifting within it.
Curious. He couldn't help but wonder who had set it there, why, and why this ball?
It seemed valuable - maybe it was just a trinket, but its heaviness and the beauty of its colors suggested otherwise. So why not use something else as a Portkey?
He pocketed it and looked ahead. The streets where he stood were mostly deserted, dark, without even the dimmest streetlight in it to brighten the starless night. Up ahead, however, it seemed that civilization began, and that was where he headed. He walked slow and measured, as if afraid of what he might find in the bright, golden-lit streets that raved and roared before him.
He couldn't explain why, but he felt odd and out of place, even more than he should've considering how he had gotten here. But he felt that, aside from being a stranger, he didn't belong in a place like this, like he was completely out of his element. His walk to the hustle and bustle of the center was too short to his liking, even though he had to gather information and get out of there as soon as he could, but he was still apprehensive about finding anything.
Sure enough, where that dark street had ended, life had begun. People were milling about carelessly and drunkenly, screaming at each other and laughing, shouting insults in the oddest accent. Harry walked glued to the shadows provided by the walls of several low buildings, taking it all in and praying he would pass unperceived.
He gathered that he definitely wasn't in England, or Scotland, or anywhere near for that matter, from the accents. He reckoned he was somewhere in the United States, but from what little he had seen of the country from TV or heard in the radio, he couldn't say for certain where in the United States.
It was a big country. But even that detail, of being in another continent altogether, seemed dim next to the other things he noticed—namely, the people's clothing. The old-timey music was perfectly in tune with their attire, and it was as though all the people that rushed about and took swigs from their whiskey around him were in some period drama that aunt Petunia enjoyed watching.
He watched the men with their items of clothing that he couldn't name but thought were sorts of formal, well-tailored jackets and sturdy hats. Some of them wore tall, strange boots, others more of the cowboy sort, but there was not a sneaker in sight.
The men twirled their mustaches and slicked them with what Harry thought was oil. However, the women's attire shocked him the most, what with their layered dresses going down past their knees and their carefully done hair.
Even their makeup seemed strange. Their faces pale in the extreme with bright pink circles where they had painted themselves with rouge. Alright, alright. He tried to reason it, tried to find some sort of logical explanation for it.
Maybe he had stumbled into a studio, one where they were filming some period piece set in the United States. But there were no cameras. The people were clearly not acting but rather going to and fro at their ease, evidently not posing or doing anything other than living their regular lives.
Their expressions were those of ordinary people. Harry's head began to swim when he couldn't find a reasonable explanation, but he also found himself incapable of really digesting the world around him. His rationality was screaming, his heart was screaming, and he was about to start screaming.
He wanted to stop some random woman in the street, take her by the shoulders, and bellow: 'WHAT IS GOING ON?' Into her face, but his inability to act and his befuddlement stopped him. Through it all, he kept walking, quicker and quicker, as if he could run back to Britain, run back to his year.
Because there was no other explanation to what he was seeing: the Portkey had set him back in time. His head was about to explode.
He felt like a quiet farmer who had suddenly been plopped in the middle of Tokyo, screaming cars, neon signs, and everything. He was overloaded with everything around him, and soon enough, his frantic walking and his desperate expression began to attract looks.
It took only one person pointing at him to get many different people staring in his direction.
He began to walk faster, feeling the need to escape their accusatory eyes, wanting to contradict them, to explain that he wasn't the strange one in this situation, that it was them, what with their strange accents and old clothing. But it wasn't true - he was the oddity.
He ran past different shops, his out-of-place appearance drawing far too much attention, more and more people noticing him and looking at him as people do an animal at a zoo. He suddenly felt someone grab him. Harry jumped, startled.
Was he going to be beaten? Is that a thing that happened to people that looked weird in this time, in this place? He fought against it at first, but the grip was strong. Looking at the man who had grabbed him, he couldn't make out any of his features due to the heavy, worn black cloak that he had draped around him. "Stay still, kid.
If I'm right, you got no one in the world, so you best come with me," the man said in a gruff, metal-like voice. His accent was so thick Harry only barely made out what he said. The man was right, of course, but for all, he knew he would take him to some deserted street corner like the one where he had landed and execute him. But he ceded anyway - after all, he was already lost.