Halloween, 1981

Godric's Hollow:

"Lily, take Harry and get out!" James yelled. "Run! I'll hold him off!" He raced to the front entrance of the small cottage, knowing he didn't have a hope in hell of defeating the most powerful dark wizard in the world. All he could do was buy some time for Lily to get Harry to safety.

Lily darted upstairs, fear congealing in her insides. She knew she had but moments to escape. One single thought was in her mind. She had to save Harry. Nothing else mattered. Upon reaching the nursery, she grabbed her son, who had woken from all the shouting and the explosion downstairs, and started to bawl.

"Shhh, baby. Mama's here. Don't be afraid." She rocked the fifteen month old back and forth, and cast the strongest protective charm she could about them both. She could smell the scent of ozone in the air and burnt wood and she knew with a dull ache that James was dead. She turned to Apparate, but a sudden wave of dizziness came over her and she staggered, nearly falling to the floor. The charm had taken more out of her than expected and she felt terribly weak.

Before she could muster her fading strength and hide Harry, the door to the nursery was kicked open and a gaunt figure in a black robe entered. He was tall and his face had once been handsome, but was now drawn and lined with the mark of his dark craft. For the dark magic always exacted a price, and though Voldemort often used others to take the price of spells from him, there were some spells that could not be transferred in that manner, and those all took a toll upon the caster. Lank hair hung down past his shoulders and his eyes were stark and cold, like that of the snake which was his familiar.

His aura was smothering, a darkness so vast that it threatened to cut off her air and steal her breath. But she fought against it, cuddling her baby protectively against her shoulder. She pointed her wand at the invader and snarled, "Go back to the hell that spawned you, warlock!"

Voldemort laughed mockingly. "Step aside, woman! I am after one thing only. Give me the brat and I shall spare you."

"Never! Reducto!"

But her curse rebounded off his shields and she fell, landing hard on her backside, Harry tumbling from her grip.

Voldemort giggled insanely. "Foolish Mudblood! Thinking you can stand against me! I am the Destroyer and I have come to claim my dark successor!"

"No!" Lily howled. She did not know how Voldemort had discovered the secret she and James had concealed ever since Harry's birth, but somehow they had been betrayed and now he would kill to get her son. Her very special baby boy, whom she loved like she had never loved anything else in the world. "I'd rather die than see you touch him, you filthy bastard!"

"Then say goodbye, witch!" Voldemort leveled his wand and she saw the green killing energy spark along its length.

"MAMA-A-A!"

The wail was torn from the toddler's throat, a high-pitched screech of fear and anger. Harry didn't like this scary dark man who had come into his home and shouted at his mama, making her scared. He saw the tears on her cheeks and that frightened him even more. He sensed that the dark man was bad . . . very bad . . .He lifted his face up and stared at the scary man, and something ancient and terrible roused within him.

The window pane cracked and shattered as the wind slammed into the side of the house and swirled into the room, gathering about the young wizard and his mother, blowing the long forelock of dark hair off Harry's forehead.

Voldemort grinned upon seeing the mark, the bold lightning bolt that confirmed his suspicions. His spy had been right after all. The Potter boy was the one. But first, he would remove the irritating Mudblood from his path. He started to speak the Killing Curse, the destructive energy coiling and hissing through him.

Harry glared at him, meeting his eyes.

Voldemort faltered. For the boy's eyes were glowing with energy, blazing with white fire.

In the next instant, a gigantic bolt of lightning smote the house. The roof exploded, splinters flying everywhere. Voldemort's spell was unleashed at that precise moment. The two magics collided and the resulting backlash of storm magic and Killing Curse tore Voldemort apart. One moment the dark wizard was standing there, and the next he was gone, burnt to ash which the wind swiftly scoured away.

Rain fell and thunder boomed and Harry began to cry again, his head hurt horribly and his mother lay still on the floor beside him, amid the smoking ruin of the second floor.

An hour later, Hagrid found the fifteen-month-old and took him away on Sirius' motorbike, and soon after several Aurors and medical personnel came and took Lily Potter away as well, to a private room in St. Mungos, where she remained in a coma for ten years, though there was not a mark on her, and her magic replenished itself over time. Her condition baffled the best Healers in Britain and even the specialists called in from the United States to study her. There was no physical or magical trauma that could be detected, yet Lily did not wake, not even when her best friend, Occlumens and Mind Healer Severus Snape, made attempts to contact her using his mind magic and astral projection.

Because Lily was incapacitated, James dead, and Sirius locked away in Azkaban, Harry was sent to live with the Dursleys on Privet Drive, because Dumbledore believed that blood wards would protect him best from the Dark Lord and his followers. And so Harry became the Boy-Who-Lived, and the scar was thought to be the mark of the Killing Curse which he had miraculously survived. Only three people knew the truth about the nascent stormcaller, and two were dead and one lost to the world.

Ten years later

Privet Drive, Surrey:

"This is all your fault, boy!" bellowed Uncle Vernon, his mustache quivering with rage. "You're the reason we're getting attacked by mail every day and those infernal owls are hovering everywhere, making the neighbors call Animal Control and mucking up our walk!" He picked up Harry by the front of his shirt and shook him hard.

"But Uncle Vernon, I don't know why this is happening!" protested the small ten-year-old, who was due to turn eleven in two days. "I didn't do anything, sir!"

"Bollocks! Every time something freaky happens, you've got something to do with it!" Vernon roared, shoving his face into Harry's. "Don't lie to me! You let the snake out of the zoo and now this!"

Harry coughed at the stale scent of cigars on Vernon's breath and wrinkled his nose. "I'm sorry, sir!" he apologized, even though he knew he hadn't done anything to cause this latest catastrophe, unlike the time he had electrocuted Dudley when he was six, causing his cousin's hair to stick up like a porcupine's and turn almost white for a month. Dudley had pushed him and stolen his toy dragon and he had gotten mad and pushed the other back, only somehow he had accidentally caused an electric shock to happen and though Dudley wasn't permanently injured, his uncle had given him the worst smacking of his life and locked him in the cupboard for nearly a week. Harry didn't want to risk that again, he was still sore from the zoo incident, and so he apologized.

"I'm sorry," he repeated, frightened now at the way Vernon's eyes were narrowed, like a mad boar's about to trample an enemy.

"Oh, now you're sorry," Vernon mocked, shaking his nephew slightly. "But if you didn't do anything, boy, why are you apologizing? Guilty conscience?"

Harry gulped. "No, sir. I don't know why the letters keep coming. I don't know anything about who's sending them." He started to panic. Vernon had to believe him. He wasn't lying. Please, not the cupboard. Not the cupboard again. The dank dark smelly cupboard, where he could barely turn about was the worst punishment. Harry hated being locked up, hated being trapped, hated not being able to see the sky or feel the breeze on his face.

He darted a glance at his aunt, thin horse-faced Petunia, whose pinched face radiated disapproval as she gathered up all the mysterious letters and burnt them in the fireplace. The letters had been arriving for weeks and nothing the Dursleys had done so far—boarding up the mail slot, the windows, cancelling the post delivery—worked to stop the letters from arriving. They arrived round the clock, flying in through whatever space was available and several kinds of owls perched all about the house and the yard, displaying distinctly odd and unusual behavior for nocturnal birds of prey.

Petunia knew what the letters were, of course, but she wanted nothing to do with wizards ever again and had vowed that her life would never be disrupted by freaks in long robes. She had taken in Lily's child on sufferance and couldn't wait till the day she could ship him off to St. Brutus', where they could beat the freakiness out of him for good and all. She prayed nightly for her sister to wake so she could take the green-eyed boy off her hands, but years had passed and Lily remained asleep. Just like Sleeping Beauty, Petunia thought sourly, with nary a thought to her brat and how much trouble it was to raise him. She received monthly updates in the regular post from Lily's doctor at that magical hospital, St. Murdo's or whatever it was called, but they were always the same, and she had long ago stopped reading them. She didn't know why the stupid wizards kept sending them to her if there was no change. Then again, Lily's chief doctor was that grimy Snape boy who used to live down the street from her as a boy, and he had always had a thing for Lily.

An owl tapped at the front window, making Petunia scream and Dudley fall off the couch where he had been watching the telly. It had a letter addressed to Harry Potter in its beak.

"That does it!" bellowed Vernon, his nerves shot. "Into the cupboard with you!"

"No!" Harry yelled, struggling in the big man's grip. "I just got out! It's not fair! Lemme go!"

"Quit your whinging!" Vernon growled, giving the boy a smart smack on the ear. "That's where freaks like you belong!"

Harry blinked back tears. His head hurt from his uncle's beefy hand, but that wasn't what was causing his stomach to cramp and his throat to tighten in rebellion. He couldn't stomach another minute in that hole. Not when he had already spent weeks in there. "I didn't do it!" he yelled, fighting like a wild thing. "It's not my fault! You're not locking me up again!"

Clouds began to gather out of a clear blue sky, dark and menacing.

But none of the Dursleys noticed because they weren't looking outside.

"Get in there, boy, and none of your lip!" Vernon threw Harry inside and slammed the door.

Harry landed hard on his knees and hands, bruising them. He spun and pounded the door frantically, fear surging up from his belly and making his mouth taste sour. "Let me out!"

A sudden anger boiled within him at the unfairness of it all, even though his life had never been fair. And with the anger came something raw and heavy, a burning sensation that made his eyes itch and tingle. He felt the hair on his head stand up and crackle with ambient energy and then there came a loud crack of thunder, followed by the howling screech of a seventy-mile-an-hour wind. Harry felt a throbbing behind his eyes and he reached with the power . . .summoning hot and cold fronts to him, calling upon the forces of nature to free him from his prison.

In the space of five minutes, a hurricane was born on Privet Drive.

It smashed into the house with titanic force, ripping, tearing, and destroying everything in its path. Timbers groaned and snapped, aluminum siding tore like toilet paper, roof shingles flew through the air like paper clips. The owls had long since flown away, sensing the impending disaster, and only the Dursleys caught the full impact of the killer gale. Within ten minutes, number four was reduced to bits of rubble, the roof collapsed in on itself, killing all inside.

All save one dark-haired boy, who had somehow been saved because he'd been inside a closet, and the freak storm, or so the neighbors later reported, had only wrecked the Dursley residence. No one else's house was touched.

Police and emergency rescue teams found the boy lying unconscious amid the wreckage and took him to the local trauma unit. He seemed to be all right save for bruises and a bump on the head and was declared a lucky survivor. But then he began running a fever, and the doctors could not seem to get it to go down, despite all the state of the art drugs they pumped into him. The pediatric Head feared for the boy's life . . . or sanity.

Until something odd happened.

The boy, who was as yet unidentified, disappeared from his hospital bed the next night, and was never seen again. The whole incident made the papers for months, but the mystery of the vanishing boy who had survived a house falling on top of him was never solved.

The next day

St. Mungos, London:

"Has his fever gone down at all since we've administered the stronger dosage?" inquired Healer Nicholson of his assistant.

"Yes, a bit."

"Good. I want to keep him sedated until we figure out what to do with him."

"What to do with him? I don't understand." his intern said, biting her lip. "He's a little boy who did some accidental magic, that's all."

The Healer snorted. "Oh no, Miss Nightengale, he's far more than that. Do you not recognize the scar? This is the Boy-Who-Lived, Harry Potter. We must take the best care of him, and right now he needs his rest, his magical core is very low."

"Oh! Is that why the Minister and Professor Dumbledore have been to visit?" she gasped.

"Yes." He cast a single glance at the boy asleep in the bed and then beckoned his intern out of the room.

In another room down the hall, three men were having a very heated discussion.

"But he's the Boy-Who-Lived! The scar is a result of deflecting the Killing Curse. His mother's sacrifice created a shield and it rebounded upon Voldemort," argued Dumbledore.

"No, Headmaster. I think you're mistaken," said a soft silky voice, it came from a tall man sitting to the right of the purple-garbed Headmaster. "That scar was not caused by magical means."

"Surely you're not referring to . . ." the stout Minister, Cornelius Fudge, trailed off in shock. "That's impossible! The last known record of one of them was over three centuries ago! You are grasping at straws, Snape."

"Am I?" asked Snape cooly, meeting the other's eyes with his obsidian ones. "Consider the circumstances. Ten years ago, when You-Know-Who came calling at Godric's Hollow, a massive storm was born that same night he and Potter perished. The only survivors were Lily and Harry. Now, the same thing has occurred. You know well that a stormcaller is immune to the effects of his own summoning."

"But then what of Lily? Why was she not killed too?" objected Dumbledore.

"Perhaps her magic protected her. Or he did, instinctively." Snape replied. "You cannot dismiss this because you don't wish to deal with the truth, ugly though it is, reality must be faced."

"But Severus, the gift is extremely rare, only one in a million even show a hint of it, much less the full blown ability," stuttered Fudge, his eyes wide with fear.

"The mark does not lie," Severus said implacably. "Every stormcaller since the dawn of man has borne the lightning bolt upon his person."

Fudge shuddered. "And every stormcaller born has gone mad and destroyed himself and those around him eventually. The last one caused the Great Fire of London! It took over thirty wizards and witches linked in a circle to stop him and even then the death toll was unbelievable. What do we do? Is there a way to make his powers dormant, Healer?"

Severus shook his head. "No. It's been tried before. Tampering with his mind and trying to repress the gift could result in making him insane and that would be disastrous for everyone."

"Is it safe for him to attend school?" Dumbledore mused.

"No!" Fudge cried. "He's a danger to everyone around him. If he should lose control again . . .Hogwarts could be destroyed. He must not attend, Headmaster!"

"But Cornelius, I have had his name down since before he was born," protested Albus.

"I forbid it! He's a menace! May Merlin forgive me, but perhaps we ought to . . . think about neutralizing him."

"Murder, Cornelius?" sneered Snape. "That's low even for you."

"I don't want to do it, but . . . you know what danger a true stormcaller can unleash, Severus."

"Yes," Snape said darkly. "But that doesn't give us the right to play God with a child's life. He needs to be trained. Taught to harness his power so he isn't such a danger to others."

"That won't do any good," snorted the Minister. "They all go mad and die eventually. The oldest one didn't even make it to seventeen. It would be far kinder to just . . ." he waved a hand.

Severus' gaze hardened. "I refuse to be a party to murder, no matter how prettily you phrase it, Minister. I am under oath as a Mind Healer. I save lives, not take them."

"Severus is right. We cannot judge Harry on what he might do," agreed Dumbledore. "We must allow him to prove himself."

"And who shall we find who is willing to mentor a stormcaller? There is no one alive now with the gift. Why risk it?"

"Because we are human beings, Minister, not soulless Death Eaters or Dementors," Snape cut in sternly. "The key to controlling any magical talent or spell is discipline. That can be taught."

"By whom? You're the strongest wizard we have, Albus, and even you couldn't do what he did!"

"True. But it's not power alone that determines a powerful wizard, Cornelius. Severus is right. Discipline and control are essential to controlling one's magic. And in that department I am bested only by one man." He inclined his head respectfully towards Severus. "Perhaps together we may be able to teach Harry."

Severus arched an eyebrow. "That's a big perhaps, Albus. But for the sake of his mother, I shall do so. Once he is awake, I shall speak with him. He's bound to be confused and afraid."

"Grieving too. His whole family was lost in that storm," Dumbledore reminded.

"Not all. His mother is not dead." Severus snapped.

"Humph! Might as well be for all the good she'll do us," muttered Fudge beneath his breath.

Snape's hands clenched and he struggled to keep from hexing the Minister. How such a fool had ever been voted into office was beyond him. He contented himself with mentally torching Fudge with his glare. "If you have no objections, I think it best if I take him to my home for the first stage of his training. It has strong wards and is out in the middle of nowhere. If a storm is summoned there, it can spend itself out on the moor without worry. I shall take a leave of absence for a few months."

"It's your hide, Snape," said the Minister. "I wash my hands of it. But if he starts displaying signs of instability . . .I will send in a Hit Squad. I will not have devastation like the Great Fire in my term of office."

Severus' eyes flashed and he stood up, ready to tear the Minister into shreds, but Dumbledore laid a hand on his arm, and Snape controlled himself. But it was a near thing. "Duly noted . . .sir," he gritted out. "When shall I draw up the papers for legal apprenticeship?"

Cornelius shrugged. "Whenever you wish. See my secretary, she'll take care of it."

"And now, if you'll excuse me, I have rounds." Gripping his wand in one white knuckled fist, he departed the room.

He visited two of his patients and released them, then his footsteps turned unerringly to the room at the far end of the Spell Damage Ward. Not a day went by when he didn't detour to this room, and spend a few moments just gazing down at the sleeping figure in the bed. Time had not touched Lily Potter much, she was still as beautiful as when Snape had fantasized about her in school. But he had never dared to ask her to marry him, always worshipping her in secret, for he was ashamed of his upbringing, and Lily had always been his friend. He did not want to lose that, and so he had held his tongue, to his own detriment.

Only now did he dare to admit that his feelings for Lily were and always had been a deep and abiding love. Now, when it was too late.

He approached her bed on cat's feet, his green robes rustling softly about his ankles. "Lily," he whispered. He always spoke to her when he visited, just in case she was listening. "Harry's come here too, though not to stay, I think. He'll recover from his bout of accidental magic soon and be good as new. Your sister and her family are dead . . .I'm afraid Harry unleashed his magic on them without knowing what he was doing. He's a stormcaller, Lil, the first one born in centuries, did you know that?"

He never expected an answer, he talked mostly because he couldn't stand treating her like a block of wood or a cadaver when she was still alive. Somewhere, her mind wandered, and someday it would return to him. It was that fragile hope that kept him returning and talking to her. He had to believe that, else Lily was truly lost, and he would have nothing left to cling to.

He reached out a hand to take her slender one in his own and it was then that a soft voice spoke, rusty with disuse. "I know, Sev."

Severus jerked up and gasped, looking down at Lily.

For the first time in ten years, her eyes were open and she was aware.