Chapter 1: Alone
True misery was this: loneliness. Remaining completely and utterly isolated in a sea of strangers, knowing that you could never dare approach any one of them to appeal for help and instead being forced to suffer with the knowledge that the only way to extricate yourself from your current predicament was to wait, survive and hope for rescue.
Harry shifted uncomfortably against the cold metal bench on Platform 9b at King’s Cross Station and carefully used his feet to nudge his battered trunk closer towards his knees. He had been waiting for some time now; perhaps four or five interminable, uninterrupted hours of boredom that slowly transfigured into concern and from there to panic.
Uncle Vernon had been late before, certainly, but he had never completely failed to show up at all. Harry’s brow furrowed as he wondered if perhaps the Dursleys might have been involved in some terrible accident. Images of the family station wagon, twisted into a wreckage by the side of a busy motorway, assaulted his imagination.
There might be no love lost between Harry and his resentful guardians, but still he wished them no ill. Not that kind of bad luck, in any case.
Shaking his head to rid his mind of this latest foray into catastrophic thinking (this had been happening with increasing regularity since the terrible moment at the Ministry when he had watched Sirius slip through The Veil), Harry turned his dark thoughts instead to his memory of the conversation between himself, Ron and Hermione as they bade each other farewell outside the entryway to Platform 9 ¾ .
“Remember, Harry, it’s just three weeks – Christmas break will be over before you know it and you will be back on the Hogwarts Express in no time, alright?” Hermione had been desperately trying to reassure herself as much as Harry since they had departed Hogwarts that he would not suffer too much at the hands of the Dursley family during this unexpected trip home for Christmas.
“I just don’t get why Dumbledore wouldn’t let you stay at school,” Ron frowned as he shoved a half-empty box of Bertie Botts Every Flavour Beans into Harry’s jacket pocket and fell into step beside his two friends. “It’s never been an issue any other Christmas, even when there was a ruddy great Basilisk roaming the pipes in the walls!”
“Ron,” Hermione sighed distractedly. She stopped suddenly, pulling the boys to a halt alongside her and leaned forward until her forehead was almost touching Harry’s tousled dark head and Ron’s ginger hair. She spoke in a low voice. “You know as well as I do that with Umbridge and the Ministry on the warpath, Hogwarts is not really safe for Harry when school is not in session. Obviously, Dumbledore thinks it too much of a risk to leave him there with so few staff and students roaming about the place. Umbridge and Fudge are looking for any excuse to remove Harry from the Headmaster’s influence. The holiday season would be the perfect opportunity to do that with as little fuss and interference as possible.”
Harry shrugged in frustration and stepped slightly away from the extreme proximity of his friends. “Yeah, Professor Dumbledore said as much to me,” he paused and gave a lopsided grin that was not reflected in the flat expression in his green eyes. “It doesn’t matter anyway. As you said, Hermione, it’s only three weeks, not an entire summer. It’ll pass by in no time.”
The truth, as Harry saw it, was that three weeks could feel like a very long time indeed when one spent that time locked in isolation in a cold bedroom with limited food and absolutely nothing to distract from the desolate truth that one is utterly unwelcome in the family home. This was especially true at Christmas.
He had begged Dumbledore to allow him to remain at Hogwarts over the break. When the elderly wizard had smiled sadly and then gazed slightly over Harry’s left shoulder as he resolutely refused his appeal for reasons of safety in numbers, or lack thereof, Harry had shifted his pleas to request a stay at The Burrow. It was a last resort option – after the tragic events at the Ministry and the danger that Harry had inadvertently brought upon his closest friends, he was very reluctant to involve the Weasley family in any situation that may endanger them. Housing Harry and allowing him to spend Christmas with their large family remained firmly, in his mind, under the heading of ‘Extremely Dangerous Things that No-one Should Face Simply Because a Homicidal Maniac Wants to Locate and Kill Harry Potter and Anyone Who Might Possibly Get in the Way’.
Harry thought it selfish, really, to have even asked such a thing. In any case, the headmaster had remained firm. Whilst continuing to avoid any direct eye contact with his student, Dumbledore issued a clear command: for the entire duration of the holidays, Harry would remain at 4 Privet Drive, Little Whinging.
***
Albus Dumbledore was a careful man. He prided himself on his keen sense of logic and knew that he was able to stay many steps ahead of others in most situations. Dumbledore knew that Cornelius Fudge, the current Minister for Magic, was not a careful man. In contrast to the Headmaster’s considered strategising as he viewed a possible problem from all angles, Fudge was far more likely to blunder his way through, making bumbling decisions that merely served to delay a problem rather than truly solve it.
Dumbledore liked to make meticulous plans. He liked to be ready for all possible eventualities. He did not like unexpected surprises. It was for this reason that the very same day that the students of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry arranged to depart the school for their holidays, the elderly wizard was making some rather secret arrangements of his own. He had sought and attained some new private accommodations. He did not anticipate that he would need to make use of such a potential bolthole over the yuletide season; however, at some point during the year, he was certain that circumstances would conspire to see him temporarily displaced as the headmaster of the school. Dumbledore intended to ensure that he was ready for this event.
Having completed making his arrangements for his carefully warded new home within 24 hours of departing the Headmaster’s office via Apparition (being Albus Dumbledore did allow him the rather convenient privilege of being the only person who could Apparate from within the castle wards), he was quite happy to arrive back in the Headmaster’s Quarters and settle in front of the fire with a lovely cup of lemon verbena tea and a slice of honey-sweet baklava.
As he enjoyed his morning tea, he continued to think through the problem at hand. It was no secret that the Ministry’s attempts to discredit himself and Harry Potter had been quite successful. Demoted from his position as Chief Warlock for the Wizengamot and vilified on a regular basis through increasingly ruthless articles in the Daily Prophet, Dumbledore knew that his eventual ousting as Headmaster would happen sooner rather than later.
As a man of considerable age, experience and intellect, these articles rarely bothered him. In fact, he felt that some of the claims bordered on downright entertaining, if not amusing. No, what concerned the Headmaster most was that Harry had also become a central figure in the Ministry’s smear campaign. The boy had suffered enough loss and heartbreak over the course of recent events after the unfortunate death of his godfather and Dumbledore was quite aware that Harry blamed himself for Sirius’s demise. It therefore greatly pained the elderly wizard that he was forced to maintain a distance between himself and Harry. Consequently, he was unable to offer any real emotional support to a desperate and hurting boy who sorely needed it.
As his thoughts remained fixed on Harry Potter’s current predicament, Dumbledore realised that he had yet to check the status of the locator spell that he had affixed to the property at 4 Privet Drive, Little Whinging, Surrey. A rather useful little bit of magic, the spell allowed him to check the identity and location of the current inhabitants of the dwelling.
Having observed with concern Harry’s summertime proclivities for wandering aimlessly around the neighbourhood, the Headmaster had found it necessary to keep an eye out that the grieving boy was at least returning to his relatives’ home each evening.
The locator spell was attached to one of the spindly instruments in his office, and whilst it did not allow him to actually see the physical presence of the occupants of 4 Privet Drive, it was very accurate in precisely recording the comings and goings of any residents or visitors to the property.
Carefully placing his teacup on the saucer on the arm of his comfortable fireside chair, the wizard departed down the winding stone staircase which led into his study. He paused before a rather delicate whirring instrument that vaguely resembled a carriage clock with a small rotating orb at its base, housed within a glass cloche. It was this unusual gadget that allowed Dumbledore to view the results of his locator spell and so he touched his wand to the crystalline orb seated at the base of the machine and leaned closer to the reflective surface of the bell jar.
A silvery blue fog obscured the formerly clear orb for a moment and he observed the clock face within as a list appeared of arrivals and departures at 4 Privet Drive that had taken place over the past 24 hours. A moment later, a deep frown settled on Dumbledore’s previously calm visage as he straightened. Despite his careful plans and forward thinking, something unforeseen had taken place whilst he had been distracted with his own private arrangements. Something that concerned him deeply.
***
Harry pulled the woefully thin fabric of his hooded sweatshirt closer to his chest and fisted his hands in the ends of his sleeves. He shuddered involuntarily in the frosty December morning air. Harry had been forced to depart the shelter of King’s Cross Station during the early hours of the morning when a decidedly unfriendly security guard had moved him on with a stern warning of “No loitering!”.
Having no Muggle money in his possession and not wanting to disappoint Dumbledore by hailing the Knight Bus when the elderly wizard had very firmly and expressly instructed Harry that he was to return to Privet Drive and nowhere else in the Wizarding or Muggle worlds, Harry had been forced to spend the earliest hours of the morning wandering in small circles on the dirty concourse in front of the station. His Muggle clothing had been woefully inadequate for the London winter chill, so the limited exercise had helped somewhat to keep Harry a little warm as he waited for an appropriate time to re-enter the station and return to his vigil at Platform 9b.
A muted grey dawn had finally dressed the concourse in its drab vestments when Harry decided that he had endured enough of the freezing temperatures outside. His panic over the non-arrival of the Dursleys had dissipated over the course of the long and lonely hours of the previous night. Instead, a quiet indignation had settled in Harry’s heart. He had admitted to himself at some stage during his lengthy vigil that he had not, in fact, been forgotten. The most likely scenario that had presented itself to him was that the Dursleys had simply decided to neglect to retrieve him from the station. He could imagine Vernon Dursley’s rapidly purpling face as he read the missive from Dumbledore that commanded that Harry spend the first Christmas in Little Whinging since his attendance at Hogwarts.
Smirking to himself, Harry had idly wondered if any communication from the headmaster might, perhaps, have arrived by owl-post. That in and of itself would have thrown Uncle Vernon into an apoplectic rage over ‘those ruddy freaks and their ruddy owls’. Sadly, it was all too easy to then imagine the conversation between his aunt and uncle about Harry’s punishment for bringing such ‘freakishness’ into the Dursley household.
Undoubtedly, part of Harry’s sentence had already been commuted – spending an uncomfortable night alone at the train station to think on his transgressions. It was unfortunate that Harry had not anticipated this. If he had at least had the opportunity to gather together a small amount of Muggle currency, he could have spent the night in much more comfortable circumstances at a nearby hotel and then returned to the station to await the eventual reluctant arrival of his relatives. It was with these grim thoughts that Harry slouched his damp and shivering way through the thin crowd of early morning commuters and returned to the same bench that he had inhabited for most of yesterday.
His eyes itching with fatigue, Harry observed the surge of passengers who bustled forward as a train arrived on the platform in front of him. As weary as he felt after the restless pacing and endless wait through the long night hours, he knew it was not safe to rest easy. Dumbledore had impressed upon him the fact that Harry’s safety relied upon his return to the Blood Wards at Privet Drive. Although Voldemort appeared to be keeping a low profile, Harry was not foolish enough to presume that he was not at risk from attacks from his followers. It would also appear that the Ministry now had it in for him. The tone of the articles that initially had scathingly mocked Harry while doubting Dumbledore’s sanity now held more sinister undertones. Questions had been raised concerning a ‘darkness within’ the Boy-Who-Lived.
Harry sighed and shook his head. It seemed that he could never be free of attention from the wizarding world, positive or otherwise. Rita Skeeter had somehow wrangled her way into interviewing several of Harry’s fellow students, who had conveniently mentioned just about every possible example of his behaving in strange and disturbing ways during his time as a student at Hogwarts. These anecdotes had been quoted with relish by the malicious journalist and her poison quill. Her articles included stories about Harry speaking Parseltongue during his second year at Hogwarts and vivid recounts of him clutching at his scar and moaning while collapsing from his chair during lessons.
No, it would not do at all to let his guard down while he was so exposed, even if he was alone in the supposed safety of the Muggle world.
***
“Severus, I would have a word with you now if you are able,” the Headmaster’s voice issued its firm command from the Potions Master’s Floo connection in his private residence.
Severus sighed irritably. It was the very first day of his winter leave and as it was, he was incredibly rushed to finalise arrangements for his departure for the Scandinavian Peninsula. It had been quite a number of years since Severus had deigned to return to the family bosom and he was more than a little apprehensive about his decision to spend the holiday season with his aunt and her family. It was due to the Headmaster’s meddlesome ways that Severus had been forced into the untenable position where he must now spend ‘quality time’ with his family and here was the infernal man commanding a private audience with him mere hours before he was due to depart.
Severus knelt in front of the fireplace and scowled deeply at the wizened visage of the Headmaster that currently bobbed sedately in the green flames. “I have very little time, but of course, Headmaster, I will make myself available, as ever.”
“Thank you, Severus. I assure you that I will endeavour not to waste your valuable time. The matter is, however, of the utmost importance,” Dumbledore’s expression was grave and his tone clipped enough that the younger wizard tilted his head in acquiescence.
“Would you prefer to step through?” he inquired, matching the gravity of the Headmaster’s tone of voice. The issue at hand was clearly no trifling matter. The older wizard was usually one for expressing all manner of irritating trivialities and well-wishes before finally meandering to his eventual point.
“Yes, I think it best that we speak in person, Severus, thank you.”
Severus stood aside and watched as the lean form of Albus Dumbledore emerged from the Floo. Without even bothering to dust himself off or properly greet his employee, he placed his hand on Severus’s shoulder and allowed his faded blue eyes to meet the depth-less black gaze before he spoke.
“Harry Potter is missing.”
Chapter 1