The Park

Harry rested his cheek against the cold links of one of the swing's chains. Had its seat always been so narrow? Long ago, he'd often caught sight of the play park from the back seat of Aunt Petunia's car and dreamt of being one of those kids there, his patient mother waiting on a bench and warning him not to swing too high. Now he was sixteen, and too old for it, but there was nowhere else to go. He was barely even welcome in the house.

So, even though he wasn't supposed to, he'd come here to sit and think about -

Had that been a person in the twilight, along the bushes there? Dudley's gang, he thought, his stomach clenching, but when he turned to look the shadows were completely still.

He leaned back against the chain, pushing himself back and forth with the toe of one trainer. He'd come here to think about - school. He'd come here to think about school.

It wasn't a very pleasant place, Stonewall Comp. Even if he hadn't put people off right from the start with his elephant-skin-looking uniform and tatty book bag and broken NHS glasses, the fact that he was forbidden to go round anyone else's house after school (let alone bring anyone back to Privet Drive!) meant that he'd ended up spending a lot of his lunchtimes in the library, which was always deserted. Still, he hadn't done so badly, using his slightness to keep unnoticed, for the main part. After the initial being laughed at, even the really scary Year Elevens with parole officers had forgotten he existed, and that had been better than more years of being a punching bag for some new Dudley.

If anyone had asked his teachers about him, he thought, they probably wouldn't have much to say. Harry Potter? Small boy, I think. Yes, I taught him. Quiet, but he usually did quite well.

To his surprise, he felt a tear trickle down his cheek, sliding down between his skin and the chain. At least it was dark; nobody could see.

It was just that all the memories he had to think about weren't much. Girls he'd admired from a distance. A few times, during group projects, when he'd felt as though he had friends. The peaceful interlude of the long, long walk to school.

The street lights flickered on in a circle around the park, and Harry sprang to his feet. What had he been thinking? He wasn't allowed out after dark, in case he made mischief. How had it gotten this late? He could have sworn it had been light just a few moments ago.

***

"Look!" said Hermione, pointing over the kitchen table. "Pigwidgeon's brought yours back too."

"Oh, great," said Ron. "I told Dumbledore Harry was going to take it out on us if we kept not telling him anything. It's too dangerous. The owls aren't safe. I bet Dumbledore could make them safe."

"But do you think Harry's really returning our letters unopened?" pressed Hermione, checking hers over.

"Well, yeah," said Ron, reaching for another piece of toast. "What else could it be?"

"Maybe someone's stopping them, like that time with Dobby. Maybe someone's reading them and then making them look unopened," said Hermione, her tea arrested halfway to her mouth.

"Good thing we're not putting any information in them, then," said Ron, buttering his toast. "Where's the marmalade?"

"Last I saw, the twins had it," said Hermione. "Really, though, Ron--this could be serious."

"Oh, come on," said Ron. "This isn't like second year. There's Order members watching him all the time. I bet nothing goes on around Harry that Dumbledore doesn't know about. Harry's just being tetchy."

"Hmm," said Hermione, dissatisfied.

"Harry returned my letter," said Sirius, sitting down with the letter flat in front of him as if it were his breakfast.

"He did it to all of us," grumbled Ron.

"Have some toast, Sirius," said Hermione, pushing the plate over to Sirius.

"Well, I'm sure Dumbledore knows best," said Lupin, pulling out a chair next to Sirius, although he didn't sound completely convinced himself.

***

"I'm not going back to school?" gasped Harry. Usually he tried to keep as quiet as possible during these rare interviews with his aunt and uncle, but this time he'd almost fallen off the edge of their pristine sofa.

"I don't know why we didn't think of it sooner," huffed his Uncle Vernon. "You've got to get a job, my boy. Learn to earn a living like a decent person instead of mooching off your relatives."

"I happen to know a woman whose husband is a supermarket manager," said Aunt Petunia with slight distaste. "They're prepared to offer you a position for as long as you're able to behave properly."

"So no funny business!" roared Vernon.

"What funny business?" asked Harry, puzzled.

"Don't question me, my boy!" shouted his uncle, who, admittedly, looked slightly puzzled himself. "None of this . . . snottiness, laziness, none of the rubbish you got from your parents. Or you'll hear about it from me!"

"Yes, Uncle Vernon," said Harry.

"Right," said his uncle.

"You start on Monday," said his aunt. "You can walk there yourself."

"Get some exercise, scrawny boy like you," said his uncle in passing as he got up.

"MUUUM!" bellowed Dudley from upstairs. "CAN YOU GET ME ANOTHER DIET COKE? WITH ICE?"

"Of course, Diddyums!" fluted Aunt Petunia, and rushed to the kitchen.

Harry got up off the sofa at once, but then he just found himself standing in the middle of his uncle and aunt's living room. He didn't think he was technically allowed to leave school yet, but he had to do what Uncle Vernon said as long as he lived with the Dursleys, and he had nowhere else to go. In any case, Aunt Petunia's friend's husband would certainly fiddle the paperwork so that he was the right age.

Harry had gone over this list thousands of times in his cupboard: no other family. No friends who would take him in. No other choice.

He wasn't particularly good at any one subject, but he'd thought he could have been a teacher. Perhaps he could have worked for Social Services, making sure that kids like him found happy families. In a quiet place like Surrey, he might have been a policeman. He wouldn't have minded walking down the street, nodding to the locals and once in a while arresting a miniature Dudley for tagging the bus stop enclosures.

Of course, he'd once dreamed of leaving Surrey, but that was long ago. He'd always known, really, that he would be here forever.

He would have liked, at least, to finish his GCSEs.

But quickly, very quickly, he found these new ideas becoming normal, accepted fact, and the visions of Harry-teacher and Harry-Social-Services-worker and Harry-policeman . . . were gone.

And this, too, had happened thousands of times: finding that he had accepted something he had thought of, only days or hours or seconds before, as unbearable.

***

"What's Harry doing?" whispered Tonks, currently disguised as a completely average and unmemorable person, to her Harry-watching companion, Hestia Jones.

"He has left the house before," said Hestia, concern knotting her black eyebrows together under her wide-brimmed sunhat.

"But that was always in the evening, to go to the park," said Tonks. "I don't know where he's going now."

"If we follow him much longer, it's going to look suspicious," murmured Hestia.

Harry sped over a zebra crossing and hurried on down the street.

"I'd have thought that Harry would be paying more attention to people around him, considering the danger he knows he's in," said Tonks.

"So would I, actually," said Hestia, after a moment. Then she elbowed her friend. "Look, he's going into that place."

"Oh, it's just a supermarket," said Tonks, grinning. "His aunt obviously sent him shopping. Case solved."

"Still, you should follow him in. I'll Disillusion myself and wait here," said Hestia, heading for the shadows behind the building. She pressed the back of her hand to one of her pink cheeks. "It's so hot already, and it's not even eight a.m. yet."

Tonks strode toward the supermarket doors, balked a little at the way they opened automatically, and then passed into the cool air. "Where are you, Harry?" she whispered to herself, searching the aisles, seething as they were with Muggles of all sizes pushing trolleys and picking up toddlers and talking, talking into their hands.

***

By noon, the heat was shimmering over the car park as Harry corralled scattered trolleys and pushed long snakes of them back to their harbors.

He had gotten to go inside, in the cool, to mop up some spilled apple juice. Then, as he had been stacking some baked bean tins into an enormous baked bean tin monolith, a short man who Harry couldn't help thinking of as ratty-looking had come over and sniffed the tins. "Special offer, two for one," Harry had told him as cheerfully as he could (as per the manager's instructions). The man had taken the tin from his hand, smirking, but when Harry had turned to see what he was smirking about he had gone.

Harry must just have been particularly absent-minded that day, because later, in the car park, he'd almost run a long snake of trolleys into a tall, prepossessing woman who Harry could have sworn had just appeared in front of them. Aunt Petunia would not have approved of her long, tangled hair, but her hooded eyes would have appeared quite sultry . . . on anyone but her. Harry apologized repeatedly for almost knocking the woman over, but she just smiled and looked at him and, once she was out of his sight, laughed. As hot as it was, he almost felt himself shivering.

"You look done in, sweetheart," a friendly checkout lady had told him at the door. "Have a little rest. Come with me--I'm just going out to smoke, anyway."

"Thanks," swallowed Harry, who had been determined not to be lazy. He followed her out to a spot of shade between the bins.

For a moment, he had been astonished by her furiously red hair, but then on second glance he'd noticed the centimeters of steel-gray at her roots. "I'm Sue," she said kindly, puffing on her cigarette. "You look awfully young to be working here, love. I hope you don't mind my saying so. Then again, my boys always did look around ten. Then, suddenly, around sixteen, zoom! They were taller than I was. You boys are always that way. What's your name, then?"

"Harry," said Harry, hoping that he didn't still look around ten, as he was fifteen.

"You've just started here? I've never seen you before."

"Yes," said Harry, feeling a little tongue-tied.

"This your first job?"

"Yes," said Harry.

"Well, don't worry about having a break when you need one," said Sue. "And if Mr. Wattleton has a go at you, you tell me, all right?" She sighed, exhaling a long stream of smoke into the air.

Harry thought he heard someone coughing, but there was nobody there.

"Thanks," said Harry, feeling that he was about to choke on the warm feeling flooding his chest.

***

"What's going on now?" whispered Ginny urgently, leaning over the stair banisters.

"Shh!" her brothers told her in unison.

"We can't hear into the kitchen, but they've been doing some talking in the corridor," said Fred.

"Something has happened with Harry," George told her.

"He's all right, isn't he?"

"We think so," said Hermione. "Here, have my Ear. I'll take a turn with the doxies."

Through the Extendable Ear, Ginny heard Tonks finishing: "But they're his guardians, sir. He can't disobey them - not unless he wants to be chucked out on the street, which isn't what we want, either, sir."

"Nonetheless," said Professor Dumbledore's voice, very quietly, "Harry should have informed us. He knows that he puts himself in danger every time he leaves his aunt's house."

"More than twelve hours!" growled Professor Moody. "Right out there in public! And Tonks tells me he was talking to a Muggle--"

"Well, what's wrong with that, Mad-Eye?" argued Tonks.

"The Death Eaters want to kill him!" roared the grizzled Auror, apparently furious beyond coherent discussion.

"Harry is quite angry with us at the moment, I believe," Ginny heard Lupin's soft voice interject. "He has not been answering any of our owl post."

There was a pause. "I wasn't aware of this," said Dumbledore's voice.

"We've been keeping him in the dark, keeping him shut out from his friends--his life," said Sirius fiercely. "From affairs that intimately concern him."

Ginny thought she heard a muffled, reprimanding, "Sirius," but then Dumbledore was saying, "At least, no harm was done today. I shall send an owl to Harry immediately. Perhaps it will be necessary to remove Harry from Privet Drive sooner than I had hoped."

Ginny retracted the ear as surreptitiously as possible and then soared up the stairs to find Hermione and Ron. "Harry's coming to Grimmauld Place!" she called into the doxy-infested room she hung, panting, from the doorframe.

"About time!" said Ron, swatting at a doxy.

"Oh, dear," said Hermione.

"What do you mean, oh dear?" said Ginny, picking up some Doxycide.

"Well, he's not going to be in a very good mood, is he?" said Hermione.

"I wouldn't be, either," said Ginny darkly. "He should have been here, with us."

"He'll get over it," Ron advised them, "once he's got away from those foul Muggles and had some of Mum's cooking."

"Maybe," admitted Hermione, suppressing a smile.

After half an hour's hurried effort to catch up on the doxy problem, there were renewed sounds of argument from the stairs.

"No, Sirius," echoed Kingsley Shacklebolt's deep, authoritative tones. "We cannot risk your being seen, even through the Muggles' windows. How would Harry feel if you died because of him?"

Ron, Hermione and Ginny had by now frozen in place in an attempt to hear as much as possible. Sirius, however, seemed to have made no response. The sound of stomping moved up the stairs, past the doxy-infested room and into Buckbeak's bedroom.

The two Weasleys and Hermione scurried back down to find the twins. There were a few moments of wrestling over the Extendable Ears.

"Remus, I'd like you to come," the Headmaster was saying.

"Albus, I--"

"Don't worry about your clothes," Dumbledore said kindly. "Harry trusts you." He went on, a little more loudly: "We'll limit our initial number to Kingsley, Remus and myself, in order to startle Harry's aunt and uncle as little as possible. However, should anything go amiss, I trust the rest of you will remain alert for our signal?"

"Of course, Albus," said Mr. Weasley.

"In that situation, please remember that your first priority is to use your Portkeys to bring Harry back to Grimmauld Place."

"You don't think it'll come to that?" Tonks broke in.

"Harry has not responded to my urgent letter--indeed, has not received it," said Dumbledore. "I cannot help but fear that something has occurred of which we are not aware."

The door creaked open.

Ron turned to the two girls. "Bugger," he breathed.

***

Looking out from the Dursleys' front step into Privet Drive, his back to Dumbledore's and Kingsley's, Lupin spotted Mrs. Figg at her kitchen window and gave her a surreptitious smile

Dumbledore pressed the doorbell once, and the three of them heard a complicated little tune ringing through the house.

The door opened to reveal Petunia Dursley's horsey face, which took one look at Dumbledore's long hair and beard and half-moon glasses and snapped, "We don't want any!" The door slammed again.

"That went well, I thought," said Lupin wryly.

"Perhaps you'd like to try, Kingsley," said Dumbledore.

The Auror rang the bell again, and this time it was Vernon Dursley who opened it. Before he could say anything, however, Shacklebolt was greeting him in that calm bass of his: "Good evening, Mr. Dursley."

"Yes--" said Harry's uncle, his eyes darting to the weird-looking old man and poor-looking younger man behind Shacklebolt.

"We need to speak with you concerning your nephew, Harry," Shacklebolt began.

"We're not responsible for anything he does!" puffed Mr. Dursley in a near-shout. He was already going red in the face.

"Of course not," Shacklebolt agreed. "Just a few moments of your time, please." And then he was walking through the door, flanked by Dumbledore and Lupin, still scanning the empty street outside.

"Ah," gaped Harry's uncle, and followed them into his living room.

As summer was at its fullest peak, the glow in the west had not yet completely dimmed, despite the very late hour. Harry hurried home through the twilight, then, chomping out-of-date crisps - his only meal that day, since he had had neither food nor money from Aunt Petunia - that he'd scavenged from the supermarket's rubbish. He knew that his having been at work literally all day would not excuse him from his uncle's wrath should he arrive home past dark. He swallowed, and the crisps scratched his throat, the unfamiliar vinegar taste burning his dry lips.

He turned onto Privet Drive, and noticed at once that the lights were still on in the Dursleys' front room. This was unusual enough, but there were more than three shadows moving there, and as he drew closer he heard shouting. He broke into a run.

"Vernon, I've never met this man before!" Aunt Petunia sounded close to tears.

"D'you think I'll believe the word of some . . . hippie before I believe my wife?" Uncle Vernon was roaring. "Get out, the lot of you! I don't know what your game is supposed to be but, believe me, the police will be hearing about this in the morning."

Harry scrambled with the lock, going over and over the day in his head. It couldn't have anything to do with him! He didn't know anyone who could possibly be classed as a hippie, even by Dursley standards.

Then there was a steady bass voice saying something Harry couldn't make out, and Aunt Petunia was screeching, "Call the police NOW, Dudders!"

"It's not working, Mum!"

"YOU'VE DONE SOMETHING TO THE PHONE, HAVEN'T YOU?" That was Uncle Vernon. He sounded apoplectic. Harry was sweating.

Harry stumbled past the door and into the living room just as a quiet, polite voice was saying, "Actually, I believe in England the number is nine-nine-nine, not nine-one-one."

Harry skidded into the room, and Dudley dropped the phone, which dangled just above the carpet, buzzing with the static of an unengaged line.

"YOU!" roared Uncle Vernon, grabbing him by the collar. "DO YOU KNOW THESE PEOPLE?"

For the first time, Harry looked at the strangers. There were three of them: first, a tall and eminently majestic-looking black man with a bald head. Judging by his expression of iron composure and tolerance, he seemed to have been in the middle of trying to reason with Harry's uncle, and Harry felt a flush of embarrassment at his relatives' rudeness.

Then there was a slightly less tall but very ancient-looking man with glasses. This was obviously the "hippie"; his silver hair and beard were waist-length, and his blue eyes twinkled with life and energy in a way Uncle Vernon would naturally despise. Completely oblivious to anyone else's presence, this man's eyes were completely filled with what seemed like concern and compassion for Harry. Under this gaze, Harry felt himself flush even further.

Last of all--and Harry almost missed him--was a still man in a clean but very worn-looking brown suit. His age was hard to pinpoint, because he seemed both young but, well, worn, just like his clothes. He glanced out of the window and then looked back at Harry with what appeared to be affection.

All this observation took only a second or two, though. Then his uncle was shaking Harry and beginning to repeat the question.

"I don't know them, I swear!" gasped Harry.

"Harry?" said the old man, stepping forward.

"Who are you?" Harry began, but his words began to blur. His shirt strained around the neck, where his uncle was still clutching it. He felt a soft bounce of carpet on his knees, and then the whole world--relatives, strangers, sitting room, the darkness of the street outside--draining away, with perhaps, at the last spark of consciousness, a pair of arms closing around him.

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