The Portkey Solution

CHAPTER 4 - A Little Personal History

Harry jumped up to get something to clean his spilled drink, cursing and trying to keep it down so Staci wouldn't hear such language. She laughed.

"Leave it, Harry. We can magic it up later if it stains. Want another?"

"No, I want you to tell me that again."

She leaned forward to look him full in the face. He noticed she was wearing glasses this morning, round like his but with a thin silver frame. His father had been the one to wear glasses, Harry remembered from his album of photos and the Mirror of Erised.

"Your father had family he never knew in the United States. My dad discovered the connection two years ago. We knew your story--our family stays much more informed of international events than the average US citizen. Dad traced our Potter roots back down to your father and you, just to be sure. He and Mom started asking around and eventually sussed out Albus as being in charge of your welfare, and we've been pestering him ever since to allow us to take you in. He kept insisting that it had to be the Dursleys, that his protections couldn't be altered. He's known our family for ages, but he wouldn't change what he had set up no matter how wretched it was for you living with those wastes of good organs.

"When we heard the news about Voldemort returning, Grandpa kicked our information department into high gear. We scoured libraries everywhere for information on protective wards. We deciphered the protections that Dumbledore used and learned the spells in order to transfer them to another relative. When school let out for the summer and Albus gave no sign of changing his mind, I volunteered to be the watcher on the scene. At first I just monitored from a distance: drive-bys and such. I started watching physically most of every day after my dad alerted me that what little Death Eater activity there was had gone quiet, as if they were planning something.

"Then someone sent that fake letter and all hell was going to break loose, so I got you out of there and worked the spell to transfer the protections. They will work just as well--better, even--if you're staying with us. Well, me, specifically. There was an extra level to the spell and I took it. I had to use a touch of our blood to do it--"

"Blood?" Harry paled and jumped to his feet, remembering the last time he had bled for a spell.

Staci stood up and took him by the shoulders. "Yes, but not like that. Not like what Voldemort did. Pinpricks on our thumbs. If there had been any other way to shift the spell off the Dursleys and know it would stick, I would have taken it, Harry."

He felt he had a number of things he wanted to say in reply to that, but all he could get out around the tightness in his throat was, "Why?"

"Why did we act?" Staci frowned, unsure of his meaning.

"No. Why did Dumbledore leave me there?"

Harry turned and looked at the sea, watching the waves come in and crest, one after the other, in an endless cycle. It reminded him of his dealings with Voldemort, who kept returning with no end in sight. The wind blew his hair off his face, revealing the thin scar zigzagging down above one eye. But instead of calming him as he had hoped, the waves seemed to increase the growing anger inside him, as the years with the Dursleys had grown worse and worse, especially after Harry had been told of his magical heritage. He slammed a fist down on the railing and was dimly aware of pain lancing his hand.

"Why did he leave me with them? They hated me! They lied about what happened to my parents and refused to tell me anything about them!" Harry could sense Staci moving behind him and wondered if she were going to try and hug it away, the way Mrs. Weasley might react.

"I lived there like a slave, expected to cook and clean and garden without so much as a thank you! I was expected to be grateful for Dudley's old clothes and a cupboard to sleep in and tape to repair my glasses when Dudley broke them! And no matter how often I tried to tell them I didn't know why odd things happened around me, they never believed me! Never! And they knew about me the entire time!" He could feel tears stinging his eyes, but was too angry to let them out. "And when I came back for summers, the only way I could make it there was to trick them, threaten them, or run away! Why did I have to live like that? Why?"

Dimly, in the back of his mind, the rational part of him was aghast at this display of temper. What was he doing, raging like this at the person who had gotten him out of his prison? She would send him back, realizing what a nuisance he was, not worth keeping, not worth helping.

Staci waited until his words stopped spilling out in a torrent, hoping he would take the next step on his own. Instead he turned back to watch the ocean again, trying to regain that calm exterior that had undoubtedly been his defence for so long. Before that could happen, she turned him around and pulled his chin up so he would meet her eyes.

"Why did Albus leave you there? At the time, they were the only family he knew of and he needed a blood relative to set the protections that he did. Why didn't he agree to let us have you when we discovered the connection? I truly don't know. I've known Albus all my life; he is one of the greatest wizards ever. But he also has this streak in him--he won't change a plan until he's forced to. My guess is that it started when your parents died--when he failed to convince your dad to make him their Secret-Keeper and they were killed.

"Why were the Dursleys so hateful? In their twisted, bigoted way, they thought they were doing the right thing by trying to prevent your becoming a wizard. They were grossly unfair in their methods and certainly made just about every mistake there is...oh, Harry, there's no use dancing around it. They abused you. They deserve your hate. But if you bottle up that hate, or the guilt you must still feel over the Diggory boy's murder--"

Harry jumped as if she'd brushed him with a live wire, and scrubbed at his eyes violently under his glasses. "How do you know what I feel?"

"I was eavesdropping on the house, remember? The protections were designed to trigger at the use of active spells, so I used an Invisibility Cloak, which is passive magic, and ordinary tools like a sound enhancer and binoculars. I heard how the Dursleys treated you this summer. And I heard you when you were having nightmares. You had one last night, as a matter of fact, before I cast a strong enough Restful Sleep Charm to help you banish it.

"Harry, holding all that in is not healthy for your mind or your emotions. I swear to you now, anything you don't want me to repeat, I won't. If you'd rather share it with your friends, that's fine. If you want to try writing in a journal, I can show you how to lock it away magically in a computer drive or simply spell-lock a notebook. But get it out of your head before it builds up to a point that your next explosion levels the house. You're still a young wizard; losing control is all too easy."

Now she hugged him, a simple squeezing embrace that didn't last long. Not a mother's embrace--Harry felt a much different kind of caring from her. Mrs. Weasley had wanted to take the pain away for him. Staci wanted to help him learn how to take it away himself. He was reminded strongly of the Weasley boys and Ginny and, oddly enough, of Colin Creevey and his little brother Dennis. It took him a moment to put the seemingly unconnected thoughts together: Staci was acting like a big sister.

He managed a weak grin and voiced that thought. "So, how many kid brothers and sisters do you have, to be such an expert?"

Her face lost all expression for a second, so briefly that Harry almost thought he imagined it, then recovered. She answered in a controlled tone, "I don't have any."

As he had so many times before, in magic, in Quidditch, he followed an instinct. "But you did." She swallowed hard, but nodded. "What did you just tell me? To let it out?"

Staci gave a small chuckle. "Touché, mon ami." She put an arm around his shoulders. "Let's go down to the water and share, shall we?"

***

"What do you mean, he's no longer there?" The Dark Lord hissed furiously at the gaping circle of nervous faces around him. Macnair, one of his braver, if stupider minions dared to repeat the obvious.

"He's no longer there, Master. Wormtail saw the Muggle woman let some witch in, and after a few minutes he came out with his things and drove off with the with. He had no way to follow a Muggle car in his rat form, so we don't know where the boy is."

Voldemort spun and, lacking Wormtail's presence, threw the Cruciatus Curse at Macnair instead, who stayed on his feet for several seconds before collapsing in agony. "I don't need you to repeat the obvious! I need you to find the boy!" He spun around and leaned over another minion, smarter but with too much ambition. "Malfoy, it seems that your little idea has had the opposite effect from your intentions. Instead of a Harry Potter cast out of his protection, he is now currently somewhere completely unknown to us!" Another Cruciatus Curse and Malfoy immediately joined Macnair in writhing on the ground. Voldemort's gaze swept through the rest of his still-incomplete circle--far, far too incomplete--and rested on the one who had come back late to the fold.

"Snape, I charge you. You have spent the last four years in close proximity to Harry Potter. You still have the fool Dumbledore's confidence. Use it. Discover the whereabouts of Harry Potter before he returns to Hogwarts and I will reward you greatly."

The sallow, greasy-haired Potions Master of Hogwarts bowed low. "Master, I will not rest until I can provide you with accurate information."

"See that you do, Snape. You were late in rejoining us. You must prove your loyalty to me many times over before I consider you a true Death Eater again."

***

The sat on the sand, digging bare toes into its silky warmth. Staci pulled out her comb, regathered her hair in it, and began talking.

"You're rather scarily perceptive sometimes, you know that?" She paused, looking out over the water the way she had earlier. "Yes, I had a little brother. He would have been twenty-one on his last birthday. It always felt like just the two of us, with our sister Lise being eleven years older than me and never very sisterly."

Harry waited as she paused again, this time in remembering. "We were down in North Carolina, visiting relatives in the area and giving me an opportunity to check out Appalachian State University." At Harry's surprised look, she nodded. "Yeah, the Patterson family tradition is a wizard boarding school and a regular college. Anyway, Mom and Dad were visiting with the aunts & uncles that live in that area and the cousins were all hanging out on campus. I wanted to stay longer, talk to some of the students, but I had driven there. I had gotten my Apparating license not a month before, so I handed the car keys to my cousin Spencer so he could drive the rest home.

"It was a drunk driver. Who the hell gets drunk at four-thirty in the afternoon? But he had an alcohol level of over 0.2, according to his autopsy. Went right through the intersection against the light and ploughed into the driver's side.

"Spence was killed instantly. My brother Ben died at the scene. The four other cousins in the car survived."

Staci buried her face in her hands a minute. "I had no idea until I Apparated to Uncle Max's house that anything was wrong. My mom attacked me like it was my fault--"

"But it wasn't!" Harry interrupted fiercely. "It wasn't your fault at all! No one can prevent an accident like that!"

Staci smiled thinly. "That's true. But it took a very long time for me to accept that. I spent months in a depression and years still convinced that if I'd been driving I could have avoided the crash. Or I could have magicked the oncoming car to stop or I could have used medicine or magic to keep Ben alive until the ambulance got there--the other cousins were all younger, hadn't had the training Spence and I had.

"Mom and I eventually forgave each other, and I chose to attend college in New York instead, distancing myself from my parents and that branch of the family for a while. And I took classes to qualify myself as an emergency medical technician alongside my mediwizard training."

"And I finally mourned my brother. It took a long time for me to really heal from his loss, just as it will take you a long time to truly mourn the Diggory boy's--"

"Cedric," Harry corrected absently, looking out at the grey-green water.

"Cedric's death. But the first step you have to take is to realize that it was not your fault."

Harry snapped his head back to look at her. "But I told him to take the cup with me!"

"Would you have done so if you'd known it was a trap?"

"No! Of course not!"

"Then the person to blame in this situation is Voldemort. He set the trap. He chose to kill Cedric rather than injure or release him." She reached out and took his hands, encouraging him to keep looking at her. "You were only doing what felt right to you. Cedric was refusing to take the win for himself, and he would probably have been killed anyway if he did. Did you ever realize that? If Cedric or either of the other champions had made it to the cup first despite Crouch's efforts, Voldemort would surely have killed them anyway. But because he was stupid enough to follow his need for vengeance, you lived and were able to escape. It is not your fault that Cedric died anymore than it was my fault that a drunk driver ploughed into the car carrying my brother and cousins."

Harry felt the anguish building in him and screwed his face up in order not to cry. Staci put an am around him and pulled him close, not bothering to hide the tears that were forming in her eyes. "Let it out, Harry. I know it hurts, but keeping it in will only hurt more."

She said no more, but continued to hold him, stroking his hair and looking at the water as if she had all the time in the world. He struggled with himself for a few minutes, but was finally able to let himself cry with her.

***

After his tears had run their course for the moment, Staci got up and pulled him to his feet. She raised her glasses and scrubbed her eyes with one hand. "Let's go clean up a bit. I don't know about you, but I'm getting hungry."

Harry nodded and followed her back up the path. He felt somewhat better, as if a huge burden on him had been shifted and was a little easier to carry. He missed something Staci said and tried to listen harder in the strong breeze.

"--need to inventory the kitchen and go shopping. You'll have to tell me some of the things you like to eat. And of course we need supplies for Monday."

"What's Monday?" Harry asked without thinking.

"Besides your birthday?" At Harry's surprised look she grinned. "Albus will be bringing a few guests for a birthday party."

"A party?" Harry lit up with delight at the thought and jumped the last few steps to the deck. A real birthday party at last!

He was almost to the sliding glass door when the pain seared across his scar.