Harry couldn’t sleep that night. The revelation he had had earlier kept haunting him and his thoughts. Hermione had been used as a message. She had been attacked because of him, because she was his friend. She was innocent of all of this.
Harry threw off his covers and sat up. He picked up his glasses from the night table, stood up and left the room. Walking through the hallway, Harry continued to replay his thoughts over and over in his mind. This was not the first time that someone close to Harry had been a victim just to get at him. It infuriated him that people he cared for kept being hurt. Was no one safe around him?
He didn’t know how long he walked up and down the hall, but he soon found himself outside the door to Hermione and Ginny’s room. It was well past two in the morning, so he knew the girls would be asleep. Being the only upper year girls, they had gotten a room to themselves. . Harry knew he shouldn’t, but he reached out his hand and took hold of the doorknob. As quietly as he could, Harry slid the door open and peaked in.
Hermione was lying on her back, as she often did. She said that was the most comfortable position she had found since being brought here. However, even this was painful for her. The spell that had been used on her had apparently not dissipated or had left a lasting effect. Kevin and Sara had not been able to help her anymore then they already had. Ginny, however, was lying on her side, facing the door. Her eyes were closed and her face was illuminated by the moonlight streaking in from the window. Harry found himself staring at her a bit longer then he should have.
“You could get into a lot of trouble for that.”
Harry quickly turned around. Sara was standing behind him with a smile on her face. “Although, I don’t know, she may take it as a compliment.” She reached around him and closed the door.
Harry’s face went red at being caught. “I was just…” His mind was suddenly blank. What was he doing? Why had he left his bed? “I was just checking on them.”
“I see,” Sara replied. She placed a hand on Harry’s shoulder. “You care for your friends quite a bit, don’t you? And you would do anything to protect them. These are admirable qualities in a boy so young but understand this Harry; there are other people who look after them. You don’t have to put so much weight on your own shoulders.”
Harry thought this was an out of the blue statement. All he had been doing was looking in on Hermione and Ginny. He looked up into Sara’s eyes and felt a warmth envelope him. They seemed to be looking inside him, sensing his thoughts and feelings from the last four years. What did she know about everything that he had experiences? Had she, somehow, sensed the guilt he had been feeling all day towards Hermione’s injuries?
Sara suddenly became as much a mystery to Harry as Kevin was. These two strangers appear one day and begin treating him with a care that he has never known. Even when he stayed with the Weasley family, and he had been treated like a son, he had never felt like this. Kevin and Sara didn’t shut him out or treat him like a helpless child. What Sara had said, about not putting so much pressure on himself, it seemed to him that she was telling him that he only had to look after himself. It seemed like an offer of help, something no one but Ron and Hermione had ever offered him.
This was something else, though. Sara was trying to pick an individual problem that Harry was having and tell him to let it go. Harry knew what she was talking about and it gnawed at his insides to think about it. He had carried this burden for almost a month, without talking about it to anyone. “Sara, I…”
He never got to finish, for she had brought her other hand to Harry’s face and he suddenly became very tired. “Thank you, Harry,” she said, softly. “I know you want to end this tonight, but tomorrow will be better, after you’ve had some rest.” She led him back to his bedroom and, before leaving him, wrapped her arms around his neck. As she held him, Harry felt calm and protected. It was another feeling he had never truly known…except once, long ago. He couldn’t really remember it, but he knew it was there. And he smelled something on her crimson robe. It was familiar, almost like a distant dream.
A dream from the first year of his life.
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The following day proved to be a day of surprises. In the late hours of the morning, a host of owls arrived at the house, bringing letters and packages to the students. This was the first time that this many owls had graced the manor this summer. While most of the letters had encouraging words from loved ones, a few students received something ominous.
Hermione, Harry, and Seamus were gathered in Hermione’s room. Each had received a letter from the Ministry of Magic that morning, but none of them were in any hurry to open them. The three of them kept looking into each other’s eyes, wondering who would be first. “Well, we’ve got to do it sooner or later,” Hermione said. She had woken this morning with an unusual amount of energy.
Seamus shook his head, “Not me. I already know what it says.” He turned the envelope over in his hands. “Why don’t you open yours, Hermione? They can’t have written anything bad about you.”
“All right,” she replied, her voice frustrated. She ripped open the envelope and pulled out the letter. As she read down the parchment, her face fell slightly. “Oh, no. I got an E in Ancient Runes.”
Harry rolled his eyes and laughed a bit. “So I guess that drops you to above average now, doesn’t it?”
Hermione narrowed her eyes at him. “Ha ha. Make jokes if you want. Let’s see how many O.W.L.s you got.”
Harry knew that there was no getting around this. The results for the Ordinary Wizarding Level examinations that all fifth years had to take at the end of last year had arrived, and Harry had dreaded opening his. Closing his eyes, he ripped open the envelope and pulled out the parchment. He slowly opened his right eye, then opened his left and sighed in relief. He had done exceedingly well in Defense against the Dark Arts, as he knew he would. His scores were also good with Charms and Transfiguration, and average with potions; Harry was thankful that he has learned at least something from that horrible class. All his other scores were on the average to above average scale, except for Divination, which Harry had never been able to do well in. It didn’t matter much to him except that it reminded him that Kevin had not said anything about Professor Trelawney in the past weeks.
“See,” Hermione said, interrupting his thoughts. “It wasn’t that bad. Seamus, open yours.”
Seamus took the same approach to his letter that Harry had and breathed the same sigh of relief, which caused Hermione to roll her eyes and mutter, “Honestly.” Seamus had done quite well in his exams, earning high marks in Transfiguration and Astronomy. “Well, at least this will keep my mum from strangling me…for now anyway.” The tension gone, all three shared a laugh of relief.
“Expelliarmus!”
Harry turned towards the window where the sound had come from. Kevin was in the backyard with the first and second year students again today. Harry had found out that Kevin was teaching them some basic spells on the advice of Professor Dumbledore and the new Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher, though he would not say who this new teacher was.
Thinking of Kevin reminded Harry that he had something else to take care of. He got to his feet. “See you guys later. I’ve got to go talk to someone.” Hermione and Seamus waved as he left the room. He walked down the hall towards a door that he had never entered. It was the door to Kevin and Sara’s bedroom, and it stood slightly ajar. Harry reached out to knock, but stopped when he heard a voice. “But I don’t want to scare him.” It was Ginny’s voice.
“You won’t,” Sara’s voice replied. “If you set him down and talk it over slowly, the two of you should be able to work things out.”
Harry’s breathe caught in his throat. He shouldn’t be eavesdropping on this, but he found it hard to pull himself away. Who was she talking about? he wondered. Knowing he shouldn’t listen but he couldn’t leave, he knocked on the door.
The girls’ voices silenced for a moment, then Sara spoke. “Come in.” Harry slowly opened the door. Sara was standing behind a seated Ginny at a vanity mirror. She was braiding the younger girl’s hair as they spoke. When Harry looked at the two of them, he thought they could be sisters. Sara smiled at him. “Harry, it’s nice to see you.” She finished the last braid on Ginny’s hair. “All done, Ginny. Let Harry and me have a little privacy, would you?”
Ginny stood up. Harry thought she looked a bit redder in the face than usual. She hurried out of the room without looking at Harry. Sara motioned for him to sit on the bed next to her. “So Harry, what can I do for you?”
He took a seat. “Well, I wanted to talk to you about…last night.” His ears turned pink. “When you caught me…”
Sara nodded. “Ah, I thought that might be it. Where do you want to start?”
That was the question that Harry had been dealing with for a while. Everything that had been going through his mind since yesterday seemed to ruin together. Best to start at the beginning. “What did you mean when you said other people could look after my friends?”
“Well,” she replied. “What I was talking about was your tendency to go at things alone.” Harry looked at her quizzically. “You have to admit, Harry, when it comes to your friends, you aren’t thinking with you head.”
Harry shook his head. “I don’t understand.”
“I mean, Sirius,” Sara said. Harry was silent. “Since you’ve been here, you haven’t shown any emotion towards what happened and you haven’t talked about it to anyone, not even your friends. When I saw you last night, I could tell you were still harboring some of those feelings.”
“I like to keep my friends safe.” There was an edge to Harry’s reply. “I don’t see anything wrong with that.” He inched away from her.
Sara laid an arm over his shoulder to stop him. “No, there isn’t anything wrong with that, that’s not what I mean. I’m trying to say that your approach needs to be looked at. When you thought that Sirius was in danger, you didn’t look at all your options, or you might have realized Professor Snape could have helped you.” She shook her head. “But I’m not here to lay blame, Harry. You did what your heart told you was best, and we can’t live in the past. Think about this, though. Now that Voldemort and the Death Eaters are after you, they are going to do whatever they can to draw you out. Your friends are going to become targets, but you can’t let yourself be manipulated and you can’t try to protect them by yourself.”
Harry looked down at his feet. “That’s why Hermione was attacked. It was the same with…” He couldn’t bring himself to say his godfather’s name. Tears began to fill his eyes.
Sara tightened her arm around his shoulder. “I know how hard this must be for you. Sirius was a wonderful man with a good heart.”
Harry lifted his head a bit. “You knew him?”
She took her arm off of him, stood up and walked to a nightstand beside the bed. Pulling open a drawer, she reached inside to retrieve a photograph. Sara looked at it for a moment, and Harry could see her shoulders shake. She was crying, too. Harry stood and walked over to her side. The picture she was holding showed a wedding scene. A bride and groom stood close together, with a collection of friends around them. Harry knew this scene. He had a photo of it himself.
“This is my parent’s wedding.”
Sara jumped, not realizing he was there. “Yes, it is.” She handed the photo to him. “I understand you have a similar picture of your own. But there’s something different about this one. Do you see?”
Harry looked closely. The only real difference he could see was that the people in this photo were still, while his photo had moving people. His eyes glided over the picture until he discovered two extra people in the group. They were kids, around seven or eight. The boy had dark brown hair with green eyes and the girl had sandy red hair with blue eyes. Harry thought they looked familiar. He looked closer and it came to him. “This is you and Kevin.”
Sara stepped behind him and wrapped her arms around his neck. “Yeah, Kevin and I have been have been together for a long time. Our families and yours were very close in the Order. When we lost our parents, James and Lily were kind enough to take us in. So, in a way, you’re kind of like our little brother, Harry. Kevin and I were there when you were born. I remember your mother letting me hold you as you fell asleep.” She tightened her grip. “It was as close to a family as I could have hoped.”
Everything seemed to make sense to Harry now. This is why a perfect stranger had been sent to rescue Harry, why he was so open about the dangers that Harry was facing. It also dawned on him why last night had seemed familiar and safe. Harry had found something that he thought he had lost a month ago. “I’m not alone.”
“No you’re not. If you ever need any help, you can come to Kevin or me. We’ll always be here for you.”
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Outside the room, a young girl was in tears while she listened to the conversation inside.
Author’s Note: OK. Sorry for the late update. I had a lot of trouble writing this chapter. I hope that you all understand what Sara was saying about Harry being a part of a family again when he thought he was alone. If there are still some gray areas, I probably did that on purpose and am saving that explanation for a later chapter. I’ll definitely try to update sooner. Thanks to all my loyal readers.