She shoved the newspaper into his hands, and he stared at the cover in awe. Harry’s face, complete with his scar, was stretched across the front of the Daily Prophet. Harry Potter’s Latest Sighting!
Ron opened the paper eagerly, and began to read…
Harry Potter, the seventeen year old wizard who is famous for surviving an attack from He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, has been sighted near London. A woman named Eileen Turner has filed a report, saying that she saw Potter at wandering the streets alone several nights ago.
“He was carrying a strange bag on his back while he was walking. I’d seen him at least once before doing the same exact thing, but I didn’t realize it was him for a while,” she reported to the team of Aurors that is currently investigating this month-old mystery. “Then he just stopped coming by.”
“We are working as hard as we can to find him,” commented the head of the Ministry of Magic Auror Office. “We hope to have a happy end to this mystery.”
It has been foretold that Harry Potter is the only one who can vanquish He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named. The wizarding world is holding their breath as the next installment in the Harry Potter mystery is being solved.
Ron sucked his breath in as he turned the page and continued reading. Hermione jumped up and down behind him, trying to read over his shoulder, a hard feat to accomplish because he was almost a foot taller than her now.
When he was done, he turned to Hermione. “D-do you think they’ll find him?” he asked tentatively.
“Of course, Ron!” exclaimed Hermione, who seemed overly gleeful. “Don’t you see what this means?”
“What?” asked Ron, completely nonplussed at her attitude.
“He’s okay! He’s not lying around somewhere unconscious where no one will ever find him, or worse! He’s alright!” Hermione exclaimed, a wide smile stretched across her face.
“Yeah,” muttered Ron, whose thoughts were elsewhere. “It’s kind of strange how he was just wandering. I wonder why he had a bag on his back?”
Hermione rolled her eyes at him. “That’s not important Ron!” she snapped, “What’s important is Harry!”
“Oh yeah…right.”
The common room was then interrupted by the arrival of a strangely snowy white owl. It landed in the middle of the room, then caught the sight of Ron and Hermione, and flew over to them.
“Hedwig!”
“Harry…wake up!” called the voice, which sounded far away. “I…er…you need to do something important now.”
Harry awoke with a start. The voice sounded urgent, as it continued.
“You need to leave! There’s danger around here,”
Harry started to obey, and he climbed out of bed. Then, he suddenly felt rebellious. Instead of leaving, he climbed back into bed and pulled the blanket over his head.
“You need to leave…someone might recognize you!” the voice said urgently from somewhere behind Harry’s mind.
“Recognize…me?” Harry asked aloud. “Why would any of these strange people recognize me? I-I’m nobody.”
The voice didn’t answer, and Harry was sure that he was progressing, and he was going to learn something important.
“There is nothing important to know,” sneered the voice, and Harry heard a bit of anxiousness in its words. “You just need to listen!”
Harry stayed where he was. His forehead began to throb painfully like someone had hit him over the head with a large mallet. His vision blurred for a moment, and he closed his eyes. When he opened his eyes again, the voice had stopped talking, and Harry saw something strange perched on the end of his bed.
It took Harry a moment, but then he recognized the snowy white owl from the locked bedroom at the Dursley’s. It clicked its beak impatiently and stared at Harry’s eyes. Harry felt something inside him jump.
“You do not know this owl,” called the voice, but Harry could tell that it was urgently trying to make Harry believe it. Harry pushed the voice out of his mind and walked closer to the owl.
The owl screeched, and held out its somewhat scaly leg towards Harry. He saw a piece of parchment attached to the owl, and hastened to remove it, in case it was causing the owl pain.
As he cautiously took the paper off (the owl stood very still), he noticed that there was writing all over it.
Dear Harry it began. Harry stared at the parchment. How on earth did this owl get a piece of paper that was addressed…to him?
“Don’t open it, Harry!” cried the voice desperately.
Harry ignored the voice, and pulled the rest of the paper open:
Dear Harry,
I couldn’t believe it when Hedwig came through the window in the Gryffindor Tower! She looked very confused, and she didn’t have any letters or anything for me. What happened to you? I’ve already written you several letters (about twenty actually), and you’ve already had twenty-one articles in the Daily Prophet. Some batty old witch said she saw you wondering around in London. What are you doing there? Have you gotten any of my other letters? Are you trying to escape from the wizarding world or something? Or are you searching for horcruxes? Please write me back, Hermione’s really worried about you (and I am too, in case you didn’t already guess that). She thinks You-Know-Who got you or something…
PLEASE, PLEASE WRITE BACK!
Harry couldn’t do anything but stare confusedly at the letter. First of all, whoever had sent this (someone named Ron?) was worried about him, but why? Second, he used several strange terms that Harry didn’t understand (What was a Hedwig, a Gryffindor, a Daily Prophet, Horcruxes, and a Hermione?). Harry set the letter down on the bed for a moment, and examined the owl that had delivered the letter.
Harry waited for a second, expecting the voice to try to cut his thoughts off and tell him otherwise, and he was surprised when it didn’t utter a word.
“Hedwig?” he whispered slowly, reading the owl’s name off the beginning of the letter.
It blinked at him, and Harry was almost sure that it had understood him perfectly. For some reason, however, it looked like it wanted something from Harry. But what?
“What do you want from me?” Harry asked it softly, knowing he was insane to try to talk to an owl.
For an answer, it gave a soft screech in Harry’s ear. Harry reopened the letter curiously, and began pondering the rest of it. Now that the shock had worn off slightly, Harry reread the letter, and tried to see if there was anything else hidden in it. He wondered who ‘You-Know-Who’ was, and why Ron didn’t just write his name. Something about Ron seemed really familiar, and he wasn’t sure if it was just his messy handwriting that resembled Harry’s own, or if it was something else that Harry had forgotten.
A soft knock on the door woke Harry from his concerns and wonder about the strange letter. Harry walked over to the door and opened it cautiously. A small girl with pigtails stood behind him.
“I have a message for you,” she said in a squeaky voice. She shoved a rolled up piece of parchment into his hands.
Harry opened it, and saw it was addressed to ‘Mr. Thomas’.
“I don’t think this is for me,” he said, handing it back to her. “It is addressed to someone else.”
“Oh!” she exclaimed as she examined it closer. “I’m supposed to deliver it to the room next door. Sorry!”
Harry watched her turn bright red before she ran over to the room next to Harry’s and knocked on the door. He closed the door.
An hour later, he’d examined the letter from Ron a hundred times over, and it still made no sense to him. He began to develop a small headache, so he stowed the letter away in his pocket, put on his shoes, and walked out. Downstairs, there were more people in strange robes that didn’t seem to see him at all. Harry felt very invisible. He followed somebody who looked like they knew where they were going, and walked out of the inn, the silver coins from Sam jingling in his pocket.
Once he was outside, Harry breathed a sigh of relief. His strange impulse to hide that he’d acquired the night before was halted; there were so many people packed along the street that there was little chance of anyone noticing him. In fact, nobody seemed to want to make eye contact with anybody else. They all walked along, seemingly scared of something.
The first store that Harry walked into was called ‘Ollivanders: Makers of Fine Wands’. Harry walked in, intrigued by the strange name. Inside, a pretty girl with flaming red hair greeted him.
“My name is Heather, and I’m Mr. Ollivander’s daughter, er, assistant. He’s not here right now,” she said very quickly. “I can see you’re not a first year, so I don’t really have to go through the speech, do I?”
Harry looked at her, hardly grasping what she was saying. “What do you sell here?” he asked, looking up at the boxes that lined all of the open wall space in the shop.
The girl gave him a funny look. “Wands of course!”
“Oh,” Harry muttered, confused.
The girl nodded, then whipped a tape measurer out of her pocket and began to measure Harry. He was so busy staring at the walls that he didn’t notice something strange: there was no one holding the moving measurer.
When she was done, the girl disappeared into the back room, then reappeared holding many boxes in her arms. She passed one to Harry, who opened it tentatively. He was expecting something big and flashy, and was heartily disappointed when he set his eyes on a plain stick wrapped in pink fabric.
He took it out and looked at her questioningly.
“Well, wave it already!” she said impatiently, as though Harry should have known to wave the stick in the air.
He obeyed, feeling quite silly, before she snatched it away from him, and passed him another from one of the other boxes she’d brought. He took the stick and waved it, but again she snatched it back. Harry was regretting ever walking into the strange store.
Again and again, it was the same process. After a moment or two, when Harry waved the sixth stick from the boxes, the girl didn’t snatch it away. She smiled, nodded at Harry, and then snatched the stick away.
“That’ll be seven sickles,” she said, wrapping the stick in a box. “Everyone needs them now, so we’ve had to lower our prices since You-Know-Who…” she trailed off.
Harry’s ears perked up at the words ‘Sickle’ and ‘You-Know-Who’.
“Don’t buy that wand, Harry! cried the voice as Harry pondered over the meaning of the strange terms. “It’s just a worthless, useless stick!”
Harry was fueled by the voice’s obvious nervousness about Harry buying the stick, so he pulled seven silver coins out of his pocket and handed them to the girl. When Harry walked out of the shop, he felt proud, although he didn’t know why.
About halfway back to the Inn, Harry noticed that everyone else had a stick stuck in their pockets, and nobody seemed to think this was the least bit strange. Harry felt the sudden impulse to do so as well, and walked back in to the Leaky Cauldron thoroughly exhausted, with a thin wand sticking out from his back pocket.
Author’s Note: I have another story that just got validated on MNFF! It is called, “Ron…Where Is Crookshanks?”. If you like this story, I recommend that you check it out!