This is a crossover between Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings (before the trilogy).

The rating on this is probably too high right now. I think it's around K. However, it will get higher as the story goes along, so just bear with it for a while, please. Thanks!

There are no pairings as of yet, and will probably be completely gen for awhile. Regular updates weekly, but will probably be sooner considering how new this story is. Reviews (both good and constructive) are welcome, but I'll probably ignore any flames or spam I get unless they're really funny or really unusual. Then I'll just keep them on my desktop for further entertainment.

Disclaimer: Harry Potter and Tolkein Universe do not belong to me. I wish; then I'd be making oodles of money and I'd probably take a tour around the world, but I'd really like to se- sigh. Well, they're not mine. And the falling-apart laptop I'm using to write this is probably testament to that. Sucks.

Lost

By Bluejay

Whispers swept the hallways as a small, ragged looking boy dashed though the crowd. The boy could hear a few of them. "Look, look! It's the boy-who-lived..." "Quiet! He might hear you." "Are you sure that's our saviour? He looks the size of a house-elf..." They were following him everywhere. Why was he their saviour? How could he, when he had yet to know one year of magic, rescue the entire wizarding world? The crowds kept whispering. "Oh thank Merlin. With the Boy-who-lived, there will surely be a miracle..."

It was the night of thirtieth of July that Harry Potter scrambled out of bed gasping for dear life. It was a dream that constantly plagued his mind since his return from Hogwarts. 'If it was only just a dream,' he thought. He recalled again the phrase the Wizarding World plastered onto him - The Boy-Who-Lived. It was like an albatross. Surely this world didn't believe him their saviour? He was only eleven! He wasn't special! Never had he felt so much doubt and pressure.

It was pitch black. And uncomfortably silent. After waiting for his eyes to adjust, Harry looked up from his creaky bed to the empty perch by the window. Hedwig had yet to return in two weeks. He missed her so much. She was the only real company he had since the start of the summer. The Dursleys, while usually cold and uncaring of their nephew, were especially harsh to him recently. It was as if, since his return from Hogwarts, he had been labelled officially as a freak in their eyes. Harry had to guess they had hoped that, with their dubious upbringing, they would have stomped the freakish nature right out of him. But, it wasn't to be. And with his first year of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry ended, the Dursleys had probably realized there was no turning back of his 'abnormal' behaviour.

But it wasn't just the Dursleys. Harry squinted at the moonless sky in his window. For the summer, he had not received a bit of mail from his friends. Odd as it was, it was as though Ron and Hermione had abandoned him to his fate. After the first week of silence, Harry had been sending Hedwig, secretly, of course, with simple correspondence using a broken pencil and torn-up pieces of colouring-books that had gone by Dudley unnoticed. Yet nothing came. He sighed dejectedly. Harry couldn't understand. Was it something he did? Did they not want to talk to him? As much as he wrote to them, not one had been returned. 'It was probably something I said or did,' he thought. 'Maybe they're angry at me for what I did to Professor Quirrell.'

And why wouldn't they be? Harry was still angry at himself for what he had done. As a child growing up with a bully-for-a-cousin, Dudley, he had seen the cruelty of children spoiled rotten by their parents. Dudley, despite their old primary school teachers' belief, had not stopped short at bullying the weaker children in their neighbourhood. He also had fun killing off defenceless animals, skinning the skin off squirming snakes, and, sometimes, tying frogs and squirrels to branches and burning them alive.

'Well, I just topped Dudley didn't I,' Harry thought, chuckling a little hysterically in the dark, 'I had to burn alive a human being; my own professor!' How had he come to this - a murderer? Harry shivered, though it was a warm night. And it seemed it was a common trend with him since he was one year old. 'Quirrell, mum, dad; all of them were murdered by me,' he thought depressingly. Even Voldemort, a murderer himself, could not evade his murdering tendencies.

'Maybe I shouldn't have been born a wizard,' he thought. 'Maybe I should have been a squib. Then my parents wouldn't have to die, and maybe the Dursleys would finally like me -"

Harry halted at that thought. He knew that was a lie. Even if he was a squib, with no magic in his veins, the Dursleys would hate him. Even if he was a squib, the mere fact that he had the blood of his parents who were witch and wizard in their own right would make Aunt Petunia hate him, and Uncle Vernon even more. Dudley would imitate them like he always did concerning Harry, and nothing would change. He would never be normal enough for them, and he would never be normal for the muggle world. As far as the muggle world was concerned, he was a juvenile delinquent who went to St. Brutus's Secure Centre for Incurably Criminal Boys for all they cared.

Harry flopped back down on the creaky bed and curled to his side. He was between a rock and a hard place. He had no place to turn to, either in the wizarding or the muggle world. He was a murderer in one, his so-called friends probably hating him because of it, and a good-for-nothing freak of a criminal in the other.

Like many previous nights since he was four, before ever seeing Hagrid at the shack on the rock, he dreamed of a new place, a new life. It surprised him a bit to realize he hadn't had these dreams since he heard that magic was real from the then-friendly half-giant. Harry guessed, since that life-changing revelation, he had found new hope that he would finally have his dream come true. Somewhere where he could be like any other boy or girl, where no-one would point him out and say he was abnormal. A place where he was wanted for being justHarry. But even that was not meant to be. At first he thought he was accepted. He made friends and most of his teachers were okay. He had found a new home in Hogwarts' walls, and had even gotten a pet - though if Hedwig heard him call her a 'pet', Harry would probably be missing his eyebrows for a couple of months. It wasn't until he reached the magical castle, that he heard the whispering and felt the not-so-discreet stares of his classmates. Then he learned. Harry Potter, the Boy-Who-Lived; the Boy-Who-Murdered. It had felt at the time like a ton of cement had fallen down his throat. Harry couldn't believe it at first - believe himself a murderer - but then Quirrell had happened and it was like all the little doubts in his head, the soft murmurs in his mind that followed him to class, the Quidditch pitch, Gryffindor common room, the great hall - all came to a stark truth: he was a killer.

Harry found he was squeezing his eyes shut without even noticing. 'Dream!' he shouted in his mind, 'Please dream! I don't want to be here, where there's nothing for me, but pain. Please, take me somewhere! Take me to a place where I can be loved for who I am! Take me to the place I always dreamed about!" Harry shouted this over and over in his head, until the words turned to mutters stuck in his throat. Soon, they blended together, a bubble of nonsensical noises, until at last, half an hour later, Harry fell asleep.

This could have been the end of it, for the next day Dobby the house-elf would have appeared, scared and stuttering, to warn Harry of returning to the Wizarding world, and in doing so, accidentally admitting to stealing his letters from Ron, Hermione, and the others. Harry would then have remembered his friends would not have given up on him, and that maybe (just maybe) he had a life at Hogwarts to return to after all. However, on the night of the thirtieth of July, luck was not on his side. For as the wish from magic newly formed at Hogwarts met the accidental magic of a wish seven years in the making, a new spell was formed, and with it, Harry Potter ventured to a world where he could be loved by all for who he was, one where the conflicts of his muggle and wizard ties would never reach him. At two-thirty in the morning, the thirtieth of July, Harry Potter was gone.

NEXT CHAPTER PREVIEW

Harry awoke to snow. He was covered in it, a fact which should not have been since there was no snow at Private Drive and to have snow on top of you would indicate that he would have had to be outside, which he most certainly was not. It didn't help that it was dead summer at Private Drive and was in one of the worst heat waves to hit England in a century. 'Did I sleepwalk?' he thought hazily. A little hand crept out of the snow to rub his eyes. "Ahh!" he peeped. What was this? Whose hand was this? Whose voice? The hand moved further, its tiny fingers grasping at the brown coloured monstrosity of clothing which he knew were Dudley's castaways, and were what he had put on last night. They seemed like sheets now, falling straight off his shoulders, pooling at a stomach that was much too small to be his. A gust of wind swept through, flinging shoulder-length hair in his mouth. Huh? When did his hair grow? Harry moved the child hand - which his brain seemed to realize was his own, even if his consciousness had not - to pull the hair away, only to meet little pointy ears in its place. As if pulled by some force, Harry's mind finally pierced through the shock. He was small. He had long hair. He had pointy ears. He squeaked when he talked. He was not in his bed at Number four, Private Drive, and if the snow said anything, he may not be even in the same country. As the shock finally wore off, a single stray thought entered the brain of Harry Potter.

"Please, Oh Merlin, let me not be a house-elf."

Please review, and tell me what you think!