Disclaimer: As you might have guessed by the fact that you're reading this for free, I own nothing regarding Harry Potter.

Chapter One "Return."

With Death, there came Darkness and some said with Death came an eternal reward that rescued them from the futile nature of life. There were those who believed in some kind of higher being, at least in the Mundane world. While such beliefs did not exist in the Wizarding World, there was a belief by many that Death lead to the next great adventure.

Of course, there were instances where an adventure was not necessarily a good thing but that was the common belief stated by some.

And some believed that with death, that was the end and there was no coming back. They were going to be proven completely wrong.

A pair of eyes flashed open and a heartbeat restarted in a figure that laid upon the pavement outside of a ruined cottage in Godric's Hallow. Memories flooded back to her mind, not in a trickle but in a flood which caused the female's head to ring.

How did she get here? The last thing she remembered, she was enjoying Halloween night with her husband and son.

Then more memories returned to her. The ritual she used to ensure that her son would survive the Killing Curse even if it sacrificed her life had seemingly returned her to life years later. There were certain variables that she could not even figure out and yet she knew as of five minutes ago that she was dead.

She stood up as the wind blew wildly around her, feeling a bit confused and her mind ran with a million different thoughts. Absolutely none of them made sense and the redhead tried to push the hair out of her face. She needed to focus.

She stood a fair height, about five feet, five inches. Her green eyes were only shared by one other person in the world and her face was that of an angel, without a blemish on it. She had high cheek bones along with rosy red lips. The green blouse that wrapped around her body strained around her D-Cup sized breasts and was about a size too small as it rode up to show her shapely middriff.

The black skirt that covered her bottom half showcased her long shapely legs. Her skin was absolutely without blemish and said skirt was wrapped around her tight ass.

Her name was Lily Evans-Potter and as the memories continued to flood back into her mind. She found that many of them were not her own.

She knew what happened on Halloween Night even if it was hard to determine every exact variable. The ritual did work to an extent but it also put her soul in a limbo of sorts.

Somehow, the ritual that granted the Dark Lord a new body, restored Lily's soul back to a flesh and blood body as well. She recalled every single moment of her son's life, which forced her to close her eyes and take a deep breath. She felt anger that he was left at the Dursleys, disappointment at her sister for not growing up even though she was trusted with an amazing responsibility and utter astonishment that Dumbledore missed some very obvious things happening at Hogwarts.

Snape disgusted her most for all but Lily could not focus on that without wanting to vomit at the thought of that foul human being.

She felt a stirring of something deep within her gut that she could not place. There was a sense of mortal dread that she couldn't stop herself from feeling.

Voldemort was back, even though the ritual that she used should have blasted him straight to his eternal torment, where he should have remained forever.

That fact worried Lily a little bit and she then realized something, she should have been gone as well. Yet, the same thing that kept Voldemort from dying was the same thing that kept her from dying.

'No need to lose your head, Evans,' Lily thought to herself as she took another step and turned her head to see the graffiti written on the wall. There were also dedications and a monument to what happened. Ignoring them, Lily turned to focus on the item that she was looking for.

She muttered a few words underneath her breath, there was a low hiss and the box on the desk opened. The key was still here, meaning that her charm work held up. That was good news for Lily, as it was the key to her son's birthright, even though no Potter accessed it further than the front hallway in eight hundred years according to James.

Harry was different, at least that's what Lily was going to assume. She was a mother, she knew these things. He would be far better than the rest.

She still felt the bond that she had with her son. Granted there was another link to his mind present and that was less than acceptable in that allowed him to gain insight into the mind of one of the most deranged human beings of this time or any other.

Lily sensed his frustration of being left out of the loop and she sympathized with it. Dumbledore had been hyped up as the man with all of the answers for so long, he'd started to believe his own hype. Either that or he lost touch with teenagers. With maybe a touch of senility starting to set in, but she could not really tell for certain.

In the end, Lily did wish that she hadn't trusted Dumbledore as much as she did, but what was done was done.

She could beat herself up over what happened in the past or she could focus on what was happening in the present.

Lily stepped out of the study and checked for any monitoring charms. She would not be surprised if Dumbledore and the Order had this place watched. Some might say for Death Eaters defacing it but Lily suspected that since Harry never got to visit the graves of his parents, a cynic might say that there was a more sinister purpose at foot.

'Nothing actually….well nothing overt,' Lily thought, she suspected to find about twelve eavesdropping charms in the sitting room alone.

She knew that she had to get to Privet Drive without setting off the detection charms there. Well, she suspected that there would be a copious amount of them there.

If Lily knew Dumbledore and she knew much more about him then he thought thanks to her conversations with Professor Bagshot when she was alive, he would only monitor magical methods of transportation in and out of Little Whingling.

Therefore Lily was going to Apparate outside of the city limits and then take a public bus there the Muggle way.

She was all about exploiting the blind spots. Plus she suspected that the Ministry was keeping an eye on all magical activity in the area based on what she learned from her son's memories.

Harry Potter had gone over the events of a few weeks ago so much that he was pretty much sick of it by now.

It was really no use going over everything again. Lord Voldemort returned, taking his blood in the final task of the Triwizard Tournament. The tournament that had so much go wrong with it just while he was competing alone, that he could see why it got canceled in the first place.

In hindsight, Harry thought it was really stupid to have a spectator tournament where the spectators could not really see two of the three tasks but that was beside the point.

The fact that he had been placed back at Number Four Privet drive, after he just saw someone killed in front of him. Well, that just showed how out of touch certain people were.

'If I start torturing squirrels with razor blades, I hope that someone's smart enough to have seen it coming,' Harry thought as he closed his eyes. 'Sounds like something Dudley would do when he was bored.'

As far as the world was concerned, Harry was an average student at school, at least if one looked at his marks.

There was a difference between the perception that Harry put out and what was reality. The Sorting Hat did want to place him into Slytherin after all.

He hid a lot of who he was, even to his closest friends. He learned a long time ago that it didn't matter who you were but how people perceived you. The Dursleys were rotten to the core but they wore the mask of respectability and obviously they must have done it rather well given how well they hornswoggled people. People thought that they were a good upstanding family even though they were lower than pondscum.

The only exams that mattered as far as his records were concerned, were the Ordinary Wizarding Level exams and the Nastily Exhausting Wizarding Tests, both of them went on record. Every other exam was just a time waster to set up those two exams.

Harry looked around the street, Vernon had decided to yell at him for listening to the news yet again. Never mind the fact that the news was his only lifeline to the outside world. He wanted something, anything, a clue of what Lord Voldemort was up to and what he planned on doing.

Surely Riddle did not come back to life just to take up cross stitching?

Harry snorted despite himself, as amusing as that scenario might have been in his mind, somehow he could not see Riddle taking up that particular hobby. It would have been nice if someone gave him a head's up after risking his life.

There was nothing really stopping him from taking the Knight Bus….although where he would go, he had no idea. So that was a big problem.

Being alone had given Harry time to think and when a young wizard was given time to think, dangerous ideas formed in their mind. One of those dangerous ideas was that he'd just run off and take his chances out there in the world.

Yet there was something keeping him from doing so. Perhaps the fact that he would rather deal with the hell that he knew, rather than the hell that he was unfamiliar with. At least that was his most obvious theory, which caused Harry to seriously question what passed for his sanity.

He had been replaying the graveyard scene in his mind every night. It was almost like that he missed something.

'Damn, it's almost like my mind's trying to tell me something, but what is it?' Harry asked as he placed his hand onto the side of his head and offered a labored sigh. The young wizard look forwards and saw Dudley and his gang.

According to Petunia, Dudley was the perfect little angel that could do no wrong. Then again, he could torch a bus of orphans then blow up a hospital of cancer patients and he'd still be misunderstood in Petunia's eyes. He had seen Dudley's horrors with his own eyes, he was everything that the Dursleys told the neighbors Harry was and worse.

Smoking pot, drinking alcohol, torturing small children and animals, harassing teenage girls who were too scared to say anything for fear of being branded in the same league as that "Potter Freak" by the neighborhood gossip queen, and that just scraped the tip of the iceberg.

Harry wondered if he could get out of here anytime soon but the opportunity had yet to present itself. Halfhearted letters promising that he would get out of there soon, prisoners in Azkaban were better treated then this and the world turned their back on him.

Harry was not stupid enough to ignore the jabs in the Prophet at him and it would serve those ignorant people right if he just left them to Voldemort. The only thing stopping Harry was that the ten percent of people who had potential in the Wizarding World would get caught up in the crossfire more likely than the ninety percent that did not, who the same ability to survive that cockroaches did.

He wondered if it would be time for him to return home shortly, the Dursleys were not too kind about him staying out very late, that much he always remembered.

'Because, Dudley could be out past midnight and it would still be acceptable, but naturally I'm a hoodlum if I stay out two seconds later,' Harry thought as he watched his surroundings and sighed.

Dumbledore said that he should stay here but Harry was beginning to think that Dumbledore was starting to crack under the pressure of having too many responsibilities or he was going senile.

Harry raised his eyebrows as he heard a bus stop near where he was standing. At first he did not stop and think twice about it. Buses stopped often where he was, after all he was standing by a bus stop, so obviously it was nothing that was too out of the ordinary.

It was who got off the bus, well that was a subject of interest to Harry. This caused his eyebrow to raise further as he watched her get off of the bus.

Harry, being a teenager, would take notice of a fairly attractive woman. Especially given that they seemed to be few and far between in Little Whinging.

So he definitely took notice of her, especially her red hair which was an extremely prominent feature. She was very well endowed with a low cut top and she had long delicious looking legs. As she turned, Harry saw her ass which looked quite hot and fit.

He had been so distracted by her assets that he failed to one extremely vital fact.

It was hard not to get distracted. In fact, ever since the graveyard, Harry had been getting more sexual thoughts and desires; he suspected that was not an intended side effect, unless Voldemort intended to drive him mad with a never ending case of blue balls.

The more he thought about it, he figured that he could get any female that he wanted, on the account that he was Harry Fucking Potter. He idly wondered if the goblins could legally change his middle name to Fucking.

He suspected that an anti-hormone potion was slipped in the Pumpkin Juice at Hogwarts. Likely by Snape, bitter that he could not get any, so he made it so anyone else would be able be get laid. Because everyone would be shagging like rabbits otherwise.

Anyone who found Snape attractive or pleasant at all to be around must have inhaled too many potion fumes. Then again, there were whispers that Dumbledore and Snape were in a secret relationship which would explain why Dumbledore vouched for Snape and got him off of the hook of Death Eater charges.

He managed to get that as horrifying thought out of his head, as quickly as it arrived. He had to focus on the attractive female approaching him.

He noticed the one thing that he missed, the one detail that he overlooked.

She had eyes, just like his.

There was only one person that had eyes just like his but surely not?

"Harry?"

Lily showed up and faced her son, he was fairly handsome, the best qualities of James and her rolled into one. She thought that her eyes with his face was a good look.

Though, he looked different than James once one looked past the superficial first impression. Sure the hair was about the same in color and messiness, but there were other differences.

She wondered if Harry would even believe her, because Lily wasn't sure how much she believed what was happening and she was the one living it.

"Yes?" Harry asked in a tentative voice but then he paused as he looked closely at the female in front of him. He noticed her eyes before, but he was unable to really mull it over properly until now.

This had to be some kind of delusion, yes he finally cracked, that was the ticket.

"Mum?" Harry asked her.

Lily was surprised that he came to that conclusion so quickly.

Harry wondered what was happening. He was torn between anger, confusion, and a few other emotions that he couldn't properly figure out.

"You were…."

"Dead?" Lily asked him as she sat down on the bench and invited her son to do the same. "Yes, I was dead. Up until the night of June 24th….although I didn't wake up until recently. Magic, being what it is, takes a long time to truly set in, especially bringing someone back from limbo."

Harry was completely confused by this.

"The ritual…."

"You didn't live just because I died for you, there was a lot more work than that," Lily commented to him but then she noticed the golden strands that were flowing from Harry's aura.

There was a huge part of his magic that was protecting the Dursleys and thus keeping him from being as strong as he should be. Which was really amazing, given that he was very strong without it.

"So…."

"This is not a conversation that we should have here, Harry," Lily offered him.

A part of Harry wondered if this was some kind of sick trick, he would not put it past Voldemort to use the dead image of his mother to entice him.

A stronger part of Harry wondered exactly how much he had to lose. If Dumbledore was going to treat him like a second class citizen after all of the times he broke his neck cleaning up the messes of adults that should know better, than he had nothing left to lose.

"We'll collect your belongings and we'll take a bus past the wards," Lily said to Harry. "That is, if you want to…."

"Mum, are you kidding? I want to be out of here as soon as possible," Harry told his mother and she smiled.

She figured that Harry would not want to stay at Number Four Privet Drive any longer than he had to. Lily gave that house to Vernon and Petunia as a wedding gift and considering how they treated her son, she could easily take it away.

The Dursleys were normal, at least if you asked them. However, they looped so far into normal that they were abnormally normal.

"Can't believe the Boy tried to attack me earlier," Vernon grumbled as he nursed the blisters on his hands. Lost in his memories was the fact that he attacked him, even though Vernon was going to deny that as much as possible. The Boy was nothing but a nuisance and he had been bullied into taking him in.

"Dudley should be back soon," Petunia offered as she beamed at the thought of her precious pride and joy. Anyone who talked about how her son was a bully and a hoodlum was just jealous with how special that he was.

There were footsteps outside the door and sure enough, Dudley would be back in time for dinner. He never missed it after all.

"The Boy better get back here soon, or he's sleeping in the shed," Vernon grumbled as there was a knock on the door.

Petunia decided to get the door and rushed over, nearly tripping over her feet as she made her way there.

She slowly turned the door open and flung it open, ready to greet her precious Diddykins, her perfect little angel.

"Hello, Petunia!"

Petunia remained silent and then she screamed which caused Vernon to nearly hit his head on the edge of the cabinet that he was standing underneath.

The woman rolled her eyes at Petunia as she stood on the edge of the door-frame.

'Petunia, you were always such a fucking drama queen,' Lily thought to herself.

Harry stood a half of a step behind Lily and he was fairly amused. That was about the reaction that he expected from Petunia, he knew his aunt all too well for better or for worse.

"How…this…." Petunia stammered as she was shell shocked.

Vernon found his way over to them and he stared at them. There was only one statement that came out of his mouth. "BOY, WHAT IN THE DEVIL IS…."

Vernon felt an invisible hand clutch around his throat as soon as he felt threatening thoughts directly at his nephew. He stepped back half of a step and reached up to massage the side of his throat.

"You're going to be warned once. Try to harm my son or even look at him wrong and the consequences will be yours to bare," Lily offered.

Now that Harry was in proximity of a relative that he truly loved and who truly loved him in return, the blood protections were stronger than ever before. They had been eating away at his energy reserves until now but they'd since been super charged due to his close proximity to Lily. Vernon found that fact out the hard way as he looked at him.

Petunia felt her entire perfect world crash down around her ears. This was not supposed to happen, this was not supposed to happen at all. The woman looked at Lily and silence was golden.

However it was meant to be broken.

"It's irrelevant how I returned," Lily told Petunia in a harsh voice as she looked at her. "All that should matter is that I have returned."

Petunia opened her mouth and shut it once more.

"And I have a few words to say to you and you'll never see Harry or me ever again," Lily told her and Petunia's eyes widened.

"So you're taking him…."

"Yes, I am," Lily confirmed.

"It wasn't….I didn't….I didn't have a choice in taking him in, Dumbledore forced me to," Petunia breathed. The letter said that it would be in their best interests to take Harry in, for Lord Voldemort's followers might target them in revenge but the protections would protect them.

Lily's eyes flashed angrily.

"What did Dumbledore tell you?" Harry asked curiously.

Petunia looked at Harry for the first time. "He told me that we'd be in danger if we didn't take you in. Never once considered if we could afford it, never once considered if we wanted to move someday, never once had the common decency to ask."

"Would you have taken Harry if you were asked?" Lily asked her sister and the resounding silence answered that question. "Harry didn't ask to be sent here, and if he had the choice, he would have been gone a long time ago."

"Good, don't let the door hit him on his worthless arse on the way out," Vernon muttered but Lily turned towards Vernon given him a positively murderous gaze.

She always thought that Vernon brought out Petunia's worst aspects, and Petunia's worst aspects could be pretty damn spiteful. She saw it when they were children and it got worse during their adult years.

"You could have done the right thing," Lily offered to her, trying to keep her temper in check because if she lost it, she would start flinging curses which would alert Dumbledore before it was time. She figured that Dumbledore knew if any active magic was performed in the house, on top of the Ministry protections. "You could have been the better person that you believe that you are."

Petunia scowled at Lily.

"You think that you're per…."

"It wasn't my fault that you were a disappointment, lazy, and unwilling to make something out of yourself. It wasn't my fault that our parents disowned you after you married Vernon, those were the choices you made, and now what are you Petunia?" Lily asked her sister. "I hoped you could be better than that but I guess I was wrong."

"It isn't…."

"Putting a child in a cupboard until he was eleven. When your gave your whale of a son two bedrooms, that's not normal behavior, Petunia. No matter how many times you try to convince yourself otherwise," Harry said as he spoke up and glared at them. "You and your husband are bigger freaks than all of Hogwarts put together…

"HOW DARE YOU!"

Vernon was angry at being called a freak, he was normal. The boy was thrown into his orderly life and he raised his hand but remembered what happened last time.

"So….he's going…to leave," Petunia said to Lily in a nervous voice. "Never come back….we'll never going to see him again."

"Yes, but I'd suggest that you'd look into alternate living arrangements, because you broke the contract that we had with each other Petunia, with your treatment of Harry," Lily told her sister harshly.

Vernon looked at Petunia, confused. "Petunia dear, what's she…."

"Vernon," Petunia stated in a firm tone and Vernon fell back into line. "You can't….we have…."

"What, nothing?" Harry asked to Petunia. "I had nothing for ten years of my life, less than nothing. Do you understand, the consequences of your selfishness? I spent over half of my life thinking that my parents were deadbeat drunks, drug addicts who died in a car crash."

Petunia closed her eyes but she shook her head.

"Dumbledore never should have forced you to live here," Petunia breathed, throwing the blame onto someone else.

Vernon, was not smarter than he looked, so he piped in. "We took the boy in, so we should get compensation…."

"Vernon, you fucking idiot, you got the house!" Lily yelled as she tried not to lose her temper. "And you're lucky…."

"The boy cost…."

Harry lost his temper which was amazing and spectacular. "WHAT FUCKING COST? YOU SPENT MORE ON YOUR FUCKING DELIQUENT OF A SON IN A WEEK THAN YOU DID ON ME IN TEN FUCKING YEARS!"

"YOU UNGRATEFUL…."

Every single bone in his arm shattered as the walrus of a man nailed a shield that appeared around him.

"I'm ungrateful? I don't think so," Harry said to Vernon who was down on the floor writhing in agony.

Lily thought that Vernon was pretty lucky that his arm did not get burned off by hitting the shield. Then again, the protection was not working properly.

"You tried to squash the magic out of me, do you realize how stupid this is?" Harry asked as he turned to Petunia and gave her an angry glare. "You grew up with Mum, she had to display some really powerful magic, wouldn't you think?"

Petunia nodded, she remembered how Lily and her got into a fight when they were young and Lily caused all the windows in the house to explode. Her parents tried to pass it off as a strong gust of wind but she knew better.

"Did you not think that it might be dangerous, that I could kill you if my magic got out of control defending myself?" Harry asked her.

"Dumbledore said….that the protections…." Petunia managed but she trailed off.

Lily looked into her sister's eyes reading her mind as she recalled the letter. Dumbledore assured them that the protections would keep them safe from all magical attacks but it seemed like this summer after the ritual that brought Voldemort back to life, more defensive aspects had returned to life when Harry was particularly stressed out.

It was almost like Dumbledore knew what was going to happen but perhaps did not figure out what was going to happen. Lily thought that through to the end, the old man was starting to lose his grip in reality. He might as well have lived three hundred years even though he was only a bit north of a hundred years.

"Harry, please get your things and then we can leave," Lily said in a patient voice, not wanting to look at Petunia or Vernon. Both of them made her sick to her stomach, to put things mildly.

Harry nodded as he made his way up the stairs. He didn't have that much to collect.

Lily found it rather curious that Dumbledore's people were not knocking on the door now right now, surely after Voldemort came back, he'd have Harry followed? Surely they'd be monitoring how many days Harry used the loo?

Not that she complained much about this but she was curious.

Harry returned, all packed up and ready to go.

He was going to ask where they were going but he wondered if Dumbledore was having him followed. There was a sense at times when he was outside that there was someone around. Then there was that noise that occurred earlier that sounded like gunfire.

"Petunia, we're leaving and you need not worry about Dumbledore, because I'll deal with him soon enough," Lily said to her sister who stepped back. "And as for you….you should worry about the consequences of breaking our agreement. All you had to do was treat Harry like a human being but obviously, you couldn't do that, because you have no experience in being one yourself."

Lily's harsh statement was the last thing that she had.

Harry followed his mother, all of his possessions in his hand and finally, he would never step foot in a place that he never truly called home.

Lily and Harry got on a bus and left the area around Privet Drive.

No sooner did they leave, then the Dementors turned up.

"You seem to be taking the fact that I've come back to life almost too well," Lily said to Harry as the two sat side by side on the Muggle bus and enjoyed the trip.

Harry offered his mother a slight smile and commented. "Mum, if you've seen what I've seen…."

"I know, there's nothing that would shock you, believe me, I know precisely where you're coming from," Lily added as she thought about it. "The first four years of Hogwarts, you didn't learn much, did you?"

Back when Lily was in Hogwarts, the lessons were a lot more useful but it seemed like after Harry's defeat against Voldemort, there had been a lot of dumbing down.

"There's a lot of key courses that have been eliminated, like healing, magical business, political studies," Lily added as she rattled off some of the classes she'd taken. "Also, what is NEWT standard now was OWL standard when I went to school."

Harry nodded, he had wondered about that.

"Maybe the Ministry thinks that if we don't have as good of an education, they won't be another threat like Voldemort," Harry offered and Lily looked at him with a raised eyebrow. "I know, I know, it's kind of silly…."

"No, it's a good theory but if they were smart they should know that the greatest witches and wizards learn eighty percent of what they know through independent study, going far and above beyond what the Ministry deems acceptable," Lily offered but she thought that saying the Ministry was intelligent in any way whatsoever would be giving them way too much credit at all. "Dumbledore, Riddle, you…."

Harry looked at her, in surprise.

"Harry, I've seen everything that's happened to you since that Halloween night and by everything, I mean everything," Lily told him with a smile on her face. "The Sorting Hat wanted to put you into Slytherin for a reason."

Harry knew this to be true the more time went on. The Wizarding world thought of him as nothing more than a scar on his forehead but he had thoughts of his own.

"Why did you dumb yourself down that much?" Lily asked Harry quietly.

Harry decided to offer the truth as harsh it was. "That wasn't the role that I was supposed to play."

"I see, Ron can be prone to jealousy, but Hermione has her own moments as well," Lily whispered to Harry. "You saw it during your second year, Daphne Greengrass, I believe the girl's name was, made a better potion than she did."

"That's who Hermione is," Harry offered Lily and Lily frowned. "They've compared her to you a lot…."

"Which shows the ignorance of some people," Lily said to him. "And I supposed that since Ginny and I are redheads, we look exactly alike."

Harry took a careful look at his mother and shook his head at that. No one could say that she and Ginny looked exactly alike. That would be like saying that Dean Thomas and Blaise Zabini looked alike just because they shared a similar color of skin.

Lily said nothing more about this although Harry could say that the comparison to Hermione had annoyed his mother a slight bit.

He wanted to know why but Lily looked through the latest edition of the Daily Prophet that Harry gave to her.

"Did you read that Dumbledore got stripped of all of his titles?" Lily asked Harry and he raised his eyebrow.

"Yes, I read about that…."

"I don't like this, if Dumbledore lost his positions, it's because he willingly gave them up," Lily concluded.

"Dumbledore is the closest thing there is to a living religious figure in the magical world," Harry commented lightly. That reputation was something that was fortified through years of just being Albus Dumbledore. That kind of respect only happened once in a life time. There were people who called him Saint Albus of Dumbledore and it was not in a friendly way.

Harry knew that Dumbledore was in that weird spot where he had his critics but if he forced the issue, it got done. He might have stepped back as Headmaster during Harry's second year but he returned easily without any problems.

That made Harry wonder if he could exert that kind of influence because of his reputation of the Boy-Who-Lived.

"Perhaps it's time to remove the mask a little bit," Harry stated underneath his breath and Lily slowly raised an eyebrow. "So, do you have any idea where we're going?"

"A place where you can only let us into," Lily offered Harry as his green eyes got on her. "It's your birthright, your inheritance."

'Another thing that no one clued me in on,' Harry thought although he supposed that he should have asked when he had the chance. The Dursleys had made him a tad bit paranoid about asking questions because they made it out to be taboo.

"Don't worry Harry, we'll figure this out," Lily offered as she grabbed her son's hand and gave it a strong squeeze and the wizard nodded.

"Of course Mum, of course," Harry said.

He had no idea why he trusted that this woman was his mother come back to life, other than it was a feeling that he had. He tended to have some really strong instincts. Hermione was motivated by books and a flawed understanding of logic, but Harry figured that had no place in many of the situations that he had to deal with on a day to day basis.

There was a time that he had to trust his gut.

Harry's gut was telling him that he was here and he exited the bus with a smile on his face.

Lily exited the bus beside her son and there was a mixture of emotions that coursed through her body but she had to keep her head up high into the air.

They stopped outside of the protections and Harry and Lily locked arms.

Harry knew that this was the moment of truth, whether or not his instincts were right.

Lily could tell what Harry was thinking, she would think the same thing had she had been in shoes.

"The key will allow you inside," Lily whispered to him as she presented Harry with it.

Harry figured that this was not a key in a traditional sense. He felt his hand warm up and he felt a feeling that could be described as only magic.

A large booming hole opened up in time and space and Harry stepped through, with Lily following him.

They were entering an adventure, although what kind it was, that would be yet to be seen.

Mundungus Fletcher was not about to pass up the business opportunity that he had. He was a man who understood the value of a hard earned Galleon and that value increased the more that he came back to his post at Little Whinging.

"Blimey, I didn't expect it to be this foggy," Fletcher mused as he had his precious contraband in a bag. "Just to goes to show you that Muggle weatherman was out of his bloody mind, I thought that he said that it was going to be sunny."

Fletcher took another step and felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up.

There were four bodies lying on the street, with vapid looks on their faces. They were breathing but by the glassy eyed looks on their faces, they lost all will to live.

They were worse than dead.

One of the paramedics looked over his shoulder.

"Yeah, you're not going to believe it, but we've got a case of soul snatching. I'm not sure if anyone saw anything….well get someone down here and see for yourself," the paramedic stated.

He was one of the squibs that had been hired by the Ministry of Magic for a miniscule wage to keep an eye on the Muggle World. Their lack of magic allowed them to blend in, at least that was what the brain surgeons at the Ministry of Magic believed.

'Kissed?….oh….well this isn't good,' Fletcher thought to himself as he felt his heart beat faster.

Fletcher did not get a look at the faces although if one of them was Harry Potter….well Dumbledore would have his head on a plate and the rest of him for seconds. The shady wizard continued to watch the scene happening before him.

"One of them lives at Number Four Privet Drive."

'Well fuck,' Fletcher thought as he took a step back and toppled as he tripped over a fifth body in his haste to get away.

"Figgy?" Fletcher asked but Arabella Figg was also kissed.

'Shit.'

This was a situation that Fletcher did not want to be put in. Arabella Figg and four others, potentially Harry Potter, had been kissed by the Dementors.

Had Fletcher not been so worried with his own hide, he would have wondered why there were Dementors on Privet Drive.

He scurried into the bushes, hiding in them and peering out to get a better look.

Not Potter, not that it made his life any easier, no he had to still explain to Dumbledore that Figg had been kissed, along with four Muggles.

Was that Potter's fat lump of a cousin?

Fletcher suspected so as he tried to trip over his heels but he spun around and came face to face with Albus Dumbledore himself.

"Mundungus, I hope you have a good explanation why you left your post," Dumbledore offered in a grandfatherly tone of voice although there was something burning through his eyes.

Mundungus gulped and wished that his soul was sucked out along with the others.

Dumbledore figured that the Dementors missed Harry but he was about to find out the truth of the situation when he visited Number Four Privet Drive to inform the Dursleys about the fact that their son suffered a fate worse than death.

To Be Continued.