Disclaimer: Everything belongs to J. K. Rowling. I'm not making any money from this story. (Or from anything else, for that matter.)

Author's Note: Hi, folks. I'm back, after a long hiatus, with a fifth-year story. (Apologies to anyone who was holding out for more James-fic; the voices is my head this time around were Harry's generation, and I've gotta do what the voices say.) I'm trying to be as Rowling-esque as possible, which means I've included a good bit of the "previously on Harry Potter" stuff; I'm interested in feedback on how well or badly that works. Hope you all enjoy it. Updates may be a bit sporadic, as I'm supposed to be writing a dissertation, but I'll try to be reasonably conscientious. Oh, and later chapters will be longer. I don't know why the first two turned out to be so short, but they did. Many thanks to Yolanda, whose beta-reading saved this chapter from general awkwardness. Happy reading! TSS

P.S. Apologies for any machine-language glitches; my version of Microsoft Word sometimes messes up when I go from .doc form to .html form.

Chapter One—A Decision

Harry Potter reckoned that this summer just might be the worst of his life, and that, given the usual awfulness of his summers, was saying something. The external circumstances of his home life weren't so bad as usual; he and the Dursleys, the aunt, uncle, and cousin with whom he had lived since his parents' deaths, had reached a state of armed truce. After a few run-ins with some of Harry's self-appointed protectors had left him with a pig's tail (surgically removed) and a four-foot-long tongue (magically restored to its normal size), Dudley seemed cured of his desire to bully Harry and was, in fact, afraid to stay in the same room with him. Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon had also been quailed into a state of near-civility. They still refused to have Harry's "abnormality" mentioned in their house, and they still looked at him with a look that most people reserve for something that they've just stepped in by accident, but they had gone from treating him like an indentured servant to treating him much like a lodger with squatter's rights—they didn't like him, but they'd realised that his presence was unavoidable and that, given his powers and the powers of his "dangerous associations," they were better off to leave him alone. Life with the Dursleys wasn't what you'd call familial bliss, but it was, so far, bearable, which was better than it had ever been before.

So it wasn't family life that made him worry about this particular summer; it was the circumstances in the outside world. His outside world. The wizarding world.

Harry Potter was a wizard, and now was the time for all good wizards to be very, very worried. In his infancy, Harry was thought to have defeated the worst Dark wizard in history, a wizard so bad that most did not dare to speak his name; however, that defeat had turned out to have been only temporary. Not quite a month ago, after spending thirteen years as a formless spirit, Lord Voldemort had been reborn. Harry had witnessed the re-birth, and he had barely managed to come out of the encounter alive. One of his schoolmates, an older student named Cedric Diggory, hadn't been so lucky, and Harry couldn't help blaming himself a bit for Cedric's death. The lingering sense of guilt, in combination with the certainty that Cedric would be only the first of many to fall to Voldemort this time around, made Harry feel worried, angry, and on the verge of hopelessness—not a nice bundle of feelings with which to start the summer.

Harry tried to keep in mind the parting words of his friend Hagrid, the groundskeeper at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Just over a week ago, Harry and his best friends Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger had visited Hagrid for a final cup of tea before they headed home. Hagrid had left them with a piece of good advice. "No good sittin' worryin' about' it," he had said, referring to Voldemort's return. "What's comin' will come, an' we'll meet it when it does." Harry had replayed these words in his head at least a dozen times a day since his return to the Dursleys; they made him feel a little braver, a little more in control. Whenever he felt himself starting to brood on things, he would repeat Hagrid's words to himself and then go and do something else.

Of course, since he was stuck in the Muggle world for the summer with a couple of the Muggliest Muggles imaginable, the possibilities for "something else" were pretty limited. The one thing that might have been able to take his mind entirely off his problems for a bit was a good, long ride on his Firebolt, the best broomstick in the world, but he certainly couldn't do that; Muggles might see him. Even regular Muggle diversions like television and computer games weren't really options; he didn't want to risk breaking the fragile peace that he and the Dursleys had achieved by doing anything that made noise or required using anything of theirs. Mostly, he either stayed in his room and read or stayed outside in the garden.

The room that was now his had once been Dudley's second bedroom, used to house old or broken toys and belongings that he had no use for. The main category of things that Dudley had no use for was books; the room still held several bookshelvesful of them, and most looked like they'd never been opened. Many of the books were for smaller children, and Harry skipped those, but there were plenty of grown-up books, too. Some well-meaning relative had given Dudley a large set of books called Works of English Greats when he was born, saying that "every boy needs a library of his own." Dudley hadn't grown up to be someone who cared much about a library of his own, so the books languished on the shelves until Harry started rescuing them. He'd taken to reading late into the night. He found that his nightmares weren't so bad if he put off sleeping for as long as he could; if he waited, he usually only woke up once a night. Usually. He had just finished a book called Oliver Twist; it was about a boy who was an orphan, just like Harry, and the orphanage where he lived sounded almost awful enough to make life with the Dursleys seem like not such a bad lot. But Oliver did okay in the end; after falling in with a band of pick-pockets, he was eventually rescued by a nice old man who turned out to be his grandfather. Harry was happy for old Oliver.

In addition to "Works of the English Greats," there were lots of 'how-to' books on the shelves. It seemed that Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon had run through lots of fantasies for what their Dinky-duddy-dums would be when he grew up: a football star, a rugby star, a chess grand master, an artist, a yachtsman. All of these plans had fallen through due to a combination of laziness and feeble-mindedness in such quantities as only Dudley could achieve, and the books were relegated to the shelves in Harry's room. The chess book and the football book were godsends; wizard chess wasn't so different from Muggle chess (except that, in wizard chess, the pieces talked—or rather shouted—to the players and to each other), and Harry hoped that a summer of practise might help him stop losing so dramatically to Ron. The wizarding chess set that he had gotten from a wizard cracker at his first Christmas Feast at Hogwarts was set up on his desk, arranged so that he could try his hand at one of the problems outlined in the book. Harry had threatened the pieces with a Silencing Spell if they made any noise, and, so far, they had confined themselves to occasional whispers. Harry was glad that they were co-operating. He wasn't really allowed to do magic over the summer, so even a Silencing Spell might have earned him a warning from the Ministry of Magic. Fortunately, the chess pieces didn't seem to know about the rules, or maybe they were just being nice. At any rate, Harry found that the book was helping his game immensely.

The football book gave Harry something to do when he wanted to burn off a bit of energy. Since Harry wasn't allowed to talk to the neighborhood kids, he was limited to one-person drills, but they were better than nothing, and he hoped that they would keep him in shape for Quidditch, the wizarding sport for which Harry played Seeker on his House team at Hogwarts.

With chess, football, and reading, Harry had so far managed to keep his days full and his mind occupied, but he was getting restless, and it was getting harder for him to push his worries about Voldemort out of his mind. Random images kept popping into his head as he tried to concentrate on the chess board: the Dark Mark flying over more and more homes; a pair of, red, pitiless eyes; flashes of green light and a high, cruel laugh accompanying the "thump" of a body hitting the ground; pale, unnaturally long fingers caressing a wand; empty chairs in the Great Hall; screams of pain, or fear, or grief, or some awful combination of all three; terror that went unallayed and pleas that went ignored; and the blank, empty grey eyes of the corpse of Cedric Diggory. Some of the images were real, some imaginary, and Harry couldn't decide which ones were worse.

"We'll meet it," Harry said aloud. He took a deep, steadying breath and repeated, "We'll meet it."

"I'm sure you will, luv," interrupted a grumpy voice from the chessboard softly. "But, before you do, could you be so as kind as to get me out o' check?"

Harry's bright green eyes refocussed on the black king, who was looking up at him in exasperation. "Sorry," he muttered, moving a pawn forward to block the white rook. "I think I'd better leave it there for now, fellows. We'll pick it up later, okay?"

The chess pieces quietly assented, and Harry picked up his football (really Dudley's football, but Dudley hadn't touched it in years) and headed for the garden, hoping the exercise would clear his mind. As he passed through the kitchen, he said, in his politest tones, "I'll be outside if you need me, Aunt Petunia." His aunt pressed her lips together in the habitual disapproval that she constantly displayed toward Harry, but she managed a curt nod of acknowledgment. Harry caught the screen door behind him before it could slam, dribbled the ball to the corner of the garden farthest from Petunia's flowerbeds, and began to practice his drills.

After thirty minutes of vigorous exercise, Harry's mind felt a little calmer, but there was still one big worry pushing itself up from all the other worries and trying to force itself to his attention: He had to tell them. No matter how tough it was to talk to them, Harry knew that he should at least attempt to warn the Dursleys about what was going on in the wizarding world. He didn't think they were in immediate danger—he reckoned that the blood magic invoked to protect him when he was in their care also protected them—but they still should know, if only so they'd understand why he was getting more owls this summer than any previous summer. He'd just sent off for a Daily Prophet subscription; he knew that the wizarding newspaper would never be allowed to tell the full story, but they'd have to report any major catastrophes, and he could try to read the real story between the lines of what the Ministry of Magic allowed them to publish. So that meant at least one owl per day. Ron and Hermione would of course be keeping in touch, though Hermione, being Muggle-born, was almost as limited in her summer access to wizarding news as Harry was, and Sirius, Harry's godfather, had promised to write often. All in all, this meant a flurry of owls would be pelting Number Four, Privet Drive for the entire summer. Harry had already seen Uncle Vernon glaring angrily as Ron's owl, Pigwidgeon, had hooted his way through Harry's window a few times, and he could already hear Aunt Petunia's comments about "droppings" once the Daily Prophet owls started flying in every morning. Perhaps the glares and comments would stop if he could get the Dursleys to understand the importance of the information that the owls were carrying.

Harry sighed and ran a distracted hand through his jet-black hair, making it stand out at even wilder angles than usual. How much should he tell them? When should he tell them? Would they listen? Would any attempt at discussion wreck the relative calm? He didn't know what to do. He could write to Dumbledore; after the events of the previous school year, Harry knew that Dumbledore would consider no request for help too trivial to answer. But Dumbledore didn't know the Dursleys, and Harry wasn't sure he could get across to him just how much they hated and feared anything magical. The trick was to get through their animosity, and he wasn't sure that even Dumbledore could tell him how to do that. No, he'd have to figure this one out on his own.

Tomorrow, he decided. Tomorrow was Sunday. All three Dursleys would be at home, so Harry could talk to all of them at once. That way, he'd only have to say it once, and it was really too awful to have to repeat.

Harry felt vaguely better for having made a decision. Tomorrow. Tomorrow, he would tell them, or at least try to tell them. Today, he thought with a grin, he'd play football. He kicked the ball high into the air with his toe, headed it as it fell, and raced off across the garden in pursuit.