Disclaimer: I do not own the world of Harry Potter.

Author's Note: No, I haven't abandoned my other Harry Potter story, I just have a mild case of missing file and writer's block.

This story is a one shot that has been bugging me to write it since book five came out. It has slightly adapted itself since I read book six, but is still being very pushy.

ONE LAST NIGHT

Harry Potter was lying on his bed in his small bedroom at #4 Privet Drive. He was two weeks from his 17th birthday and one day from leaving his aunt and uncle's house forever. He supposed he should have been nervous because he didn't have anywhere to go really, except to 12 Grimmauld Place in London. He didn't want to go to his godfather's old house though. If Sirius had still been alive it would have been different, he would have been glad to go stay with him. But Sirius was gone and a part of Harry still blamed himself for his death.

He could stay with the Weasleys, but their house was already crowded and, besides, Harry wasn't sure how Mr. and Mrs. Weasley would react when they discovered it was Harry's fault Ron wasn't going to be returning to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry in September.

Harry rolled over and looked at the glowing numbers on his alarm clock: 3:30 in the afternoon. The Dursleys, who had gone out somewhere, would be back in half an hour. Sighing, he sat up and moved restlessly to the window, looking out on the street he had grown up on. It held few happy memories for him. Most of his childhood memories of the straight, neat, almost identical yards, was of racing past them while Dudley and his gang chased him.

Harry turned away from the window and looked at his room. A room he had not spent much time in. He hadn't had a bedroom til the mysterious letters just before his eleventh birthday six years ago had terrified aunt Petunia and uncle Vernon into giving him one. His lips tugged upwards slightly at the memory of Dudley's howls when he'd been forced to give up his spare room to his detested cousin. Although at the time Harry had been more concerned with finding out what was in the letters, the memory now was amusing.

Walking absently through the messy room he was going to have to pack soon, Harry wandered into the hall and down the stairs. He stopped at the bottom and looked pensively at the door in the wall beneath them. That was where he had slept for most of his life, waking up nearly every morning to his aunt shouting for him to come help with breakfast.

Forcing down a surge of resentment, Harry continued on until he was in the living room. The few happy memories he had had in this horrible house had mostly happened in here. Dudley's tongue expanding from an enchanted sweet planted by the Weasley twins and Dumbledore calmly knocking the Durleys in the heads with glasses of mead. The smile these memories brought was short-lived, however, Dumbledore's death too recent not to taint any thought of him with sadness and anger.

Dumbledore had died some weeks before at the hands of Severus Snape. Snape who Dumbledore had trusted, defended, even when no one else did. And Snape had betrayed him. Harry had never liked Snape, but by murdering Dumbledore, he had put himself at the top of Harry's list of most hated people, right alongside Voldemort and Bellatrix Lestrange.

But that would have to wait. First he needed to get out of this house. He would stay with the Weasleys until the wedding of their oldest son, Bill, to his fiancée Fleur. Then Harry, Ron Weasley, and Hermione Granger would begin their quest to find Voldemort's remaining Horcruxes and, ultimately, destory the evil wizard and his followers.

Resolutely turning away from the living room, Harry went back upstairs and distracted himself by packing. Although he usually ended up just throwing things into his trunk, this time Harry packed things away carefully, letting the planning of where his robes and books were going push thoughts of past and future out of his mind. A more distant past intruded upon his thoughts, however, when he came across the photo album Rubeus Hagrid had given him at the end of his first year. The album was filled with moving wizard photographs of his parents.

Harry was still turning slowly through the pages when the Dursleys arrived home, but he was so lost in his thoughts as he watched his parents happily waving up at him that he didn't notice.

Petunia Dursley found him like that when she came upstairs to change her clothes for dinner. They were having company and she needed to look her best. Harry was supposed to stay out of the way. If they were lucky, they wouldn't even see him before he left the next morning. But his door was open and she couldn't, for some reason she didn't want to admit to herself, ignore him. She peered in at him and watched for a few moments. When she finally stepped away, she was surprised to find tears on her cheeks.

She angrily brushed them away and hurried into her room. She tried to tell herself that she didn't care about the freak child just down the hall, that she was glad he was finally going to be leaving once and for all, but her hands shook as she pulled her new dress from the closet.

'Where is he going to go?' Pertunia wondered. 'What's going to happen to him with...with that wizard after him and no more protection? What if he ends up like Lily?' Fresh tears slid down Petunia's face and she sat down on the end up her perfectly made bed. Lily. No matter what she told everyone, no matter what she told herself, she had loved her sister, freak or not, and the thought of Harry dying the same way Lily had was frightening.

Without really thinking about it, Petunia went to the wardrobe in the corner and carefull pulled out the box tucked in the back corner. She shot a furtive look at the closed door before opening it. When she looked down, he sister's green eyes were smiling up at her from a photograph. Slowly, Petunia flipped through the entire box, about 40 pictures, some wizard and some muggle, all of them of her sister. Some of the wizarding photographs were looking with puzzlement or annoyance and a ripped edge beside them. Although Petunia had never been able to bring herself to throw out pictures of Lily, she had found it quite easy to rip James Potter out of them. Well, not easy, because the photographic Lily had kept pulling the photographic James close to her whenever the paper ripped.

Petunia didn't realize how long she'd been sitting there until Vernon's shouted from downstairs that their gusts would be there any minute and where the blazes was she. Jumping up in horror, Petunia changed as quickly as she could, glad that the dinner was in a slow-cooker she didn't need to tend to.

She was about to go downstairs when she hesitated. She could hear Harry in the bathroom, which meant his room was empty. Turning, Petunia darted back into her room, grabbed up half the few photographs from the box and silently hurried down the hall where she placed them gently on Harry's bed, next to a closed photo album. She stared at them a moment, then nearly ran down the stairs as the doorbell rang.

Harry left the bathroom quietly a few seconds after he heard the doorbell. He slipped into his bedroom and put his toothbrush on top of his robes in the trunk then looked up. A small pile of photographs had appeared. Puzzled, he picked them up and looked through them. His mother, at various ages, smiled up at him from each one. He glanced towards the door, listening to the sound of voices drifting up from the dinner he was not invited to. But his aunt cared, at least a little. And somehow, knowing that made the future a little less scary.