The Very Long Night of Harry Potter

Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter or any aspect of JKR's wonderful world.

Chapter 1 – 7:00 P.M.

Three people Apparated into the receiving room of St. Mungo's Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries, covered in mud and grime, two of them supporting the third, who appeared to be unconscious. The two conscious ones immediately began yelling for Healers to come as they laid their friend down on the floor.

Startled by the unusual entrance the three had made, the other occupants of the waiting room began to look at this latest arrival, sizing him up. About seventeen years old by the look of him, medium-high height, medium but solid build, untidy black hair covered in dirt and grime and on his forehead…

One witch nudged her seat-neighbor. "It's Harry Potter! Look, you can see his scar, there on his forehead!" she whispered. With that, the rest of the waiting room inhabitants abandoned all pretenses and watching as the Healers came running in to assist the boy and girl who had come in with him, and who were alternately trying to help Harry and glaring daggers, metaphorically, at the gathered crowd.

One of the Healers conjured a stretcher and together, the boy and girl and several of the Healers lifted him onto it, and proceeded to move him out of the waiting room and into the hospital proper, leaving behind them a boiling caldron of discussion and speculation in the waiting room.

"Harry Potter, here?"

"What do you think happened to him?"

"Do you reckon he dueled He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named again?"

"How'd he get away?"

"Maybe he lost."

"Maybe he won."

At this statement, all of the various wizards and witches in the waiting room seemed to cheer up significantly and they continued to discuss the various possibilities with a great deal of excitement…

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Deeper inside St. Mungo's, the girl and boy who had come in with Harry were sitting at the desk of the Master Healer, a somewhat elderly woman who reminded them, in a rather unspecified way, of Headmistress McGonagall.

Looking between the two of them, she said, "Mr. Weasley, Ms. Granger, we are trying to help Mr. Potter, but his condition is… confusing to say the least. Can you tell me anything, anything at all, about what triggered this?"

Ron and Hermione looked at each other, obviously wishing that they could say something, but holding themselves in check for some unknown reason. Hermione spoke up, "Healer Pomfrey, we wish we could tell you, but we're not allowed to." Just as the older sister of the Hogwarts nurse was about to protest this, a voice came from one of the portraits on the wall, that of Dilys Derwent, the one-time Healer and Hogwarts headmistress.

"Ms. Granger, I told Dumbledore what happened, and he says that you can trust her. Matter of fact, here he is now," said the painting of the long gone witch as she moved over in her frame to make way for an image of Albus Dumbledore.

The portrait-bound headmaster nodded, acknowledging Ron and Hermione, and said, "Ms. Granger, Mr. Weasley, you may inform Healer Pomfrey what has transpired. I am also curious as to what has happened," he said, leaning against the edge of the frame. "I assume that this has to do with either the cup or the locket?"

Ron and Hermione looked at each other again, clearly not having anticipated this development. After a moment's silent consultation with each other, Hermione spoke up.

"This will take a few minutes, Healer Pomfrey, but this is essentially what happened…"

Over the next few minutes, Ron, Hermione and Dumbledore's image filled in the increasingly aghast Healer about Voldemort's Horcruxes, and then told her how they were protected against intruders…

"So Harry had to drink the potion around the cup-Horcrux and," Hermione patted down her robes and extracted a small vial of potion from a side pocket, "I managed to save this bit in here to analyze later, it was in the cup itself." She handed the vial of thick liquid over to the rather appalled Master Healer, who then called another Healer in.

"Healer Smethwyck, take this," she said as handed him the vial, "and start making an antidote to it, right away." As the Healer held up the vial, examining its contents with a frown on his face, she shouted, "NOW!"

After the resounding crack of Healer Smethwyck Disapparating faded from the office, Pomfrey turned back to Hermione, who continued, "So after we managed to escape the repository, and back to our headquarters, Harry took out the cup and tried to destroy it using the reducing jinx and it worked." Ron held up the mangled remains of what had once been a rather magnificent cup. "But then there was this bright blue flash that wasn't from the spell, and next thing we know Harry's on the floor, screaming and convulsing violently, and then he went limp. We sort of panicked and brought him here. And that's it, that's what happened," she finished somewhat lamely.

Master Healer Pomfrey seemed to digest this for several minutes as she sat at her desk silently. After about five or six minutes, she got up and said to the two of them, "Come with me. We're going to go check on Mr. Potter."

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Harry came to, feeling sore and in pain, and sat up. For a few moments he couldn't identify where he was until he realized that he didn't have his glasses on. Squinting, he brought the room into focus and it was undeniably… "What am I doing at Hogwarts?" he murmured to himself, for he was undoubtedly in the dormitory that he had shared with Ron, Neville, Seamus, and Dean for the last six years.

Getting out of his four-poster bed with some regret, he got dressed and walked to the stairs down to the common room. It was completely empty, with no sign whatsoever of habitation; even the fire in the fireplace was out. Puzzled and slightly worried, Harry began stretching to relieve some of the muscle pains and aches that he had for some reason that he couldn't remember.

Still, there were spots on his body that felt very painful and sore, that, no matter how much he stretched, didn't disappear. Probing one of them on his back with his fingers, he felt, with a small measure of horror, that his robe was warm and wet in those places, and his finger came back covered with blood.

Running back upstairs to his dormitory, Harry pulled off his robe and looked at his back in a mirror. He could clearly see several deep cuts across his back and legs but as he watched, thunderstruck, he could see them knitting back together one by one, until the only evidence that they had been there was rivulets of drying and dried blood on his back, which also disappeared in short order.

Putting on some fresh robes, Harry left the dormitory and headed out of Gryffindor Tower walking towards the Great Hall, his footsteps echoing, wondering what the heck was going on and where everybody was.

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Ron and Hermione looked at Harry's still form lying on the bed in the private ward as the team of Healers worked frantically on him, barely hearing the Healer's words, even though she was right next to them. "We thought that he'd be safer in here, of course, with nobody else around. We're trying to keep this quiet. Only the most essential personnel know that he's even here, and we've put Memory Charms on the people in the waiting room, although we did have to inform the Ministry. We shouldn't have any over-ambitious Death Eaters trying to come in and finish him off." Looking over the two of them, she frowned and said, "Ms. Granger are you aware that you're still bleeding? And Mr. Weasley, you should have that burn looked at."

And, indeed, they were quite a mess. Actually, it was a not so minor miracle that they were both still standing, considering their current conditions. Motioning over two Healer orderlies, she silently indicated Ron and Hermione, who seemed rooted to the spot, watching a Healer as he tried to heal Harry's wounds, his brow knitted with concentration as he used a combination of spells and potions to get some of the deeper lesions to heal.

"Ms. Granger, Mr. Weasley, please, you require attention. Please, go and get fixed up. We'll inform you as soon as there's any change in Mr. Potter." When they obviously hadn't heard her, she continued, a definite note of irritation in her voice, "Ms. Granger, Mr. Weasley, please! You can't do anything for Mr. Potter right now. You have both sustained serious injuries and you need medical attention! Please, go and at least get those looked at. We'll let you know as soon as he's stable." After her third, and most definitely final, request, Ron and Hermione seemed to register that that they were being talked to, and allowed themselves to be lead away for treatment.

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Harry was running through the halls of Hogwarts, chasing after someone, his footfalls ringing loudly in the empty corridor. Harry had been walking slowly through the empty castle, trying to find someone, anyone, that could explain what was happening. But it had seemed like he was the only one in the entire castle.

The Great Hall? Empty. The Library? Empty. The classrooms? All empty. The Hospital Wing? Empty. Even the teachers' offices were unoccupied. For a while, Harry had wondered if everyone was home for some holiday or other… but wait…, last thing he could recall, it had been the middle of December, and pausing by a window, he looked outside and it looked like the middle of spring. Could he have been out that long? But that still didn't explain where everyone was… Then he had suddenly realized, as he looked around his current corridor near Trelawney's room, that all of the paintings were empty. Walking over to one that usually held a group of nuns from the 15th century, he saw that the nuns were gone; their table and chairs were still there, along with their books and whatnot, the fireplace in the background was still there and moving, but the subjects of the painting were gone.

Looking around at all of the other paintings, he had realized they were all empty, totally abandoned. It had looked like he was the only one in the castle, alive, dead, or pigment.

Feeling rather frustrated, he had continued to walk down the corridor, and spotted a glimpse of the hem of a cloak whipping out of sight around the next corner.

Yelling, "Wait!" he began to chase after the mysterious cloaked figure, turning the corner and seeing the cloak again whipping out of sight further down the hall. And so the chase was on, Harry running down one corridor only to see the figure whip out sight around the next bend.

On and on the chase went, up one corridor and down the next, up staircases and down secret passages, on and on and on, for minutes upon hours it seemed, until Harry noticed that, after all this time, he wasn't even short of breath, and he had just run from the North Tower all the way to… where was he?

Stopping, Harry checked his landmarks. He was near the Great Hall, which, now that he thought about it, seemed to be the mysterious figure's destination. Dashing through a shortcut hidden behind a tapestry, Harry ran towards the Great Hall, hoping that he would actually beat that whipping cloak hem there. Bursting out of a corridor in the Entrance Hall, he ran towards the doors to the Great Hall; at the same time, the cloaked figure ran out of another corridor around the corner. They collided as they both tried to round the corner, knocking each other over sprawling. Harry was back on his feet in a moment; the figure, on the other hand, was tangled up in its cloak and was fighting to extricate itself.

Harry ran over to the figure. When he grabbed its shoulders, it stopped struggling, and seemed to look up at him through the hood covering its face. Harry, thinking rather uncomfortably of Dementors, reached up and pulled the hood back and gasped. It wasn't a Dementor in the slightest. It was…

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"Hermione…"

Ron and Hermione, back from their medical treatment, looked up at the almost barely perceptible sound that Harry had just made. Harry was lying on the bed, dressed in a hospital gown, looking serene and healed.

According to the Healer that Healer Pomfrey had put in charge, Harry was in perfect health; they had managed to repair all of the damage inflicted by Voldemort's defenses and they were working on an antidote for the potion. The potion, however, at least the way it seemed to be in their analysis, wouldn't cause these symptoms. While he acknowledged that they might be missing something, when Ron and Hermione had pointed out that Harry was experiencing these symptoms, he said there shouldn't be any reason why Harry was still unconscious.

However, when he'd tried to use Enervate on Harry to no effect, a rather worried and scared expression had crossed his face for a moment. He had excused himself rather hurriedly from the room, leaving Ron and Hermione alone with Harry, who had been utterly silent up until a moment previously.

"Ron, did you hear that?" Hermione asked.

"Yeah," Ron responded, looking at their comatose friend, "but why'd he say your name all of a sudden?"

"I don't know, but there's definitely something going on in there," she said, looking worried as she and Ron sat next to each other, Ron slowly stroking her hair as they continued their vigil.