Disclaimer: The characters in this story belong to those who created them respectively.

Author's Note: shwoot! first chapter of the first story here on RK.

HBP does NOT COUNT!!! the end. (AU seventh year fic)

This is going to be a YAOI fic. Just to let everyone know. With who, well, you'll see when they come around. For now, the story is rated T.

Any Omake's will be Erica's fault. fyi ahead of time.

Now, onto the story!

Phoenix Down

Prologue

The sky was overcast and the winds were howling, disturbing the already messy hair of The Boy Who Lived. Said child was bloody and bruised and quite alone; he had lost his friends some time back in the skirmish and had yet to be reunited with them. But, since he had inadvertently grabbed that portkey, he didn't know if it would be possible to easily return. Charms, curses, and all manner of spells flew through the air in differing shades of coloured light. Each wizard was careful not to let their wands accidentally line up, remembering what had happened the last time that had happened.

"There's nothing you can do to stop me, Harry," the hissed words of Voldemort taunted above the howling winds.

"I've done it before, Voldemort," Harry yelled back, throwing a particularly nasty curse in the Dark Lords direction. Cursing let Harry know it had hit. Where were his friends? Better yet, and probably a better question to ask, where was he?

"You can do nothing to help your friends without the portkey!" Voldemort yelled back, a note of triumph in his voice.

Harry, suddenly blanking on curses like he'd seen some of his classmates do on Snape's potion's tests, could only think of one hex. It was ridiculous, but…what choice did he really have? He was fighting Voldemort!! Sure, he was destined to fight him, but he was also responsible to use every weapon in his arsenal.

Thank you, Ginny, was all Harry thought before casting the Bat-Boogey Hex at Voldemort.

"You have got to be kidding me, Harry," Voldemort chided as he blocked the hex. He should tell Ginny to work on making it bend around shields to hit the victim behind them.

If he got back…

"Harry, you are going to have to use more…dangerous…spells that have a more…detrimental affect, you might say, to be able to walk away from this," Voldemort intoned, "or survive it at all."

Harry wondered at the tone he was using. There was something about Voldemort that was off…not that the dark wizard was right to begin with. Harry fought back. He fought for his friends, for his family, for those he loved.

He fought for Sirius.

It was a lucky shot, and Harry Potter was due some luck. As lightning struck a tree that was dangerously close to Voldemort, Harry cast the attonbitus and conburo curses in quick succession. Both curses hit Voldemort, and the Dark Lord yelled as he was electrocuted and burned at the same time. Unfortunately for both wizards, the discharge of the spell on Voldemort caused the lighting that had struck the tree to jump to Voldemort. Harry, feeling the hair on his arms stand on end, threw himself on the ground, trying to make himself as small as possible. Lightning flashed. The sudden brightness made his vision go white and the thunder caused him to be temporarily deaf. When the white spots cleared from his eyes, and the sound, somewhat, returned to him, Harry could see Voldemort suffering something like he was. But, whereas Harry was fine, in a matter of speaking, the Dark Lord seemed…toasty.

The gale that was along with the storm suddenly brought a familiar object passing between the two battling wizards. Harry wanting, needing really, to know if his friends were okay, were alive, lunged towards the object. Voldemort, seeing what Harry was doing, raised his hands. The Boy Who Lived saw the actions out of the corner of his eyes. He turned, and rapidly fired a handful of curses and hexes, blocking the majority of the ones that Voldemort threw at him to impede his dash to the portkey. Harry saw Voldemort's wand arm break and the man, if he could still be called that, stumble as his robes turned crimson with blood as one of his hexes inflicted a deep laceration to his leg. Harry himself managed to get a deep laceration down his arm from a curse he was certain was supposed to blast his arm off. Luckily he had dodged. Either way, he thought his hand was broken.

His hand was close, oh so close!, to the portkey when he felt a strange sensation in the bottom of his stomach. It reminded him of the affects of a portkey, but it couldn't be; for he hadn't grasped it yet. Harry, with dread, identified the feeling as foreboding. This fight was not going to go well. Voldemort shouted the incantation for what sounded like a summon spell of some kind. A summon spell; like apparating except for objects. Hermione found it in the Restricted Section in the library in some obscure book she swore wasn't there in previous years. Bloody hell, she and Madame Pince were probably the only ones, excluding the Headmaster, who knew all the books in the Restricted Section. They hadn't gotten too far into the book, only far enough to identify a summon spell before this battle happened.

Voldemort finished his spell just as Harry's hand closed around the portkey. He threw his wand up instinctively. What happened next was chaos. Pain enveloped Harry like nothing he'd ever experienced before. He vaguely heard screaming through his own pain; he didn't know if it was his own scream or that of Voldemort. There was a pull behind his navel, but he lost his grip on the portkey. Feeling like he was hurtling through a Floo network on crack, Harry fell into oblivion, absently thinking that he landed none too hard.

Back at the battles site, something that resembled a dragon roared in the sky. It released a huge fireball with deadly accuracy.

When Hermione, Ron and various other Hogwarts allies of Harry's came upon the singed site of Harry and He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named's fight, they expected the worse, and, indeed, it wasn't pretty. The grass for quite a distance was singed and burned, in some places completely scorched to the dirt. There was a burned and mangled body near an equally charcoaled tree. Dumbledore, with much trepidation, reluctantly headed over to the tree. Instead of seeing Harry Potter, Dumbledore looked upon the crispy visage of a man once known as Tom Riddle.

"Headmaster!" Hermione's voice called out.

Dumbledore turned and headed to where some of his favourite seventh years were gathered. When he walked the few feet to the group, he saw the portkey sitting innocently in the grass. What had his attention was the writing burned into the grass around it.

It made him concerned.

"Hermione," The old wizard said tiredly, causing the others to give him a look, "please copy that and then destroy the evidence that there was writing. When that's done, we'll take the portkey back to Hogsmeade."

In short order, Hermione had copied down what looked like a prophecy and Ron and Neville had neatly thrown some curses at the ground, effectively making a few large holes and obliterating the writing singed on the ground.

"We're ready," Seamus eventually spoke into the heavy silence.

"We have much work to do if we are going to retrieve Mr. Potter," Dumbledore told them. Together, they grabbed the portkey and they returned to Hogsmead and Hogwarts.

Without one Harry Potter.

The first thing that registered in his foggy mind was that he was warm. The last temperature he remembered was windy and cold. He was also laying down. He hadn't been laying down before, so perhaps he was on a bed? The soft, fluffy thing under his head sure seemed like a pillow. So if it seemed to be a pillow, then the slightly heavy, warm weight that covered his body had to be a quilt. A gentle wind blew and sunshine assaulted his poor eyes.

Groaning, Harry adamantly refused to open his eyes.

"Denzel, could you please close the window?" A quiet, definitely female, voice asked. Hearing soft footsteps, whoever Denzel was, closed the window. The breeze stopped and the curtains resumed blocking out said sunlight. Harry's body ached and he let his mind wander back into the recesses of sleep.

Harry woke up some time later and sat bolt upright in bed when the shattering of glass reached his ears. Air hissed through his teeth as pain assaulted his senses.

"Easy there," a male voice said. It struck Harry as being deep, but not overly so…a tenor perhaps? His eyes were scrunched close from the pain. Strong arms propped him up, and he felt a presence leave, only to return and throw something behind his back. As the arms helped him lean back, Harry realized that he had retrieved more pillows to make reclining more comfortable.

"Sorry," Harry mumbled.

"It's not your fault," the voice said again.

At this, Harry opened his eyes and heard a sharp intake of breath. The figure next to his bed was rather blurry. Damn, he should have let Hermione try that spell to fix his vision.

"Where are my glasses?" Harry asked. The position he was in was, surprisingly, comfortable and put little to no stress on any of his wounds. Something was pressed in his right hand. He fumbled and hissed when he tried to move his left hand.

"Your other hand is broken," the blurry figure said.

Harry grumbled as he fumbled to put his glasses on one handed. What he saw made him question…things. He was in a smallish room that held several beds, and he saw the offending window that had woken him up earlier. When he heard some shouts and glass breaking again, the messy haired youth jumped.

"Where am I?" Harry asked, turning his green eyes to the only person who had answers. The man sighed and leaned back in his chair. To Harry, it looked like he was arranging his thoughts. What he didn't know was the man didn't know what the hell to tell him.

"You're in a room above the bar known as Seventh Heaven," the man finally said, "in Edge."

"Edge?" Harry asked dubiously. He'd never heard of that town. "Where's Edge?"

"Outside of Midgar," the man said. Harry didn't know where that was either. His confusion must have shown on his face because a look passed across the man's face. He couldn't quite catch it, but it looked worried, if a bit curious. It made Harry remember that he didn't know the man's name.

"Who are you?" Harry asked. In the dim light from a bedside lamp, Harry could see that his caretaker's eyes were blue, it was hard to tell what shade due to the poor light. He was pale skinned and had messy blond hair that stood up in stubborn spikes. It made Harry feel slightly better about the stubbornness of his own hair.

Surprised flitted through the slightly glowing blue eyes before retreating behind the impassive mask the man wore. Why was he surprised that he asked the stranger for his name?

"Cloud," the man said. "Cloud Strife."

"I'm Harry Potter," Harry said, "The-Boy-Who-Lived."

Both looked at each other, expecting a reaction of some kind. ShinRa had made it known that Cloud Strife had saved the Planet from Sephiroth and METEOR. All the hype was dying down; Cloud definitely had a penchant for driving very fast for a reason and a habit of being scarce. Harry Potter had been famous since he was a baby and had accidentally, inadvertently, "killed" an evil, dark wizard on a reign of terror. When neither exclaimed anything about the other being famous, both, well, more in Cloud's case, did something that was rare; rare for Harry because of the dark times that had fallen upon the wizarding world in England, and Cloud because nothing good had happened to him in a long time.

They Smiled.

tbc.

next chapter will be posted when I'm done writing it.
posted 11June2007