Harry Potter awoke with a start to find himself safe, tucked into the spare bed in Ron Weasley's bedroom in the top floor of the Burrow. He lay panting and trying desperately to catch his breath, even as the room felt as though it were spinning all around him, like he'd fallen from a great height and somehow managed to land there on the mattress rather squarely and miraculously in one piece. He reached up, his hand sweaty and shaking, and let his finger tips trace the lightning bolt shaped gash on his forehead, which felt as though it were on absolute fire, like there was real electricity running through the puckered, jaggedy edges.
He closed his eyes.
Breathe, breathe, breathe, he told himself, trying to pace the gasps out.
He opened his eyes gain and snuck a glance at Ron's bed across the violently orange colored room. Canons stuff was everywhere, giant posters of Oliver Kent flashed and moved around all the walls. The seeker's blonde hair blew gently in the wind and he clutched his broomstick, holding up fluttering golden snitches and grinning, teeming with confidence that few people could ever possess.
God alive, what was it like to have that much bloody confidence? Harry wondered. Not that Harry wasn't fairly confident himself, or alright at coming off as though he was at the very least, but nothing compared to the bloke in the posters on Ron's bedroom walls.
Especially not right now.
Please don't wake up, Harry silently begged Ron as he rolled himself out of the bed where he lay and crept carefully to the wide open window that overlooked the roof of the burrow. A slight breeze came in and Harry carefully climbed up onto the window sill, making sure not to knock over the tank of frog spawn Ron had growing on top of a bookshelf by the window, and climbed onto the roof. Crawling, Harry made his way 'round the corner to get some air where he wouldn't be easily spotted by anybody else in all the world.
He sat there, knees to his chest, back against the cool bricks of the chimney, and stared up at the stars, blearily because he hadn't bothered at grabbing his glasses before coming out onto the roof. He gripped his ankles with his palms and just breathed for a few minutes, trying to keep his mind on exactly where he was and reminding himself he was safe and the stuff he'd been dreaming was exactly that -- a dream.
No, a nightmare.
Which would have been fine except for one very unnerving fact: This was the second day in a row that he'd had the horrible visions in his sleep. The very same horrible visions, down to the very same horrible details that he couldn't quite bring to the forefront of his mind, but somehow knew intuitively had not changed from the first night to the second.
Was it a coincidence?
He'd written Sirius that very morning when he'd woken up, telling him about how his scar had hurt.
A weird thing happened this morning, though. My scar hurt again. Last time that happened it was because Voldemort was at Hogwarts. But I don't reckon he could be anywhere near me now, can he? Do you know if curse scars sometimes hurt years afterward?
He'd written and rewritten the question about 170 times, trying to make sure the wording wouldn't alarm his godfather too much. He could just picture Sirius getting really upset and worried about the question and coming flying back to check on him. Last Harry knew, Sirius had said that he and Professor Lupin were somewhere together, and Harry thought that it was likely they were not in the UK any longer because the bird that had delivered the letter hadn't been one he'd seen 'round Little Whinging. It was best if Sirius was out of the country - and even better that he wasn't alone at it - and Harry didn't want to be the reason Sirius was back in England and picked up by aurors somewhere. He didn't want to be the reason Sirius ended up back in prison, or - worse - on the receiving end of the Dementor's Kiss.
Harry shuddered at the thought.
But still, it was bothering him.
He'd had a couple nightmares over the past month that had made the scar burn, though most of them had been far duller than the way it burned over these two. He'd had one back on his birthday, which he'd chalked up to having eaten far too much birthday cake after receiving cakes from Sirius and Professor Lupin, Ron, Hermione (though hers was sugar free, since her parents were dentists), and Hagrid (whose cake had been home made and therefore better used as a door stop than a treat, but Harry had written a note of thank you anyway).
(He'd also thought about giving the cake to Dudley, since Diddy-kins was so desperate for sweets it would've been humorous to watch him try at eating the rock cakes Hagrid was famous for. Harry had only stopped himself doing it because then he'd have to explain where the cake had come from and possibly been busted for his floorboard pantry in the process.)
(Besides that, the cake didn't deserve such a terrible fate as to be digested by Dudley Dursley - what a horrid fate for a cake!)
But another two days later he'd had another one that had nothing to do with cake that Harry had nothing to blame for since he'd skipped breakfast (grapefruit), afternoon lunch (grapefruit again) and barely eaten dinner (boiled chicken with crunchy carrot sticks and a serving-spoonful of plain brown rice with a very little squeeze of lime on it, which had been alright until it started making the inside of Harry's lip tingle and he'd quickly abandoned it as a bad job, remembering Professor Lupin had recommended he stay away from all citrus, according to Sirius).
Those two dreams had mostly been thoughts of Wormtail, vague and far-off, like a phantom being remembered in a hazy memory. There were flashes of a great snake and the sound of wheezing breath so strained that Harry only recognized it as breath because it synched in time with his own lungs inflating and emptying. There was some sound like somebody crying, far away, and a lingering, gasping need to speak out the words kill her that grotesquely reminded him of second year, when he heard the basilisk whispering from the pipes all around Hogwarts.
Those were horrible enough dreams, the scar on his forehead zinging like a shock from a static charged blanket. Nothing to concern himself with much, really. He'd mostly forgotten those by the time he'd been scolded for neglecting his grapefruit, completely forgotten them by the time he was dodging Dudley, Piers, and the other boys around Privet Drive and Magnolia Court whose friendship had turned into more of a gang of bullies rallying. It was Piers who had given Dudley the box of Cadbury Fingers and later the powdered sugar doughnuts hidden in Dudley's room. Neither dream had haunted Harry long enough to think they were anything more than just normal nightmares, born out of the terrible experiences the month before in the Shrieking Shack, when Wormtail had materialized and changed Harry's perspective on the Grim that he had been fearful of all year long.
Surely that's all those dreams were - funny memories, twisted by the dreaming mind.
But then last night.
Last night - the 23rd of August - Harry had been dreaming he was slithering on his belly, winding his way across a wide lawn of perfectly manicured grass, up the front steps of an old, run down house on the outskirts of an old, run down village. The house had smelled of dust and a bit of mould, as though it had sat stagnant for years... He'd seen the patches of moonlight falling through windows onto a table set as though for a dinner years ago, cobwebs connecting candelabras to full ornate places with multiple glasses and a complete set of cutlery set right down to the tiny oyster forks.
He's slithered up a flight of stairs, covered by worn maroon carpet that had once been lush, but worn threadbare and full of thick dust particles that were disturbed as he wound his way by. There was a man, an old man in a night gown and sleeping cap, clutching some sort of gardening tool and looking terrified, cowering in the corner of the landing. But Harry slunk by him with scarcely a glance back...
And here was where the details became fuzzy, like a double vision, he couldn't tell what his perspective was anymore in the rest of the nightmare, but he saw flashes once more of Wormtail, saw flashes of a fireplace being stoked and the rising sparks from the dropping of a heavy log upon the hearth... He saw another figure, too, a tall and lankly man whose frame was reminiscent more of a cardboard cut out with straw-colored hair. He knew there was a good deal of talking - though the wheezing breath dominated his memory and the way his chest felt too small to hold much oxygen, as though he were constantly losing his breath and only just able to draw the next before his body lost its functionality...
There was a sinister feeling that Harry couldn't quite pinch out of his memory, something being spoken about to which the words seemed too far away to grasp onto...
But those details, those things spoken about and the identity of the other people speaking in the conversation...
The only thing Harry knew for sure is that he had woken both nights at precisely the same moment... when he, Harry, had raised a wand and hissed the words avada kedavra and green light had shot forth from his armed wand... and killed that cowering man on the landing. He, Harry, watched the light leave that old man's eyes, watched the gardening tool fall from his lifeless fingers just a fraction of a second faster than the body itself fell onto the landing...
And something horribly like reminiscence of a body falling onto a stair landing flooded him.
For a split second before he woke up, he was the body on the landing, staring up at the ceiling.
And he'd woken up, breathless, heart clenched as though his heartstrings had been wound up as tight as thread on a bobbin, and he'd been dizzy and disoriented and confused.
He rocked himself now, on the roof top of the Burrow, staring up at the sky. His eyes found the brightest one - Sirius, only just becoming visible that very week in the predawn sky as the seasons prepared to change from Summer to Autumn - and he stared at it, watching the light throb in the blue-black space surrounding it, thinking about his godfather and, in turn, his father.
"Da?" he whispered, "I wonder if you can hear me?" His voice was but a whisper, his breathing louder between the words than the words themselves, fearful what Ron might think if he overheard him - what?
What was this? Praying? Talking to himself? Talking to ghosts? Harry wasn't even sure what to define what he was doing as, beyond to say that it was most likely mental.
"I'm afraid, Da. Why does my scar hurt? Why does the nightmare feel so real?" He felt his face threaten to crumple up and he bit his lips and shook his head, forcing himself to keep his composure. "I wish... I wish I could write to you or to mum, and - and really hear back. I miss you and I don't even remember ever meeting you. Oh, Da. Why'd you have to die for?"
As though in answer, there was a knock on the door of Ron's bedroom, and then the sound of a voice Harry hadn't heard before. "Oi - Ronnie, dad says it's time for gettin' up so we can get to the Port Key on time! Leaves at 5! Hurry up! You and your mate!" there was a gentle repeated rapping when there wasn't an answer, and the voice called, "Ronnie!"
Harry crawled back across the roof and back through the window and opened the door.
On the other side was who Harry assumed must be Ron's brother Charlie - one of only two of the Weasleys that Harry had not yet met, but who didn't fit the description that Ron had given him of Bill's long hair and earring. Charlie had on a white t-shirt with a giant gray dragon across it with small letters saying Fortescue's Dragon Training Academy in black letters and he had a cut across his jawbone that looked fresh, still healing and red. "Oh," Charlie said, staring at Harry in surprise, hand still raised to knock again. "Sorry," he added after an awkward pause. He lowered his fist.
"S'alright," Harry replied. "I'll wake Ron up."
"Thanks," Charlie replied. He paused, turned and started to climb down the ladder that led up to the small landing outside Ron's bedroom door. He stilled, clutching the ladder and looked at Harry again. "Sorry 'bout bellowing like an iron belly just now - I didn't realize you were here."
Harry wondered why it made a difference if he was there or if it was just Ron. Was "bellowing like an iron belly" an alright way to wake his brother up, but less so for a guest? Or was it Harry himself, the Boy Who Lived, the part that unnerved Charlie about the wake-up call?
"S'alright," Harry repeated.
Charlie nodded, started to descend again, and then, just before his head dipped below the landing out of sight, he paused again. "I'm Charlie Weasley, by the by. Sorry." He went on down the ladder.
Harry figured he didn't have to say he was Harry Potter. His scar did that for him.
He touched his fingers to the scar - still burning even now - and backed up, closing Ron's bedroom door.
"Whussthat!?" Ron gasped, waking at the slamming of the door.
"Your dad says it's time to go catch a port key," Harry said.
"Ohrightyeah," Ron muttered, falling back into the pillows. "Bloody hell, I'm glad we get to go to the Cup but why's it got to be so early for?" HIs words slurred together with sleep and Harry shrugged. "Blimey Harry!" Ron sat up as Harry turned to the nightstand and got his glasses. "Blimey, can you believe it? That we're really going to the World Cup?"
"I really can't," Harry said. He'd never done anything like this in his entire life.
"Blimey and we get to see Viktor Krum."
"Viktor Krum?" This name was new to Harry.
"Oh Harry, he's brilliant. He's close to our age, not much older any way, and already on the international Bulgarian quidditch team!"
"Oh," Harry said, "That's cool."
Ron's reverence was deep as he said, "Yeah, they say he's poised to be the greatest seeker ever. Even greater than Oliver Kent if he keeps up his averages... But of course that's only because Oliver Kent's been training him, according to Quaffle Talk Magazine. Krum's supposed to be a killer at the Wronski Feint."
"The what now?"
"RONALD BILIUS WEASLEY!" came Mrs. Weasley's voice from the stairs below, "If you aren't up and down in this kitchen eating your breakfast in five minutes - I don't care if you'll starve, young man!" A pause, then, in a much more docile tone, "Harry dear, how do you like your eggs?"
"Um, fried, I suppose, Mrs. Weasley," Harry called back, trying not to laugh, as Ron threw himself dramatically backward and pulled the pillow over his face as he kicked his legs in frustration.